CHAPTER XI(1905-1908)

[47]“Address to the people of Wales,” January 17th, 1903.

[48]Cousin of Sir Frank Edwards, M.P., one of the most faithful of the Welsh Nationalists, but himself an Anglican.

[49]Carnarvonshire and Merionethshire.

“If they take part in public life, the effect is never indifferent. They either appear like ministers of divine vengeance, and their course through the world is marked by desolation and oppression, by poverty and servitude, or they are the guardian angels of the country they inhabit, busy to avert even the most distant evil, and to maintain and procure peace, plenty, and the greatest of human blessings, liberty.”—BolingbrokeinThe Patriot Kingon his “Chosen Men.”

TheDepartment which fell to the control of Mr. Lloyd George on the formation of the 1905 Liberal Administration presented no easy or simple task. The Board of Trade stood at a moment which comes to every great office of State—a moment when it may either increase or decrease, gather power or lose it. Its official name gave little clue to the distracting combination of powers varying from complete control at one end to vague influence at the other. British Departments are like wild-flowers—they grow and spread without plan or scheme, just as the chance caprice of Parliament or some fugitive Ministry may decide. It is often just a throw of the dice as to what new powers or functions may be laid upon them.

The Board of Trade had withered under the shadow of the great fiscal deadlock of the previous three years (1903-6). Poised between two theories of commerce,it had lingered in the “doldrums,” like a ship waiting for a wind.

Thus there awaited in the pigeon-holes of the office a great number of untouched and unfinished projects, loose ends of legislation, belated steps towards giving method and authority to the powers of that great Department.

For the Board of Trade reflected in every branch of its administrative powers the spirit of the age in which it had grown up—the timid, tentative, apologetic touch of the nineteenth-century administrator. The scope of its powers, indeed, bulked vast and tremendous—extending from bankrupt firms at one end to shipping, railways, and labour at the other; but over all these branches of national life its sway was mild and illusive. The very Consuls who control our trade abroad were appointed and controlled by another Department.[50]

The Labour Department, founded in a spasm of progress, was still mainly advisory. British railways had to be supplicated rather than controlled. The great shipping interests had discovered new sea-ways through obsolete laws.

Mr. Lloyd George soon realised the opportunity that lay to his hand. The time had come to give to the Board of Trade a new grasp and stretch of authority. New laws must be passed. But also, and even more important, there must be a new spirit in the administration of the laws that existed.

He did not act in a hurry. He spent his first weeks in a thorough study of the work of the Board. He appeared little in Parliament. He took the sensible courseof first learning from the able officials of the Board the general outlines of its functions and problems.

Then, after some months, he began to legislate; but, before bringing in his Bills, he developed what was then a new system of preparation and anticipation.

It had been too often the custom of Ministers in such Departments as the Board of Trade to frame Bills without consulting the interests concerned. Here was the truly “bureaucratic” spirit of the olden days—to assume that the Civil Service must of necessity know better than the public about their own business—to enforce on great private interests measures as to which they had never been asked their opinions, to wait for the inevitable complaints and grievances until it was too late to remedy them without public confessions of ignorance and folly. Such methods have been responsible for many bad laws and for many parliamentary disasters.

Mr. Lloyd George changed all that. Take the first question in which he decided to legislate—the control of merchant shipping. Here he found things in a very bad mess. The British merchant sailor was still far behind most British land-workers both in comfort and in wages. While fabulous fortunes were being made by shipowners, sailors were still badly fed, badly housed, irregularly paid, often cheated of their pay altogether. The result was that the more prosperous classes of British wage-earners were refusing to go to sea or leaving the sea as soon as possible. Our gigantic merchant fleet, the pride of the British Empire, was already half manned by foreign seamen, whose ignorance of the English language often put English ships and lives in grievous peril.

Many efforts had been made to remedy these things—one by Mr. Chamberlain, still remembered at the Board of Trade as the best administrator up to that time. Mr. Lloyd George proposed to carry Mr. Chamberlain’s efforts to completion.

What had defeated all efforts up to the present moment was the powerful resistance of the shipowners in the House of Commons, where the rights of the many too often escheat to the bold and flagrant championship of the few.

Mr. Lloyd George determined to call the shipowners together and to consult them before he introduced his Bill into the House. But, if he was to consult the shipowners, he must also consult the sailors. So he ended by consulting both interests outside the House; and this sensible method proved so successful in the case of shipping that it soon became his favourite method in preparing all his Bills, and has now been adopted by many Ministers as the obvious and necessary preliminary to legislation.

