CHAPTER XXV

[137]See Chapter XXIII, second page.

[138]By a section in all parties. For instance, theMorning Post, theDaily News, and theDaily Herald, are all equally vigorous in this combined attack.

[139]Sixty-three Labour members were returned out of some 300 Candidates.

[140]For the strike 611,998; against, 104,997.

[141]The founder of the French Syndicalist movement. See his bookReflexions sur la Violence.

[142]From £50 per annum to £70 in London, £60 in Scotland and £55 in the counties.

CHAPTER XXV

“He, though thus endued with a senseAnd faculty of storm and turbulence,Is yet a Soul whose master-bias leansTo home-felt pleasures and to gentle scenes.”Wordsworth’sThe Happy Warrior.

“He, though thus endued with a sense

And faculty of storm and turbulence,

Is yet a Soul whose master-bias leans

To home-felt pleasures and to gentle scenes.”

Wordsworth’sThe Happy Warrior.

Thatelement of tranquillity which Mr. Lloyd George enjoys in his own home—that “happy fireside clime” which to him is always truly—

“The pathos and sublimeOf human life”—

“The pathos and sublime

Of human life”—

perhaps accounts for the serenity of his outlook on public life.

That serenity is never more conspicuous than in seasons of hurricane. Like some ships, he rides steadiest in rough seas. When people around him are most disturbed, he is often the most calm.

There is doubtless an element in his nature which rejoices in conflict and storm. I remember once finding him in his private room at the House of Commons when it was urgent to bring him word that Scotland Yard reported the intention of certain persons to take his life. His response was to strike up a verse of a great Welsh hymn which passed beyond my scope of understanding; but it was clear, from the flash of theeye, that it was a song of rejoicing. “Well,” I said, “aren’t you at all disturbed?” “No,” he said, “with the world in storm I rejoice. I love all this smashing of windows and tumult of nations. I remember the saying of a great Welsh preacher: ‘Such disturbances of the world always mean some great movement in the realms above’—a reflection on earth of some heavenly strife. I believe that is true.” I did not attempt to argue with this mood; but this sympathy with unrest explains much in his career, and most of all his skill in riding through tempests and mastering storms. For it is at such moments that he is at his best. Nothing seems to frighten or appall him. When the hearts of others are dismayed he is touched with a new emotion. It is a kind of exaltation, which seems to work in some kind of harmony with that universal spirit which rides the storm and works through the whirlwind.

It is these moods which have most confused his critics and distorted their judgment of him. Those who know Mr. Lloyd George only on one side of his nature have always expected to see him fall over some political precipice. His zeal, in their opinion, would eat him up. He would just run the hot course of so many furious political firebrands. Some rash and hasty blunder would occur, and he would flare out into the darkness.

Yet this disaster has never occurred. And why? Because behind all those flashes of spirit there has been a steady pursuing purpose; discreet, cautious, shrewd. “Whenever Mr. Lloyd George seems most rash,” said to me an old friend of his who has seen him in many situations, “I always know that there is a cold, shrewd calculation behind it.”

It was a true judgment. For, with his great power of words, he combines a tremendous sense of facts. If he finds himself on the wrong course, he will often hark back. If he has erred in speech he will apologise. After the most vehement attack he will make friends with his victim. It is this combination of the slow qualities with the swift—of judgment with daring, of mercy with rigour, of slow reflection with swift attack, of the zeal of the Cambrian with the shrewdness of the Fleming—that marks him off from so many of his race. For it is not so much the emphasis of one quality as the combination of several contrasted qualities that goes to make human greatness.

Like all great stalkers and trappers, Mr. Lloyd George is very difficult to follow. He has often doubled on his tracks whilst his faithful disciples are still walking straight into the danger. He talks so freely and frankly that his paths seem to be those wherein wayfarers, though fools, may not err. But with all that frankness he really keeps his own counsel and forms his own decisions. That is why so many simple people are so surprised—and sometimes even a little hurt—to find that, after they have given him the very best of their advice, he has just gone on his own way.

Mr. Lloyd George by no means despises the tactics of public appeal. If necessary, he will use even the theatrical in order to impress the public mind. Soon after the Birmingham riot, at the height of the Boer War, his friends opened theDaily Expressto find that there was a scheme afoot to do him violence at a meeting to be held in Bristol that evening. They wired a warning to the organisers of the meeting at Bristol. They need not have troubled; for whatever dangerfaced him was of Mr. Lloyd George’s own fashioning. He had deliberately gone to the office of theDaily Express, advertised the place of the meeting, announced his intention to denounce the war, and practically challenged them to kill him. The organisers at Bristol had done their best to conceal the meeting. This was his way of correcting the discretion of his own friends.

