Mr. Lloyd George: An Appreciation

I

OF all the statesmen at the Peace Conference Mr. Lloyd George makes the most fascinating study. The other three of the Big Four are typical representatives of their countries; each stands for a clear, or at any rate a defined, political philosophy, and there are no chances of surprise in their future. But even now, after so long a career in politics, Mr. Lloyd George’s position is uncertain. Any one of a number of developments is still possible for him, and the surprises of his future may be as great as those of his past.

Already he has been the hero and the villain of all three political parties. The statesman who more than anyone else kept the resolution of the country sternly tempered to victory throughout the war began his political life as leader of the pro-Boer guerillas in the Liberal Party. The virulence of his attacks on the landed classes added a new verb — ‘to limehouse’ — to the dictionary of political slang; but within a few years the same squirearchy was nestling comfortably in his bosom. Alternately the bogey and the pet of the City, he has commanded both the left wing and the right of the Liberal Party; and even Conservatives now may occasionally be heard to complain that this ex-leader of the Liberal extremists has-surrendered their hopes of reform to the Tory reactionaries.

But, in spite of this uncertainty in his political orientation, the charge of inconsistency is the one that is least often brought against him. Perhaps it is that no one nowadays in English politics dares accuse anyone else of inconsistency; perhaps, in these days when people have had to cast so many of their principles into the melting-pot of war, the organic unity of a strong and attractive personality is felt to be a surer anchorage than purely intellectual or mechanical adjustments.

Mr. Lloyd George came of the lower middle class, which, much as it has contributed to business and learning, has played a smaller part in English politics than its numbers and ability would have led us to expect. Born in a mean street in Manchester, he went early in life to Carnarvon in North Wales, where he had an uncle who was a solicitor. He became a member of the firm and passed into politics through the law. But the Chapel did more for him than the study of the law or business. Welsh Nonconformity is of an entirely different temper from the English variety. The one attaches most importance to the clear and logical development of ideas, the other cultivates the hwly, when the speaker, rapt away in the swing of his periods and the lyrical sing-song of his utterance, loses contact with pedestrian reality and soars into the upper regions of pure idea. The hwyl still vibrates in many a peroration of Georgian rhetoric about those Welsh hills of his, though latterly his style of oratory has become more conversational, and the idiom that of a familiar dialogue rather than that of a sermon or of a debating society.

If one would realize the difference between Welsh and English Nonconformity, one could not find more typical examples of either than Mr. Lloyd George and Sir John Simon. Simon — the son of a Congregational minister, also of Manchester — is in controversy cold and dry, his feet are never both off the ground at once, his argument is like brick-laying. Lloyd George is ecstatic and homely by turns. He leaps from point to point. His argument advances, not with the steady tramp of infantry, but with the burr of an aeroplane flight.

That Mr. Lloyd George is and always has been a genuine democrat, there is no possibility of doubt. No man ever worshiped rank and reputation less than he; no one was ever more ready to take a man on his own merits as he understood them and not as the world estimated them. He never forgot an old friend, and he is destitute of the pride of place. It is equally certain that he was and is a Radical. Whether he was ever a Liberal, too, is open to doubt. This distinction between Radical and Liberal runs through the whole of English politics in the nineteenth century. English Liberalism is not a body of doctrine but a state of mind, a way of judging things; it has firm moorings in the principle of human liberty, liberty that is common to all, and therefore postulates tolerance, order, and self-discipline; but for the rest it spreads a great expanse of sail to the four winds, ready to catch the breath of a new idea from any quarter. In the forms of politics, if not in its substance, tradition counts for more with it than it counts with conservatism. To be a typical Liberal leader, you must have entered by the straight gate and the narrow path, not necessarily of birth, but at any rate of education and upbringing.

The Radical mind, on the other hand, has broken completely with tradition and is definitely iconoclastic. It is always asking, Why, why? with regard to all institutions and every reputation. It is instinctively skeptical. It questions even accepted principles, and it subjects everything to the remorseless tests of utility, logic, and, above all, of efficiency. It is free from the suspicion of social and intellectual snobbery which so often attaches itself to Liberalism, perhaps by reason of its descent through Whiggery. While the Liberal is always holding aloft the banner of an ideal of some sort, the Radical is before everything else a realist, though his methods may be romantic and his argumentation rise and fall in the cadence of the hwyl, or even cultivate an artificial cynicism. The Radical, in this respect like the Conservative, often thinks more of men than of measures, and makes up for his lack of the sense of continuity in history by closer study of human nature and a broader sympathy.