In the Merchant Shipping Act of 1906, indeed, he carried this process a step further. Not only did he, by agreement, establish for the British sailor a new charter of rights,[51]but he also effected a new load-waterline agreement with foreign Governments. Thereby he established a new precedent for international legislation.

The working of the famous “Load-line”—so dramatically secured by that fervent and determined man,Mr. Samuel Plimsoll, a generation before—had undoubtedly saved thousands of innocent lives. It had given the seamen a new guarantee of security. There was always the fact that a ship could not be weighted down below a certain depth. But meanwhile a new evil had arisen. Foreign ships, without the British “Load-line,” were using British ports to snatch British trade. Deeply laden “foreigners” could afford to carry goods at lower freights; and Great Britain was penalised for her humanity.

Mr. Lloyd George determined to stop this. He compromised the “Load-line”—raising it slightly for British ships, but enforcing this modified line on all ships that came to British ports. There were protests from foreign Powers. Mr. Lloyd George proceeded to negotiate. He bargained with the right of entry to British ports, and finally he came to an agreement with most of the great seafaring nations which enforced the new “Load-line” on all ships trading to Great Britain.

Such was the first of the new measures which came from the Board of Trade under his presidency and passed through the House of Commons in October of 1906. Now for the first time piloting his own measures from the Treasury Bench, Mr. Lloyd George showed new parliamentary powers that astonished the critics. The wiseacres had shaken their heads. “Too much of a rebel to govern!” they had said. “So accustomed to obstruction, that he will obstruct himself!” said others, scoffing. But they were wrong. He developed new powers of adroit persuasiveness that surprised lookers-on. He was patient and conciliatory. He could be firm when necessary; but at other times he seemed all open-mindedness. He had won his wayvery often just when every one else thought that he had lost it. He knew when to sacrifice details in order to win principles.

Now that the Board of Trade found that they had secured a good law-maker, the progressive officials who distinguish that Department pressed on him other tasks. There was, for instance, the question of the law of patents, crying for consolidation and amendment. There, too, legislation was long overdue.

Consolidation was easy. But, in looking into the state of the law, Mr. Lloyd George soon discovered that there was one glaring British grievance which no Minister had yet dared to touch. Mr. Lloyd George refused to be paralysed by the terrorism of the Protection controversy. He has never admitted the view that Free Trade means discrimination against your own country.

And yet that was how the existing patent law worked.

For he found that a custom had grown up by which foreign firms would employ a British citizen to take out a British patent with the deliberate intention to work it abroad. In that case it could not be worked in Great Britain. For there was actually nothing in British law to prevent this British privilege from becoming a direct cause of loss to British trade.

This seemed to him intolerable. Accordingly, he introduced into the Patents Bill which he brought into the House in 1907 the following clause:[52]

“At any time, not less than four years after the date of a patent, and not less than one yearafter the passing of this Act, any person may apply to the Comptroller for the revocation of the patent on the ground that the patented article or process is manufactured or carried on exclusively or mainly outside the United Kingdom.”

Looking back on this clause now, with all the excellent results that have flowed from it,[53]it is clear that it represented the merest justice to the British trader. The Tariff Reformers congratulated Mr. Lloyd George on conversion; the Free Traders reproached him for desertion. Neither had any leg to stand on. The mere fact of granting patents is, in a sense, a form of protection for the patentee. But to ask that a nation should grant so great a privilege in order that it should be used against its own citizens is surely the very ecstasy of “freedom.”

Then, just before leaving the Board of Trade, he finally settled up the Port of London by buying out the Dock Companies. There again he arranged the terms of purchase by bargaining before he brought in his Bill.

One company stood out. He went straight on without that company. It was awkward; but it would have been fatal to show weakness. He was just about to move the Second Reading of the Bill, leaving that company out, when the announcement of its agreement to his terms was brought to him in his room at the House of Commons before he went in to the Committee. Thus a problem was settled which had defied several Governments and paralysed London as a port.

“Not an ideal way of legislating,” it will be said. Certainly not. Nor was then our Parliament an ideal legislative machine.

In a speech made at Liverpool on May 24th, 1906, Mr. Lloyd George described how the menace of the Lords then threw its shadow over all Liberal policy. He told how, in framing every Bill, the Cabinet, even before the Bill was drafted, had to take the attitude of the Upper Chamber into consideration.