This was immediately after that reverberating event at Birmingham, when he in fact nearly lost his life. Late on that stormy evening he rang me up in theDaily Newsoffice from Birmingham. He wished me to go and inform his wife at Wandsworth that he was safe. “But,” I said, “what I am to tell her? Where are you?” “That I cannot divulge,” he said in a laughing voice. “At present I am a member of the Birmingham Police Force”—and he gave me his number. Through the telephone I could hear the tinkling of cups. “Well,” I said, “you are having a good supper.” “Yes,” he said, “we are making merry, and the mob are making merry outside. We are both happy!” It was perhaps characteristic of the calmness of his domestic life that, on reaching Wandsworth late that night, I found the house closed and the whole family fast asleep. Mrs. Lloyd George happily had not heard of the danger through which he was passing at Birmingham.

Then, as now, this habit of courage was always his supreme public characteristic. “Of all qualities in public life,” he said to me once, “courage is the rarest.” From the earliest episodes of his career, from that day when he defied the Bench in North Wales, here—in his courage—has always been the conscious centre of his power. He has always believed that if you wantto destroy a popular idol you must learn to face it and to fight it—to put it to open shame—if necessary, to insult it. Fear rules the minds of men; and against fear courage alone prevails. This was always the moving faith at the back of all his great campaigns, whether of peace or of war. It was with this weapon that he has fought both Governments at home and Prussians abroad. It was the element of policy that underlay that frank directness of speech which offended the cultured classes of England so profoundly at the time of his Budget campaign.

For he convinced himself that modern public speakers had got into the habit of referring too politely to great national evils. He believed that the most effective weapon to use against these evils was to revive some of the lost frankness of our forefathers. His great aim was to prove that it was safe to speak as plainly about a duke as about an ordinary citizen. He had known in his young days how cowed men could be, how fearful of shadows, how frightened by ghosts. The thing he had most admired about Mr. Chamberlain was his plainness of speech. It was his deliberate policy to revive that habit. Mr. Lloyd George’s oratory of the year 1911 was the direct successor of Mr. Chamberlain’s during the years between 1886 and 1893.

As to the abuse he encountered, he counted that as a political gain. He was fond of the story of the workman who had heard a political agent expressing terror at the fury of a certain class. “Bless my heart!” said the workman, “we never thinks you mean business until they squeals.” So it was with the avalanches of calumny which fell upon Mr. Lloyd George between 1911 and 1914. He knew that it was the penalty ofchallenging the powers in high places. It showed that his proposals really “meant business.” “Their abuse,” says Sir Fretful Plagiary inThe Critic, “is the best panegyric.” So Mr. Lloyd George ploughed the road to fame through the abuse of those years.

Yet all the time he suffered. He has a heart very sensitive to the affections of the people. He was puzzled at the way men hated him. It was not the danger of it he minded; for he would scarcely allow the Scotland Yard men to protect him. It was the pain of it. He frankly hates dislike; his nature craves the sun; he is at his best among friends. “I cannot imagine why they detest me so,” he said one day during that time. “I seem to be the best hated man in England.” The reply was obvious. “If one half of England hates you too much, then surely the other half loves you too absurdly.” He was instantly all smiles. “That is perfectly true,” he cried—and put the melancholy thoughts aside.

During the struggle over the Licensing Bill of 1908 he received numerous postcards written in what was intended to be blood, but looked suspiciously like red ink. These documents generally threatened him with instant death, probably combined with torture—“something lingering, with boiling oil.” They came, or professed to come, from enraged publicans fearful for their livelihood. These postcards got curiously on his nerves. “I don’t mind so much being killed,” he said one day, “but I should hate being killed by a publican.” There seemed to him something curiously unsatisfactory in such a way of going out.

