The Mirrors of Downing Street | Page 5

right, and who actually
invented new tools to make the new machines of the inventors, were
earning only the fixed wage of fifty shillings a week. I thought this
arrangement made for unrest and must prove dangerous after the war.
So eager, so hot was his mind on the end, that he missed the whole
point of my remark. "What does it matter," he exclaimed impatiently,

"what we pay those boys as long as we win the war?"
And the end of it was the humiliation of the General Election in 1918.
Where was the new world, then? He was conscious only of Lord
Northcliffe's menace. Germany must pay and the Kaiser must be tried!
There was no trumpet note in those days, and there has been no trumpet
note since. Imagine how Gladstone would have appealed to the
conscience of his countrymen! Was there ever a greater opportunity in
statesmanship? After a victory so tremendous, was there any demand
on the generosity of men's souls which would not gladly have been
granted? The long struggle between capital and labour, which tears
every state in two, might have been ended: the heroism and
self-sacrifice of the war might have been carried forward to the labours
of reconstruction: the wounds of Europe might have been healed by the
charities of God almost to the transfiguration of humanity.
Germany must pay for the war!--and he knew that by no possible
means could Germany be made to pay that vast account without the
gravest danger of unemployment here and Bolshevism in Central
Europe! The Kaiser must be tried!--and he knew that the Kaiser never
would be tried!
Millennium dipped below the horizon, and the child's riding-whip
which Lord Northcliffe cracks when he is overtaken by a fit of
Napoleonic indigestion assumed for the Prime Minister the proportions
of the Damoclesian sword. He numbered himself among the
Tououpinambos, those people who "have no name for God and believe
that they will get into Paradise by practising revenge and eating up their
enemies."
I can see nothing sinister in what some people regard as his plots
against those who disagree with him. He tries, first of all, to win them
to his way of thinking: if he fails, and if they still persist in attacking
him, he proceeds to destroy them. It is all part of life's battle! But one
would rather that the Prime Minister of Great Britain was less mixed up
in journalism, less afraid of journalism, and less occupied, however
indirectly, in effecting, or striving to effect, editorial changes. His
conduct in the last months of the war and during the election of 1918

was not only unworthy of his position but marked him definitely as a
small man. He won the election, but he lost the world.
It is a great thing to have won the war, but to have won it only at the
cost of more wars to come, and with the domestic problems of
statesmanship multiplied and intensified to a degree of the gravest
danger, this is an achievement which cannot move the lasting
admiration of the human race.
The truth is that Mr. Lloyd George has gradually lost in the world of
political makeshift his original enthusiasm for righteousness. He is not
a bad man to the exclusion of goodness; but he is not a good man to the
exclusion of badness. A woman who knows him well once described
him to me in these words: "He is clever, and he is stupid; truthful and
untruthful; pure and impure; good and wicked; wonderful and
commonplace: in a word, he is everything." I am quite sure that he is
perfectly sincere when he speaks of high aims and pure ambition; but I
am equally sure that it is a relief to him to speak with amusement of
trickery, cleverness, and the tolerances or the cynicisms of worldliness.
Something of the inward man may be seen in the outward. Mr. Lloyd
George--I hope I may be pardoned by the importance and interest of the
subject for pointing it out--is curiously formed. His head is unusually
large, and his broad shoulders and deep chest admirably match his quite
noble head; but below the waist he appears to dwindle away, his legs
seeming to bend under the weight of his body, so that he waddles rather
than walks, moving with a rolling gait which is rather like a seaman's.
He is, indeed, a giant mounted on a dwarf's legs.
So in like manner one may see in him a soul of eagle force striving to
rise above the earth on sparrow's wings.
That he is attractive to men of a high order may be seen from the
devotion of Mr. Philip Kerr; that he is able to find pleasure in a far
lower