This was, in fact, still his own governing consideration in these Board of Trade measures. He was soon to show that he was quite ready to fight the Lords when it seemed to him a necessary stroke of high policy. But he did not believe in half-defiances. So he modelled these Board of Trade Bills to pass by agreement.

But, after all, it was not in law-making so much as in administration that he was destined to make his highest reputation at the Board of Trade. It was not only that he sent into every tentacle of the great organism a new vigour and intensity of purpose; it was also that he showed in a very high degree a genius for conciliation in great labour disputes.

It was in the late autumn of 1907 that there came to him the great test of the threatened Railway Strike. He had just achieved in October a very surprising triumph of peace-making at the Welsh Convention summoned at Cardiff to denounce him for some supposed weakening on Welsh Disestablishment. They were just preparing to sacrifice him with his own borrowed weapons when he appeared in the midst of them, claimed to speak, and won them over to spare him.

But all Englishmen always took it for granted that Mr. Lloyd George could manage Welshmen. English railwaymen and English railway directors seemed a very different affair. For both parties seemed very resolute; and the powers of the Board of Trade seemed remarkably weak.

But the crisis was too grave to consider legal powers. The country was faced with a paralysis of transport. Such an event might prove a national danger.

Mr. Lloyd George swiftly acted for the nation. With no power to enforce his summons, he boldly called directors and men to the Board of Trade to discuss the situation. There he held them for days, prolonging the discussion by every resource of persuasion until the moods of both parties were cooled to a more reasonable temperature. Then he made his proposal—the famous Conciliation Boards—and he won both parties to agreement.

Those who, like myself, saw much of him from day to day during that struggle could not but be amazed at his resourcefulness and persistence. He appeared never to contemplate the possibility of a breakdown. He seemed one of that rare band of whom the Roman poet said—“They can because they think they can.” It was impossible to dream of failure in his presence. Infected by his magic faith, weak men grew strong and sceptics radiated with faith. He appeared one of those of whom, in a famous poem, a great English singer has said[54]—

“Languor is not in your heart,Weakness is not in your word,Weariness not on your brow.Ye alight in our van! at your voice,Panic, despair, flee away.”

“Languor is not in your heart,

Weakness is not in your word,

Weariness not on your brow.

Ye alight in our van! at your voice,

Panic, despair, flee away.”

Here was a tangle of time-worn hatreds: the men were suspicious and resentful, the directors dogged and prejudiced. How bring together human beings so divided? How bridge such a gulf?

Well, first he brought into the conferences those men who stood between the quarrelling parties—the railway managers. Here he found a remarkable body of Englishmen—alert, resourceful, self-made, unprejudiced.

How often he used to praise those railway managers! Ten years after, in a still greater emergency, his mind went back to those men; and in the gravest crisis of the Great War he called them in to aid the hard-pressed British lines in France.

What is it that has made Mr. Lloyd George so great a conciliator?

It is not merely his power of using speech for purposes of persuasion. “Speakers attack too much,” he often used to say. “They ought to aim at persuasion.” That has always been his own central aim in the use of speech.

There is also in him an even greater power—the power of making two conflicting parties see one another’s point of view. That is partly because they learn to see it through his eyes. It is like some arrangement of looking-glasses in which men see one another’s faces at a new and more attractive angle. There, again, he works on a theory. “Men quarrel too much,”I have heard him say. “They become slaves to words and phrases. They miss the reality.”

It was such beliefs and perceptions that have so often made him persevere in peace-making when all others have given up hope.

In this case of the Railway Strike of 1907 it earned him the universal applause of the nation, voiced by King Edward, who always entertained a keen and subtle admiration for good peace-making. For a few brief months Mr. Lloyd George was the hero of the nation. He seemed almost a case for the warning—“Beware when all men speak well of thee!”

But in the career of this man of storm it is always fated that no peaceful interval lasts long. On November 6th he settled the railway strike; on November 30th he lost his eldest daughter Mair, the apple of his eye. While still bowed with that bitter grief, in December he was called to stop a threatened strike in the cotton trade. He is wont to say that it was the only thing that saved him. But there was clearly to be no peace for him.

Then, four months later, in April 1908, Sir Henry Campbell-Bannerman, broken by work and domestic sorrow, resigned the Premiership, and Mr. Asquith stepped into his place. Mr. John (now Lord) Morley was offered the Chancellorship of the Exchequer, but he refused it, and that high post was now allotted to Mr. Lloyd George.