But in general he has taken little heed of threats. It was only with great difficulty that the Attorney-General could persuade him to sanction a prosecutionin the famous case of the poisoned arrow conspiracy. He was always in favour of leniency to the Suffragettes. It is not merely that he hates excessive punishment. His haunting sense of humour seems to be offended by the idea that he is taking up so much room in the world. He dislikes the attendance of detectives almost as much as Mr. Gladstone did. “Can you possibly tell me where Mr. Lloyd George is going?” was the frequent cry of those unhappy followers of Mr. Lloyd George to his friends in those perilous days of civil strife. “He is always giving us the slip,” was their complaint. Sitting one day on one of those little green chairs in the Green Park for which the Londoner pays his obol—a favourite seat of his in those days of peace—at the end of a long talk he sighed and looked grave. He inclined his head towards a shabby-looking individual who was smoking a pipe and sitting not far off under a tree reading a newspaper with apparent indifference to the whole world around him. “There is my guardian angel!” said Mr. Lloyd George.

It is not only in facing hostile audiences that he has displayed his courage. He has never hesitated to tell his friends the truth. He has that gift of leadership which consists of making followers do something which they do not want to do. He has put aside all fear of those great influences which overshadow English public life—birth, money, prestige, caste. He represents in high places a new freedom from all those bogies—almost the realisation of Robbie Burns’s dream:

“For a’ that, an’ a’ that,It’s coming yet for a’ that,That man to man, the world o’er,Shall brithers be for a’ that.”

“For a’ that, an’ a’ that,

It’s coming yet for a’ that,

That man to man, the world o’er,

Shall brithers be for a’ that.”

Not in his most vehement Limehouse days did hesay anything stronger than the Scotch ploughman said in his famous song:

“Ye see yon birkie ca’d a lord,Wha struts, an’ stares, an’ a’ that;Tho’ hundreds worship at his word,He’s but a coof for a’ that.”

“Ye see yon birkie ca’d a lord,

Wha struts, an’ stares, an’ a’ that;

Tho’ hundreds worship at his word,

He’s but a coof for a’ that.”

Mr. Lloyd George, in fact, always tests man by what is in him; not by the guinea stamp, or by the pedigree. Why should he not? Birth! What birth can there be higher than that of a Welshman?—“The oldest race in these islands.” Money? “I can always get money for a cause; there is no difficulty about money.” That has always been his view; and who can wonder that such should be the belief of a man who has made millionaires subscribe for their own taxation!

Of prestige he is perhaps more fearful. He was tremendously impressed with Oxford when he stayed in that town for some days on his visit to the Palmerston Club during the Boer War. “I am glad I never came here,” he said. “I should never have recovered from the influence of this place; it would have been with me all my life.” He was indeed strongly gripped by Oxford and its “dreaming towers.” After two days of it he was, for the moment, half subdued. “Ah!” he said, “how the past holds you here.” All of which shows what a mistake our forefathers made when they excluded the Nonconformists from our ancient universities.

It is indeed quite a mistake to suppose that Mr. Lloyd George is dead to the voices of the past. There is no greater delusion than to regard him as an unlettered man. If the best education is to turn a boy loose in a library, then he has enjoyed to the full that form of schooling. He started life with the training of alawyer, which he always claims to be the best mental discipline to which a human mind can be subjected. Those laborious explorations of French and the classics through which he passed with his “Uncle Lloyd” as companion, were certainly not less useful as a training than the fugitive crammings of the average University undergraduate. At any rate, he learnt to read for himself; and to absorb what he read. Since those early days he has been a wide reader in all his spare time. He knows his English historians better than most Englishmen. He can hold his own with most classical scholars in discussions on ancient history. Perhaps, indeed, Rome holds him most of all the countries. He knows his Mommsen well, and he spent the long convalescence from the throat illness that came to him after the Budget in reading some of the latest Italian historians of ancient Rome. He emerged from that illness a formidable expert in later Roman history, especially in the land laws of the Gracchi. In fact, he has most of the outfit of the scholar except the scholar’s pride.

Parallels from history are dangerous; but they always haunt the mind of a well-read imaginative man. Mr. Lloyd George is very fond of them. One evening in 1908, when we were sitting in the Orangerie at Stuttgart, in a pause of the German tour of that year, the conversation began to turn on the possibilities of a war between Britain and Germany. The parallel of Rome and Carthage came like a flash from Mr. Lloyd George; it brought from him one of those far-reaching forecasts which, in other days, would have earned him the mantle of a prophet. “There is the same commercial rivalry,” he said, “the same sea jealousy, the same abiding quarrel between the soldier andthe merchant, the warrior and the shopkeeper, the civilisation that has arrived and the civilisation that is still struggling to arrive.” He paused, and then he added: “I wonder if we shall be as unprepared as Carthage; I wonder if we shall be as torn by faction?”

