The Mirrors of Downing Street | Page 3

I think,
to answer this question. Early in the struggle to get munitions for our
soldiers a meeting of all the principal manufacturers of armaments was
held in Whitehall with the object of persuading them to pool their trade
secrets. For a long time this meeting was nothing more than a
succession of blunt speeches on the part of provincial manufacturers,
showing with an unanswerable commercial logic that the suggestion of
revealing these secrets on which their fortunes depended was beyond
the bounds of reason. All the interjected arguments of the military and
official gentlemen representing the Government were easily proved by
these hard-headed manufacturers, responsible to their workpeople and
shareholders for the prosperity of their competing undertakings, to be
impracticable if not preposterous.

At a moment when the proposal of the Government seemed lost, Mr.
Lloyd George leant forward in his chair, very pale, very quiet, and very
earnest. "Gentlemen," he said in a voice which produced an
extraordinary hush, "have you forgotten that your sons, at this very
moment, are being killed--killed in hundreds and thousands? They are
being killed by German guns for want of British guns. Your sons, your
brothers--boys at the dawn of manhood!--they are being wiped out of
life in thousands! Gentlemen, give me guns. Don't think of your trade
secrets. Think of your children. Help them! Give me those guns."
This was no stage acting. His voice broke, his eyes filled with tears,
and his hand, holding a piece of notepaper before him, shook like a leaf.
There was not a man who heard him whose heart was not touched, and
whose humanity was not quickened. The trade secrets were pooled. The
supply of munitions was hastened.
This is the secret of his power. No man of our period, when he is
profoundly moved, and when he permits his genuine emotion to carry
him away, can utter an appeal to conscience with anything like so
compelling a simplicity. His failure lies in a growing tendency to
discard an instinctive emotionalism for a calculated astuteness which
too often attempts to hide its cunning under the garb of honest
sentiment. His intuitions are unrivalled: his reasoning powers
inconsiderable.
When Mr. Lloyd George first came to London he shared not only a
room in Gray's Inn, but the one bed that garret contained with a
fellow-countryman. They were both inconveniently poor, but Mr.
Lloyd George the poorer in this, that as a member of Parliament his
expenses were greater. The fellow-lodger, who afterwards became
private secretary to one of Mr. Lloyd George's rivals, has told me that
no public speech of Mr. Lloyd George ever equalled in pathos and
power the speeches which the young member of Parliament would
often make in those hungry days, seated on the edge of the bed, or
pacing to and fro in the room, speeches lit by one passion and directed
to one great object, lit by the passion of justice, directed to the
liberation of all peoples oppressed by every form of tyranny.

This spirit of the intuitional reformer, who feels cruelty and wrong like
a pain in his own blood, is still present in Mr. Lloyd George, but it is no
longer the central passion of his life. It is, rather, an aside: as it were a
memory that revives only in leisure hours. On several occasions he has
spoken to me of the sorrows and sufferings of humanity with an
unmistakable sympathy. I remember in particular one occasion on
which he told me the story of his boyhood: it was a moving narrative,
for never once did he refer to his own personal deprivations, never once
express regret for his own loss of powerful encouragements in the
important years of boyhood. The story was the story of his widowed
mother and of her heroic struggle, keeping house for her shoemaking
brother-in-law on the little money earned by the old bachelor's village
cobbling, to save sixpence a week--sixpence to be gratefully returned to
him on Saturday night. "That is the life of the poor!" he exclaimed
earnestly. Then he added with bitterness, "And when I try to give them
five shillings a week in their old age I am called the 'Cad of the
Cabinet'!"
Nothing in his life is finer than the struggle he waged with the Liberal
Cabinet during his days as Chancellor of the Exchequer. The private
opposition he encountered in Downing Street, the hatred and contempt
of some of his Liberal colleagues, was exceeded on the other side of
politics only in the violent mind of Sir Edward Carson. Even the gentle
John Morley was troubled by his hot insistences. "I had better go," he
said to Mr. Lloyd George; "I am getting old: I have nothing now for
you but criticism." To which the other