[50]The Foreign Office, which still (1920) appoints them.

[51]A fixed standard of food and ship accommodation, a certificated cook on board ship, a guarantee that distressed seamen should be looked after and abandoned seamen paid, a restriction on the scandalous practices of overloading and under-manning, and on the employment of foreign sailors.

[52]Clause 27, Patents Act of 1907.

[53]Many patents are now being worked in England which were previously worked abroad.

[54]Matthew Arnold in “Rugby Chapel.”

CHAPTER XII

“In small, truckling States, a timely compromise with power has often been the means, and the only means, of drawling out their puny existence: but a great State is too much envied, too much dreaded to find safety in humiliation. To be secure, it must be respected. Power, and eminence, and consideration, are things not to be begged. They must be commanded.”—Edmund Burke,Letter I on A Regicide Peace.

Inthe late summer of 1908, at the end of the parliamentary session, Mr. Lloyd George traversed Germany from west to east and from south to north. It was a very thorough and systematic motor-tour. He was the travelling guest of Mr. (now Sir) Charles Henry,[55]a Member of Parliament of great public spirit and strong Liberal views, who invited me also to accompany the party. It was a journey of profound interest for us all. The object of the tour was to investigate the German system of National Insurance. Parliament had just passed the Old Age Pensions Act; and Mr. Lloyd George had already publicly promised to round off the British pension system by a general scheme of national insurance. Before drafting the actual Bills he wished to make a complete study of that very comprehensive system which had been operating in Germany since 1893. The German Government gave us access to all their Central State Insurance Offices, and gave us facilities for interviewing all theirleading Insurance civil servants. We visited most of the largest towns of the German Empire, and had conversations with employers and workmen—Socialists and trade unionists—as well as with officials. Never was a statesman’s holiday spent in a more thorough investigation of a great problem of the lives of the people.

We started the motor-tour in France. We trained to Amiens, where the motor met us, and travelled on the great northern French national roads through the very region where so much of the fighting has taken place during the last three years—through Compiègne, Soissons, along the valley of the Aisne to Rheims, where we visited the Cathedral—that great masterpiece of Gothic architecture which has since suffered such sacrilegious injury. Thence we travelled south by Châlons-sur-Marne, following the river valley by Vitry and Bar-le-Duc. We crossed the Meuse and passed through Nancy, that most lovely of valley frontier towns, which has since so bravely borne such fierce enemy attacks. Nancy looked very peaceful on that August day when we passed through her pretty streets and pressed on towards the Vosges Mountains, hoping to reach Strassburg that evening.

At that point we made a happy miscalculation in our time; and we were benighted in a little French village just on the edge of the frontier at the very summit of the Vosges. We found that we could get supper and beds at one of those clean littleaubergeswhich are scarcely ever lacking in the smallest French village. As we supped on the excellent meal ofbouillonand cutlets improvised by the ready hostess, she stood and talked to us. She spoke to us of the memories of1870-71, when the tide of war had so swiftly passed by that little village. She was a school-child at that time, and she had missed two years of her schooling. For the Germans had remained in occupation of that part of the country on the Vosges frontier for fully a year after the end of the war. The withdrawal of the army took place, Department by Department, as the indemnity was paid; and this Department was the last to be evacuated. Before the war she was living well within France; at the end she found herself on the edge of the new frontier.

We asked her how she managed to make an inn pay at such a spot. “Oh, quite easily,” she said. “We are kept going by the people of French birth who come up on Sundays from Alsace!” “Why?” “Oh, just to feel the joy of living for a day on French soil!”

Next day we motored down to Strassburg, climbed the towers, and saw the marks of the German shells fired nearly forty years before, and spent a pleasant afternoon in the picturesque streets of that ancient town. As far as man could do it Alsace had been painted black, white and red with Teuton colours. Nowhere in the streets of Strassburg did we observe any sign or notice in any language but German. Everywhere were German soldiers, and in the evening we attended a concert of massed German bands at which the music was purely Teuton, and Teuton of the most patriotic kind. But the people seemed to us to listen with a certain strange dull indifference to all this brazen wooing; and beneath the surface we seemed to hear the whisper of a coming storm. Next day, motoring across the country, we had occasion to ask the way from an Alsatian peasant. The question was asked in German,but one of the party slipped in with French. The peasant’s face instantly lighted up. “Ah! do the gentlemen speak in French?” he said. “Ah! I prefer to speak in that language myself.” So little had all the arts of suppression succeeded in crushing the spirit of that race.