It is curious to look back now on that conversation, in that comfortable, well-lighted garden—the pride of that old German town—with the vault of stars above us, and the murmur of a great city around us. We thought no more of it at the time. But now it comes back.

In his games, Mr. Lloyd George is a keen sportsman. Golfers, as a class, have the seriousness of religious devotees. But no man could pursue the little white ball round a course with a steadier concentration than Mr. Lloyd George. No player could be keener on victory. “Golf is like life,” he loves to say, “you never quite make up for losing a hole.” His game has much improved in recent years; though he never claims to be a champion. He has not again repeated the achievement of “holing out in one.” That was at Cannes in the far-off, merry days before the Great War. It had the beauty of the unexpected. He drove off: and lo and behold! the ball disappeared. The caddies hunted everywhere; and it was just being pronounced a “lost ball,” when a sharp youth looked into the hole, and there the ball was quietly reposing!

It is usual on these occasions to present the caddy with a bottle of whisky. Mr. Lloyd George gave the lad five francs; and of course there were candid friends who said that the caddy had put the ball in the hole. There are always critics, even on the golf-course.

His worst enemies cannot accuse Mr. Lloyd George of “side”; so there are some who say that he has notenough. He is, in fact, the simplest of men, fond of being surrounded with friends, and very faithful to the humble friends of his youth. He is curiously unconscious of his own position in the world. To one who congratulated him on his elevation to the Premiership he merely replied, “Oh! I had forgotten that!” And I believe that he had.

This simplicity makes him very thorough. He knows his own ignorance. When he was Chancellor of the Exchequer he went to Somerset House and went carefully through the whole system of the old land taxes and their working. When he was guiding his Budget through the House of Commons he had a daily meeting of the Treasury experts, with whom he discussed every detail. That is always his method—to learn all he can from others. He is a great listener, and learns rather by the ear than by the eye.

He is very considerate for his secretaries and his staff; but he works them hard. He has no place for “slackers.” When he first went to the Treasury, he astounded that august Department by beginning work at ten o’clock. They soon caught the habit, for later on they slaved for him in a way that astonished the onlooker. He can make others work because he works himself.

At one time he took a great interest in the organisation of the Civil Service. On first becoming a Minister, he was astonished to discover the rigidity of the division between the First and Second Classes of the Civil Service. He wished the system to be more fluid. Once he was struck by the ability of a certain civil servant, and he wished to place him in a position of trust. “It is impossible!” was the reply; “he is only a second division clerk.” Mr. Lloyd George looked upwith a flash of whimsical indignation. “Why!” he replied, “I am only a second division clerk myself!”

Whenever one tries to discover the secret of his power over men, one comes back to that supreme gift of his—the gift of the silver tongue—the power of public speech. That is, after all, the thing that has made him supreme over men. To hear him at his best one must hear him on a public platform, addressing a great public audience. There are few fireworks, no shouting, no declaiming. He opens easily, in a soft, quiet voice: he always works up to his effects. There are “purple patches” now and again; but the bulk of it seems almost conversational, and is often broken by colloquial phases—“Can you hear at the back there?” “Ah! well, you must listen if you want me to speak to you.” He is almost always very soon on good terms with his audience; it is only by shouting him down that his enemies can prevent that. He is never angry on a public platform; he seems always quite at home, as if it was his real natural element. He can be scathing at times—withering, scornful, contemptuous. But that mood rarely lasts long. He generally returns swiftly to his gentler moods—persuasion, appeal, emotion. He almost always prepares a careful peroration, generally a memorised piece of prose poetry, very often drawn from some great phase of nature—from the hills or the sea. Then his speeches end on the high note; and his audiences go home with a sense of having been uplifted.

There they are right—for it is precisely his power as a speaker to uplift the hearts of men. He has his own moods. But from those he carefully selects the very best, and gives them to the world. No public man can do more.

MRS. LLOYD GEORGE

DAVID LLOYD GEORGE AS A YOUNG MAN

CHAPTER XXVI

“Jog, jog on, the foot-path way,And merrily hent the stile-a:A merry heart goes all the day,Your sad tires in a mile-a.”Autolycus inShakespeare’sThe Winter’s Tale, Act IV, Sc. ii.

