The Mirrors of Downing Street | Page 4

replied, "Lord Morley, I would
sooner have your criticism than the praise of any man living"--a
perfectly sincere remark, sincere, I mean, with the emotionalism of the
moment. His schemes were disordered and crude; nevertheless the
spirit that informed them was like a new birth in the politics of the
whole world. A friend of mine told me that he had seen pictures of Mr.
Lloyd George on the walls of peasants' houses in the remotest villages
of Russia.
But those days have departed and taken with them the fire of Mr. Lloyd
George's passion. The laboured peroration about the hills of his
ancestors, repeated to the point of the ridiculous, is all now left of that

fervid period. He has ceased to be a prophet. Surrounded by
second-rate people, and choosing for his intimate friends mainly the
new rich, and now thoroughly liking the game of politics for its
amusing adventure, he has retained little of his original genius except
its quickness.
His intuitions are amazing. He astonished great soldiers in the war by
his premonstrations. Lord Milner, a cool critic, would sit by the sofa of
the dying Dr. Jameson telling how Mr. Lloyd George was right again
and again when all the soldiers were wrong. Lord Rhondda, who
disliked him greatly and rather despised him, told me how often Mr.
Lloyd George put heart into a Cabinet that was really trembling on the
edge of despair. It seems true that he never once doubted ultimate
victory, and, what is much more remarkable, never once failed to read
the German's mind.
I think that the doom that has fallen upon him comes in some measure
from the amusement he takes in his mental quickness, and the reliance
he is sometimes apt to place upon it. A quick mind may easily be a
disorderly mind. Moreover quickness is not one of the great qualities. It
is indeed seldom a partner with virtue. Morality appears on the whole
to get along better without it. According to Landor, it is the talent most
open to suspicion:
Quickness is among the least of the mind's properties, and belongs to
her in almost her lowest state: nay, it doth not abandon her when she is
driven from her home, when she is wandering and insane. The mad
often retain it; the liar has it; the cheat has it: we find it on the
racecourse and at the card-table: education does not give it, and
reflection takes away from it.
When we consider what Mr. Lloyd George might have done with the
fortunes of humanity we are able to see how great is his distance from
the heights of moral grandeur.
He entered the war with genuine passion. He swept thousands of
hesitating minds into those dreadful furnaces by the force of that
passion. From the first no man in the world sounded so ringing a

trumpet note of moral indignation and moral aspiration. Examine his
earlier speeches and in all of them you will find that his passion to
destroy Prussian militarism was his passion to recreate civilization on
the foundations of morality and religion. He was Peace with a sword.
Germany had not so much attempted to drag mankind back to
barbarism as opened a gate through which mankind might march to the
promised land. Lord Morley was almost breaking his heart with despair,
and to this day regards Great Britain's entrance into the war as a
mistake. Sir Edward Grey was agonizing to avert war; but Mr. Lloyd
George was among the first to see this war as the opportunity of a
nobler civilization. Destroy German militarism, shatter the Prussian
tradition, sweep away dynastic autocracies, and what a world would
result for labouring humanity!
This was 1914. But soon after the great struggle had begun the note
changed. Hatred of Germany and fear for our Allies' steadfastness
occupied the foremost place in his mind. Victory was the objective and
his definition of victory was borrowed from the prize-ring. A better
world had to wait. He became more and more reckless. There was a
time when his indignation against Lord Kitchener was almost
uncontrollable. For Mr. Asquith he never entertained this violent
feeling, but gradually lost patience with him, and only decided that he
must go when procrastination appeared to jeopardize "a knock-out
blow."
Anyone who questioned the cost of the war was a timid soul. What did
it matter what the war cost so long as victory was won? Anyone who
questioned the utter recklessness which characterized the Ministry of
Munitions was a mere fault-finder. I spoke to him once of the unrest in
factories, where boys could earn £15 and £16 a week by merely
watching a machine they knew nothing about, while the skilled
foremen, who alone could put those machines