At Stuttgart we were witnesses of a strange event, which comes now back to memory with a significance which was then hidden. Count Zeppelin was then experimenting with his airships, and one of those new miracles had been advertised to start on a voyage from a spot near Stuttgart. The whole town had flooded out in a vast multitude to see the airship make a start; but at the critical moment there arose a hurricane of wind. The ship was torn from its moorings and fell in utter wreckage and confusion in the midst of the crowd. We arrived on the scene just after this had happened, and met the people returning from witnessing the disaster. What was notable about that multitude was the passion of grief which at that moment was sweeping over them. It was as if they had all suffered some acute personal loss. Men and women were gesticulating, some were almost weeping; all their faces were troubled and perplexed. As the people coming from the city met those returning we could hear exclamations of sorrow and almost of anguish. “Ah!” they cried, “is the airship down? What a horrible calamity!” We heard afterwards that the crowd surrounding the airship had just sung that famous national hymn, “Deutschland über alles.” They had been worked up to ecstasy when the airship crashed.

So we motored through that land in that happy peace time, little foreboding all the great calamitiesthat were to break from that storm-centre on to an unsuspecting world.

Bethmann-Hollweg was at that time “Home Secretary,” a vigorous, amiable Minister of the official kind, sincerely keen on social reforms; a Junker of the better type. He treated Mr. Lloyd George with great courtesy. He returned from his holiday, and specially entertained him and his party in the famous restaurant at the Zoological Gardens at Berlin. He invited many eminent members of the German Civil Service to meet us. Every one was very gracious and polite—almost too polite for comfort. After dinner we went into a large reception-room, and there we remained standing all the evening talking and looking at one another. Towards the end of the evening we began to feel very fatigued. I ventured to ask one of the German officials whether it would be the correct thing to sit down. “Oh!” he said. “We have all been waiting for you to sit down! We, too, are very tired!”

In the middle of this rivalry in fatigue, they brought round great glasses of foaming beer in Prussian fashion. Mr. Lloyd George, who is almost a teetotaler, looked at the glasses with a scared expression. Then suddenly his face grew resolute. “We must show that Great Britain is not to be left behind!”

Bethmann-Hollweg did not talk politics until towards the end of dinner. The conversation drifted to King Edward’s visit to the Russian Czar at Réval. That visit had caused a great ferment in Germany, and grave suspicions of British intentions. Bethmann-Hollweg voiced those suspicions in the frankest manner. “You are trying to encircle us!” he cried to Mr.Lloyd George. “You and France and Russia are attempting to strangle us!”

Mr. Lloyd George assured him of the friendliness of Great Britain towards all the great Powers; but for the moment he refused to be appeased. He thumped the table with his hand. “The Prussian Government has only to lift a finger,” he cried, “and every living Prussian will die for the Fatherland!”

Mr. Lloyd George listened to all this with his characteristic calmness and good-humour. “But what about the other Germans?” he put in at this point.

A shadow passed over the face of the Prussian Minister.

“Oh! they?” he said with a gesture. “They, too, will come along!”

But this was only a flash. On the whole, Bethmann-Hollweg was very friendly; and the facts of his family life showed him Anglophile. He had sent his son to an English University; and admiration for English education was, curiously enough, just at that moment almost as much a fashion in Germany as admiration for German education in England. When we were lunching with a judge at Frankfort Mr. Lloyd George discovered that the daughter of the house had actually been at school along with his own daughter at the famous English girls’ school near Brighton—Roedean.

Of course, it is always foolish to imagine that social courtesies seriously affect the grave pursuit of national interests in any country. But they produce a friendly atmosphere; and he would be a criminal who, with all the causes of difference and conflict in the world, did not always try to improve the human atmosphere.

The people of Hamburg were remarkably friendly to us. The merchants trading with England gave us an especially enthusiastic reception. They feasted us at a banquet at which sat the Hamburg Prussian Minister—for Berlin keeps a Ministry in the “Free Towns” as a last relic of their former independence.

It was on the occasion of that banquet that Mr. Lloyd George threw out the idea of regulating armaments by a Plimsoll “Load-line” fixed according to population. It is strange to-day to remember with what enthusiasm that suggestion was received by the Hamburg merchants.