“Jog, jog on, the foot-path way,

And merrily hent the stile-a:

A merry heart goes all the day,

Your sad tires in a mile-a.”

Autolycus inShakespeare’s

The Winter’s Tale, Act IV, Sc. ii.

But, on the whole, it is the future rather than the past that rules the mind of David Lloyd George.

To him the future has always been an unexplored miracle—ever in travail with some new birth. To him, behind the veil of the coming time, there always lies a possibility of some event such as the world has never known—of some creation such as the world has never seen. He has moods when he seems “fey” with his belief. “I am out to abolish slums,” he cried one evening, in 1912, walking across London upon a winter’s night beneath a starless sky. He meant it. His bitterest enemy could not have laughed at that utterance if he had heard it.

In such moods he was at that time (1908-12) indeed “The little Brother of the poor.” He was filled with a certain storming passion of pity, so powerful that it seemed to destroy all obstacles—to bridge all difficulties. All the accumulated memories of his own childhood—all the recollections of the poor cottagers among whom he had been brought up, all their sufferings and pains, all their oppressions and tragedies,seemed to be moving behind him like some great tide and driving him on. I remember his explaining once his own consciousness of the mark which such an upbringing left on a man’s life. He was talking about the East End Settlement movement, and of its attempt to bring the leisured classes nearer to the workers. He was a little doubtful. “It is a gulf which can never be bridged,” he said. “You people can never understand what it is to be really hungry or out of work. The difference lies in security. The poor man is always in danger, and he always knows it.”

It was such a knowledge that inspired him with his enthusiasm for Old Age Pensions and for his Insurance Schemes. It was just this security that he wanted to give to the life of the poor. And yet he has never been a sentimentalist over their troubles. He looks at them, so to speak, from the inside. The sentimentalism of the philanthropic middle classes rather annoys him. What he always craves for the poor is justice, and not charity. In the days of the Insurance Act he was sincerely afraid of creating a dependent working class. He was surprised when he received so little help in his contributory policy. “I will never try to be good again,” he said laughingly one day. “They call me a demagogue, and next time I will really be one.” Such was his chaff.

In conversation he first expressed the idea of social insurance by a parallel from the Canadian farmer who insures his wheat against early winter frosts. That was the image in which he expressed his sense of the vast power of the modern State to build up a properly organised system of individual security. Having once conceived this idea, the various benefits came to him inwaves of compassion—sickness, invalidity, maternity, consumption. He worked all these benefits out from his own experience of the sorrows of the poor. “I want to make the little stranger welcome,” he said one day, talking about the maternity benefit. “It is horrible to think that he should come trailing clouds of trouble instead of ‘clouds of glory.’ ” The story of the consumptive benefits is interesting. He had not felt the need of this benefit until one night he read through a very powerful medical work describing the ravages of consumption in modern Britain. The extent of the evil at once fully dawned on him. He came down in the morning with his mind fully made up. He went straight to the Treasury, called together his experts, told them to put aside £1,500,000 to fight consumption,[143]and so created that famous sanatorium benefit which is still proving only the first step towards removing a gigantic evil.

He faced all these familiar troubles of modern life with a “divine discontent” new to modern men. We all knew these things; but most of us had become so familiar with them that our anger was blunted. Our reforming temper had grown tired and stale. But this Welshman approached the matter with some of the ardour of the revivalist. He would not accept the ordinary excuses; he believed these evils to be curable. Fresh from the Welsh hills, he flamed with a new surprise at the power of poverty over modern civilisation. He showed some of the ingenuous dismay of a surprised Gotama emerging from his garden. He realised that private efforts had been tried and found inadequate.What he saw with a flash was that the State alone could cope with the evils produced by the State; the Government must become the parent and no longer the stepmother of its own children.

Once he realised this idea he was eager to carry it into effect. He was passing from one great effort to another—from the Insurance Act to the Land Campaign—when the Great War burst upon him. Then the very elements of civilisation had to be defended against an even greater peril.

It is recorded that the rebuilders of the Temple had to build every one with “his sword girded by his side.”[144]There must have been times when they had to lay down the trowel entirely and work with the sword alone. Such a time came to Mr. Lloyd George in 1914; the trowel was only laid down. Now it is being taken up again.