The authorities of Hamburg provided a launch to take us into every corner of their famous port, so as to show us all the power and pride of their new creation—with all its marvellous up-to-date devices for handling ships and cargoes, its wonderful new docks and elevators, its ingenious and multifarious resources for expediting sea-traffic. It was good to see that port; if only to realise the wisdom of the King’s advice to us at home—“Wake up, Britain!”

It is difficult to exaggerate the part played by the personality of the Kaiser in German imperial politics at that moment. If one probed any great German question to the bottom, one always came back to that fact. Take the question of the Navy—that vital Anglo-German problem of the early century. The Army chiefs were, I think, quite ready to contemplate a naval “deal,” if only to keep England out of the land-wars of the Continent. The Social Democrats, of course, were more than willing; they were anti-naval as well as anti-militarist. But to the Kaiser the Navywas always prime favourite; it was his toy, his darling dream, his cherished ambition. His sincerest belief and hopes were expressed in the phrase, “Our future lies on the ocean.” He stimulated the popular zeal for the Navy in every possible way. The Nord Deutsche Lloyd Liners had elaborate pictures comparing the respective navies, and showing the smallness of the German in comparison with ours; the great German Navy League was constantly pushed forward; and no Minister could long remain in power who did not sympathise with this cult. The curious thing was that the German populations along the sea-board were not half so enthusiastic for the Navy as the inland populations, who seemed enthusiastic in proportion to their ignorance of the sea.

Many Germans used to put down the Kaiser’s passion for the Navy to his English blood. He was a very enthusiastic yachtsman; and, as most yachtsmen are Englishmen, that threw him into constant relations of intimacy with English sailor-men. The English yachtsmen on the North Sea found him almost excessive in his friendliness. I remember an instance given to me by a famous English yachtsman, fond of cruising in northern waters. A German torpedo-boat had accidentally one evening broken the bowsprit of his yacht. During the night, while the owner was asleep, a body of carpenters came on board of the English yacht and mended the bowsprit. In the morning, after breakfast, the Kaiser arrived himself. He had sent the carpenters. “Well!” he said, “how do you like your new bowsprit?” Then he looked at it whimsically. “When you go back to England,” he said, “tell them it was ‘made in Germany’!”

And yet at that very time this friendliness towards English yachtsmen—of which this was only one example—was not preventing the Kaiser from regarding the British naval power with a haunting jealousy that led him into the constant intrigues against England, of which we gain a glimpse in the secret correspondence discovered in the palace of the Russian Czar.

The Kaiser, indeed, was at that time always a great trouble to all the diplomats. He was like a perpetual cracker explosively zig-zagging about in all the Foreign Offices of Europe. Nobody ever knew what he would do or say—to whom he would talk, and with whom he would correspond. He had a touch of freakish irresponsibility. “I always knew that Willy would come to no good,” sighed an English Princess of the old school; and she seemed to have an eye for character. After Agadir, he calmly protested that the British Government had no right to object, as he had told some one of his intentions when he was visiting the British Court! His telegram to President Wilson seems to show that he carried this view of the British Constitution right up to the eve of the Great War.

“He is a bad neighbour,” said an official of the British Foreign Office at that time; and that really seemed to sum it up.

His constant changes of mood made German foreign policy very difficult to forecast, and I do not think that any one can claim to have foreseen the future.

The German officials told me that they had never had a visitor with a quicker mind than Mr. Lloyd George. After a long day spent in the Central Insurance Office at Berlin, the men who went round withus were very enthusiastic. “He grasps the system more rapidly than any student we have ever had.” Mr. Lloyd George, indeed, made a very exhaustive study of the German system. But in his Act he improved upon it and added to it in many important respects.[56]

It was a strange visit, curious to look back upon at this distance of time. Our days were filled with the insistent calls of a great social inquiry. But we could not ignore another aspect. After all, there was a greater problem darkening the air than insurance against individual sickness and unemployment. What about insurance against another and greater human sickness—the sickness of war? The thought of that kept recurring, like a secondary theme in some piece of music.

The impressions gained during this tour (1908) partly account, no doubt, for the firmness of Mr. Lloyd George’s language in that famous City speech with which, after consultation with Sir Edward Grey, he faced the German Agadir threat in 1911. He himself always contended at the time that that speech saved Europe from war. A firm, clear, real attitude—an attitude that would convince Germany that we meant what we said—that is what he always in those days advocated. He argued that here was the most positive realistic Power in the world—with no regard for sentimentalism or even humanity where the interests of Germany were concerned. Very well; let us treat them as they treated us. Let them know definitely where westood. Let our language to them be plain and frank. They would respect us all the more for it.

He was very fiercely attacked for this speech by the pacifists at the time, both in public and private. He made a characteristic reply to their pin-pricks. “Perhaps it would have been better if I had not made the speech! There would have been war, and the Prussian bully would have got the thrashing he deserves!”

Then, as since, nothing irritated and angered him more than the attitude of Germany to France. “It is simply persecution!” he used to say. “The world cannot be carried on along these lines!”

So he had already a dim perception of the great issue which was so soon to divide the world.

Between 1908 and 1914 came that “Turtle Dove” period (1912-1914) during which Germany wooed us. Never had Germany been more friendly to Great Britain than she was in the spring of that fatal year, 1914; never had our relations been more smooth; never had her protestations of affection been more numerous. The change from 1911 was almost startling.

Perhaps it ought to have startled us more. It is so easy to be sages after the accomplished fact. But it is not often that the architects of suspicion build wisely; their day comes once in a while, and they rejoice exceedingly. It is, perhaps, the worst crime of Germany that she has strengthened that sinister creed of doubt, and lowered faith between man and man.

[55]Died January, 1920.

[56]He raised the level of the sick benefit; he added several new benefits; and he paid the doctors better.

CHAPTER XIII

“It gives me a serious concern to see such a Spirit of Dissention in the Country; not only as it destroys Virtue and Common Sense, and renders us in a manner Barbarians towards one another, but as it perpetuates our Animosities, widens our Breaches, and transmits our present Passions and Prejudices to our Posterity. For my own Part, I am sometimes afraid that I discover the Seeds of a Civil War in these our Divisions; and therefore cannot but bewail as in their first Principles the Miseries and Calamities of our Children.”—Addisonin theSpectator, July 25th, 1711.

Duringhis foreign tour in 1908 Mr. Lloyd George always carried with him a small pocketbook, in which he jotted down ideas and suggestions as they came to him in thought or talk. These were jottings for that great Budget of which he already perceived the necessity.

For when he took over the Treasury in April 1908, he found British finance at the parting of the ways. Old Age Pensions had just been promised; a Bill was already drafted on non-tributory lines. He quite approved. But no provision had been made in the Budget of 1908 to pay for this great social boon.[57]

Here was a great opportunity for the Tariff Reform cause, at that time still languishing from the staggering blow of 1906. It was up to Free Trade to show that it could meet the coming deficit.

We all know how Mr. Lloyd George faced that crisis at the Exchequer—by what audacious drafts on the great reserves of our national wealth—by what determined levies on the luxuries of all classes. The Budget of 1909 is still one of the landmarks of English history. Its rejection by the Lords and its final triumph in the first General Election of 1910 are thrice told tales.

How did Mr. Lloyd George bear himself through the stress of these tremendous evils?

He did not spare himself. He bore the burden of the midnight sitting as well as of the day labour. He revolutionised the habits of the Treasury.

He had now left his private house and come to live in Downing Street. His life was practically lived in public. It was at about this time that he instituted his famous habit of breakfast parties at which the affairs of the nation were discussed. Strenuous gatherings were these, opening with merry chaff, but soon passing to earnest debate and discussion over coffee and bacon—debates always human and thrilling, enlivened by the swift jest and epigram of the host, always one of the best of talkers. But he never allowed these talks to drift into triviality. He always directed them to moulding and shaping policy. He compelled his guests to face vital decisions.

Great gatherings! Where the best of the nation met, not with idle gossip or silly scandal, but with high converse and swift, eager discourse, ever touched with hope and light!

He could not have lived this strenuous life without some relaxation. He found it, like so many other busy moderns, in golf. It was shortly after the opening ofthe twentieth century that he took to this game, and found in it his physical salvation. Up to 1900 he had never been robust. Often he had long periods of ill-health. But the steady tramps round those wonderful courses that now surround London made a great change. Golf has given him a tough physique, equal to resisting great strains.

Those of us who, during 1909, worked in the “Budget League” to help forward this great cause saw something of the energy and resourcefulness which went to achieve the hardly won victory of the first 1910 General Election.