What struck the observer most in his achievements during those years (1908-14) was his daring and originality. Plenty of clever English minds had been working on these problems ever since 1886. But how little had been done! How long we had had to wait for Pensions and Insurance! How strangely academic and remote were all those University and West End speculations on these problems! How quarrelsome were the philanthropists! How divided were the English Labour leaders! Then from outside came this zealous Welsh Crusader, and while all these people were still talking he proceeded to act. When the world had recovered from its surprise most of the persons concerned turned round and attacked Mr. Lloyd George. However right he might be in his aim, there was alwayssure to be something wrong with his methods. This attitude frankly puzzled him. “Why! they talk as if I was trespassing,” he used to say. “Is charity, then, a form of property? Is kindness a monopoly?” The attitude of the doctors especially surprised him. “I have made a discovery,” he said one day with a twinkle in his eye. “I have discovered that disease is a vested interest!”

Throughout all these struggles over social reform Mr. Lloyd George tempered his enthusiasm with a very even sense of political tactics. He knew well that, to carry England with him, he must always have a great political party at his back. There were times when this was not easy. Neither of the great political party machines in this country is exactly impassioned for new ideas. It is rather typical of the faithful party man to view a new proposal with actual dislike. “Why not leave it all alone?” is a common attitude with all parties.

Then there is the value of a grievance. There is even a type of party man who actually regrets to see his cause succeed. “If we pass the Bill we shall lose the cry!” you hear him say. “Mr. Lloyd George is passing too many Acts of Parliament,” was the common complaint of the period among the very faithful.

To this type of man the Budget of 1909-10 was rather a distracting affair. They were always trying to “dilute” it. The Insurance Bill, too, would certainly have been thrown over if Mr. Lloyd George had not staked his fortunes on it; and, as to the Land Campaign, that was viewed with open disfavour in the same quarters. For every party has its priesthood;and in politics, as in religion, all priesthoods are conservative.

But, in spite of all this trouble within the party, Mr. Lloyd George was always resolute not to quarrel with the machine. One of his fixed principles was—“Keep the party machine on your side.” He was certainly not a typical party man—far from it. He regarded the party as the instrument and the cause as the end; whereas the typical party view is that the cause is the instrument and the party the end. But he knew the power of the machine; he often quoted Mr. Chamberlain as an instance showing that in the end the machine won. “Mr. Chamberlain fought both of the machines in turn,” he used to say, “and, in the end, both combined against him and beat him.” Roosevelt was another case which impressed him deeply. “Ah!” he commented, when that great man was beaten so decisively in 1913, “Roosevelt ought not to have quarrelled with the machine.”

On these grounds he has often accepted the second best in policy.

He has often allowed himself to be convinced against his will. After the defeat of the Education Bill in 1906, for instance, he was as eager to go back to the country as Mr. Gladstone after the Lords’ rejection of Home Rule in 1893. Both these great fighters felt instinctively that a party which accepts a defeat asks to be defeated again until it is finally smashed. You cannot expect a country to vote for ever for a party that accepts defeat as its proper portion. But in this case, as in others, rather than quarrel with his party, he acquiesced in the decision to go on.

Still, he was glad when the split with the Lordsbecame irrevocable. It happened that I had the fortune of announcing to him the resolution of the Lords to throw out the Budget. It was down at Lord Renders beautiful house near Guildford, where Mr. Lloyd George was staying for the last time with that faithful Nestor of Welsh Liberalism. Mr. Lloyd George had been very anxious. He knew that the wiser Unionist leaders in the Lords had been in favour of accepting his Bill. He was afraid that the Lords were going to refuse battle on grounds so favourable to their assailants. When I told him the news his face shone. “The Lord,” he cried, “has delivered them into our hands!”

In the same way, he has always been very slow to take the step of resignation from high political office. How often have his friends—generally a man’s worst advisers—urged him to resign over some failure to gain his own way! But he well knows that there is nothing more difficult in politics than the art of resigning opportunely. You must have a great issue and you must have your people behind you. “You cannot be always resigning,” was one of his favourite sayings during the critical years of 1909-12. It is true that he often came near it, but he would generally compromise the matter and pass on. He was equally against Cabinets resigning in a hurry. After the second General Election of 1910 there was a meeting when the Liberal Cabinet, wearied out with a long struggle, was on the verge of resignation. Every member who spoke at this fateful meeting had favoured resignation. Mr. Lloyd George felt strongly opposed to it, but he was almost silenced by the unanimity of his colleagues. At last he scribbled a line and threw itacross to Mr. Winston Churchill. “I feel strongly against resignation,” he wrote. “What do you think?” Mr. Winston Churchill scribbled below: “If you feel against it, speak against it.” Mr. Lloyd George spoke against it, and spoke so persuasively that the idea of resignation was dropped.

Even on fundamental issues he would often accept personal defeat for the time. He had to decide whether to go out into the wilderness or to work with men to whom he was attached, and with whose ideas he broadly and profoundly sympathised. When the draft of the new Home Rule Bill was before the Cabinet in 1910 he moved to exclude Protestant Ulster. He made the longest speech he had ever addressed to a Cabinet on that issue. He prophesied what was certainly coming—the resistance of Ulster; the refusal of Protestant England to join in coercing her; the hesitation of the Government to carry out their Act. He was in favour of telling the Irish Party straightaway that the Government of 1910 was not strong enough to include Ulster in the Home Rule Bill. He would have left the Irish Party to accept or reject the Bill as it would have then stood. He himself believed that in such a case Ulster would come in during the parliamentary discussions on the Bill. He was defeated in his proposal. Being defeated, he loyally stood by the Cabinet and steadily supported the Bill. It was not until long afterwards, when he himself became Prime Minister and responsible for policy, that he revealed to the world in that dramatic speech which drove the Irish Party out of the House, the fact that he had always been in favour of the exclusion of Ulster.

In literature and art Mr. Lloyd George does not pretend to be among the elect. He gives himself no airs and has no pretensions. He is just himself. He states, without parley, his own genuine opinions on books and pictures; and, as that is the rarest habit in the world, it is always interesting. Nine out of ten literary and artistic judgments are reflections or echoes—repeated at second-hand from some bolder speaker, or even vaguely salvaged from the dim abysses of memory. The most refreshing thing in the world, therefore, is an honest, fresh, and original judgment. It is characteristic of Mr. Lloyd George that he never hesitates to give that in any company.

In literature he votes with both hands for Byron, perhaps because Byron is the poet of liberty, and also because that great writer, with all his faults, has the quality of daring. But he boldly contends that the Welsh are among the greatest of modern poets; and he will recite their verses at large, even to English friends, in order to confirm his claim.

In prose, he is devoted to George Meredith.

In music, he places Handel first among his heroes. There, again, in great works like theMessiah, he seems to discover some quality of sublimity which elates and inspires him.

But there, again, his living passion is really nationalist and based on national affections. The only music that profoundly moves him—touches his soul—is the music of the old Welsh hymns and folk-songs. Not long ago he spoke up boldly for the music and literature of his own nation before all the world.[145]Therehe voiced his own deepest conviction on these matters. The music and songs of his own people strike the deepest chord in his nature.

In religion his outlook always seems to be broadly Christian rather than sectarian. Brought up in his uncle’s creed of the “Disciples of Christ,” which is really an attempt to hark back to the purity of the early Gospel teaching, he has an inherited hatred for dogmas. He is very fond of such parables as those of the Good Samaritan, which he instinctively regards as the best comment on the claims of priestcraft.

He has a profound interest in all forms of Christianity. There was a time, many years ago, when he was fond of going the round of the Churches. He would also listen in the old days with the closest interest to the discourses of the Salvationist preachers on Wandsworth Common; and he would often contribute to their collections, and talk to their officers. And yet, at the other extreme, he has always had a curious admiration for Roman Catholicism. He would sometimes argue that the Methodist discipline in Wales was founded on the Catholic model. I remember going with him into a London Catholic Church where he listened with rapt attention to the chanting of the Latin psalms. There was something in the roll of the language which penetrated and held him. But he was always a great listener. He would never complain at the length of a sermon. When at Brighton he would take his friends to listen to the preaching of a young Nonconformist minister at whose feet he sat with whole-hearted admiration. He would always argue that the standard of preaching among the Nonconformists had steadily risen and was now higher thanamong the Anglicans. He attributed that fact very largely to post-graduate colleges like Mansfield. He was a great admirer of Principal Fairbairn, and would listen to that great man’s hour-long discourses without moving an eyelid.