One of our methods was to cover England with posters. I remember one glorious poster of an ermined and coroneted duke. We were very proud of it. But it passed through great troubles. Mr. Winston Churchill protested against it because it was too much like his cousin, the Duke of Marlborough. So we changed the face and darkened the colouring. The result was that the new duke came out precisely like our splendid and energetic chief, Sir Henry Norman, M.P.!

All this poster business was very expensive. We spent till we were exhausted; we swamped the Budget Protest League in paste. But, however much money we spent, we got more money. We only had to send across to Downing Street. Mr. Lloyd George seemed to have the key to the treasures of Golconda. He had the amazing gift of being able to persuade millionaires to subscribe in order to be taxed.

The Liberal Cabinet, as a whole, refused to believe that the Lords would throw out the Budget; and it was steadily set about through the summer of 1909 that Mr. Balfour and Lord Lansdowne were in favourof passing it. But Mr. Lloyd George persisted in believing the contrary. “They will throw it out all right!” he would always say cheerfully enough; and the only shadow that would pass over his face would come when some one would half convince him to the contrary. I believe that up to September there was some real doubt. But then the Tariff Reform League came into the fight; the first flush of the Budget popularity seemed to pass; our street-corner orators were met by rivals—often hired Socialists; and the “Die-hards” grew more powerful. The Lords determined to face the great risk. They threw out the Budget in November; Mr. Asquith was forced to dissolve; and in January 1910 came the General Election.

The Lords nearly won. The Liberals emerged with a diminished majority of 124 as compared with the 1906 majority of 354, meaning a loss of 115 seats, and a turn-over of 230 votes.

For a moment this fall in the majority shook the constancy even of that strong Cabinet. There was talk of resignation. Even Mr. Lloyd George was bitten for a moment by the idea of substituting House of Lords Reform for the policy of the Parliament Bill.

In a few weeks they steadied. They found that if they were disappointed, the other side were more so. The Lords had staked all; the Tariff Reformers had assured a win. The Opposition was as much “down” as the Government.

It was fated that a tragic event should give sudden pause to this rending strife. Just when the first shadow of civil war was falling across the nation, on May 6th, 1910, King Edward died. The presence of death brought a calmer mood; men saw realities for a moment,and shrank from the edge of the abyss. They were like travellers from whose path the mist suddenly clears, and lo! they find themselves stumbling along the edge of a precipice.

Mr. Lloyd George made a suggestion to the new King which was taken up and resulted in the remarkable conference of party leaders which lasted from June to November 1910. It was a pause of halcyon calm in the midst of storm.

Mr. Lloyd George was a member of that conference; he was always among those who took a sanguine view of its prospects; and he has always infinitely regretted its failure. He took a long view. He foresaw the civil perils that lay ahead of the country. He was ready to come to a large and comprehensive settlement. He knew that a settlement could not mean a victory for either side. He was ready to accept that view; and there were those on the other side—especially one, Mr. Arthur Balfour—who were large enough to accept it also.

But neither of the great parties, organised for combat and victory, could be brought to the height of so great a treaty. The secrecy of the conference had been perhaps all too faithfully observed. There had been no “spade-work” in preparing the parties for a self-denying ordinance so sweeping. The “Snakes” they say, “committed suicide to save themselves from slaughter.” But in this case both parties still hoped for life and victory.

So, in November 1910, the conflict was resumed; and in December there took place the second General Election—this time, by agreement between the Prime Minister and the King, a test Election on the VetoBill. The decision of January was practically repeated; and Mr. Lloyd George, again leaving his electioneering chances in Carnarvonshire to his local friends, was returned by a second sweeping majority.[58]

The second Election proved too much even for the strength of Mr. Lloyd George. After speaking up in Scotland with a strong fever actually on him, he was struck with a touch of serious throat trouble. His voice was threatened. After many efforts to go on, he finally accepted the verdict of seclusion, and spent a prolonged rest in a spacious, restful mansion behind the Sussex downs, lent to him by Mr. (afterwards Sir Arthur) Markham. He grew to a genuine love of this peaceful life; and when he returned to the turmoil, it was with a certain reluctance.

Driven back on reading as his sole diversion, he rambled widely through literature and read a great deal of history.

But his chief occupation during these months was the preparation of the famous Insurance Bill of 1911.

All who saw much of Mr. Lloyd George at that time knew that that measure was inspired by nothing less than a profound compassion for the sick and the suffering—a passion sobered by reflection, but still burning with an intense fire behind all his cool and calculated moves.

He was moved by a spirit best expressed in Blake’s golden verse:

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