Wit is his most sparkling characteristic; and there are few companies of talkers among whom he is not the wittiest. His laugh will change the mood of the gravest men, just as his smile has been known to affect the attitude of immense multitudes. And yet wit is not his greatest gift. I should place higher that power of insight into deep truths which he will display in sympathetic company. Generally the theme of this insight will be politics; and there is no subject which he is more swift to illuminate with telling phrase. In these moods he will seem to be looking at all parties, and even at himself, from the outside. It is an extraordinary gift of detachment, literary and artistic in its nature, and peculiarly rare in a party politician. It goes with a Celtic love of whimsical paradox, like the talk of a man at his ease, a little disturbing to the strait sect of the faithful party men.

But it will not always be politics that his mind plays on in this manner. In moments of relaxation he will take a wider range. Sometimes it will be this very subject of religion, which is never very far absent from his thoughts. “Christianity,” he said to me once, “is like a gold-mine. We are always imagining that it is exhausted, and that no more gold can come out of it. Then humanity digs a little deeper, and it always comes across a fresh seam.” He always seems to be digging a little deeper himself.

His judgments of great men who came before are always just a little inclined to severity, perhaps as a rebound from the snobbery of history. Looking round at that great gallery of the Englishmen of Napoleonic days which adorns the breakfast-room at 10, Downing Street—Pitt, Wellington, Nelson, Fox, Burke—he said once: “None of them were very great—the greatest of them all was the man in the little frame in the corner—the man they honoured least—the Irishman, Edmund Burke.” Perhaps it was the orator and the thinker in Burke that drew him. Or perhaps, even more, the Celt.

But it would be unfair to take him too seriously in these judgments. He is above all things a conversationalist in regard to all such matters. It is only in politics that he would ask to be taken as an expert. There he works very gravely and arduously. It is sometimes said that he does not read much. When he can, indeed, he prefers, like many very busy men, to acquire knowledge by the ear; and he likes to meet men who know, and to learn from them. But he can read widely and deeply when he thinks it necessary. He will read steadily through great Blue-books when he is preparing a parliamentary case; and when he was preparing for the Insurance Act he studied deeply and widely the whole literature of English social conditions, and in the parliamentary debates he displayed astonishing mastery.

He is a great newspaper reader. It is his habit to read practically the chief daily newspapers in bed in the morning before he comes down to breakfast; and it is somewhat disconcerting for his breakfast guests to discover that he already knows all the news of theday. He never reads either a newspaper or a letter at any meal. He talks and attends to his guests, as every civilised host should do.

“He always speaks to me as if I were the only person in the world,” said one who met him rarely, and was opposed to him in politics. That utterance explains, perhaps, better than any other the secret of his social power. He has a profound sense of equality, and will treat the humblest human being as courteously as the highest. He is always very popular with humble people who serve him, such as hall-porters or maid-servants.

Not, indeed, that he suffers from that inverted snobbery which puts its boots on drawing-room sofas and reserves its insolence for crowned heads. It is well known that King George V and Mr. Lloyd George are sincere friends, and bound by mutual respect and admiration. The friendship began after the death of the King’s father, and has deepened ever since. They have much in common—habits of arduous industry, the love of home and family, the passion for simple things. In private he constantly expresses his deep esteem and regard for the King as a man and a father. He is thoroughly at home in that happy domestic atmosphere of the present Court.

He is a splendid travelling companion; he loves the novelty and stimulus of foreign touring. He likes the friendly open-air life of foreign capitals; and he is never tired of exploring new cities. They come back now as radiant memories—those travels over Europe which we took together in earlier, peaceful days—in France and the Tyrol, over plains and mountains, through villages and cities.

One experience comes vividly back. We were staying in a little Tyrolese village named Vent. Some of us, being mountain climbers by election, had set off at 3 a.m., the climber’s hour, to mount a high snow-peak, the Similaun. We returned in the afternoon to find that Mr. Lloyd George had disappeared from the inn.

He returned later and told us his experience. He had tired of his reading, looked up at the glistening peaks and decided that he, too, could and would climb mountains. He had taken his stick, set off alone, and proceeded to attack the nearest peak, without ice-axe or guide. He surmounted a rock-ridge, crossed a glacier, and reached a distant height. None of us could comprehend how he managed to return alive.

There it is again, in small matters as in big—this note of daring, of refusal to accept defeat, of assertive invincibility. It is the key-note of his character. In every study of David Lloyd George it pursues you everywhere and all the time.

There never was a time in human history when such a quality was more needed. Frowning heights lie behind and in front of—roaring cataracts of catastrophe—gleaming peaks of suffering and sacrifice—frozen glaciers of death, seamed and crevassed with agony. May he help us to win through!

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