The difference is one of temperament and environment rather than of conviction, but it is impossible to understand English political history of the last hundred years without taking account of it. Normally in political alliance with the Liberals, Radicalism has always run in strong cross-currents and undercurrents against the main Whig tradition. In the heyday of the Manchester School there were the Molesworths and the Sir George Greys, who in home, and especially in labor politics, were more advanced than the Liberals, and in foreign and colonial affairs were already pronounced Imperialists.

Sir Charles Dilke was a type of this school of Radicalism, and W. E. Forster, the founder of the English system of Primary Education, another. Joseph Chamberlain was yet another. They had a very large following in the country, and it used frequently to be said that the Radicals won the elections and the Whigs took the offices. They were as a rule badly treated by the Whig hierarchy. Gladstone in particular was never fair to Chamberlain, who on many questions, and notably on Ireland, saw much further than he.

But Mr. Lloyd George was the most remarkable deviation of all. When his reputation as a fighting lieutenant was at its height, he was still divergent in temperament from his leaders, and though content to act as a party megaphone, he remained mentally skeptical, always referring his judgment on current affairs to the test, not of principle, still less of Liberal principle, but of reality. The most loyal of men in his personal relationships, he was in the politics of the Liberal Party always a rebel at heart.

It is amazing, if we look back on English politics, to find with how little Liberal doctrine and formula Mr. Lloyd George ever identified himself. Home Rule for Ireland? He never believed in Gladstonian Home Rule, or in any sort of Home Rule for Ireland that would not apply equally well to Wales. Nowadays his Irish views approximate to those of Chamberlain, of which Gladstone was so bitterly and so unjustly contemptuous. Nor is Mr. Lloyd George a Free-trader, except with grave reservations. If he were to speak his mind quite freely, he would probably denounce the whole science of economics as a fraud and an unintelligible fraud at that. He has no economic beliefs except those which can be reduced to simple concrete instances and expressed in the Socratic idiom of the cobbler and the housewife. Peace and international concord? Why, yes, provided that they make for human progress; but as an end in themselves, decidedly no. He was never a pacifist, and he loves peace, not as a theorist, but only as a realist and a practical man, because he sees that it is the condition of Democratic progress. Retrenchment of national expenditures? Ineconomy as such he was never interested; and if he wanted to save money on one object, — on Dreadnoughts for example, — it was only because he wanted to spend it on some other object that would bring a better return.

One may search Mr. Lloyd George’s speeches in the past and find hardly a single passage which could fairly be construed as unconditional support, either of Liberal principles or of their particular application. And as it has turned out, the current of events has confirmed his Radical skepticism. Whatever measure of Home Rule is adopted in Ireland, it will not be Gladstonian Home Rule. The Manchester economics have been killed by the war, and there are not half a dozen men in England who would subscribe wholeheartedly to the Free-Trade theory of politics as expounded by Cobden and Bastiat. The old Liberalism, which would have restricted the sphere of state activities to its narrowest possible limit, is hopelessly out of date; and with an annual budget of a thousand millions those Liberals who used to shrink back horrified from the prospect of a budget of a hundred millions, look to be timid and lowspirited fellows.

As a state of mind, Liberalism is as strong as ever, and the world has never had more need of it. But as an association for the furtherance of specific measures identified with its fortunes in the last generation, it is obsolete. The skepticism of Mr. Lloyd George has been justified by events, and the war has made of English politics the tabula rasa beloved of the Radical mind.

II

In Mr. Lloyd George’s measures as a member of the Liberal Government that came into power in 1906 there glowed the ardor of a true son of the people. Old-age Pensions and Unemployment Insurance are both admirable examples of Radical legislation. Mr. Lloyd George, who up to 1906 had been known only as a caustic critic, now became known as the man who could get things done. Others — no one more than Gladstone — often decorated with fine words what after all were only excuses for doing nothing in particular. But Mr. Lloyd George’s rhetoric always meant that something was going to be done. His courage was indomitable, and his democratic ardor swept away all obstacles. Though no man ever had less patience with the details of the measures that he introduced, he had an unrivaled gift of putting them on the way to success. For this statesman, apparently an extremist, was really an arch-accommodator. He never challenged political opposition when he could get round it; already he was a past master in the art of managing men.

These unsuspected qualities came out in his management of the Port of London Bill as President of the Board of Trade, when, to everybody’s surprise, the Welsh Radical showed that he understood English business conservatism better than it understood itself. In 1910 he was bitten for a time with the heresy that property in land was antisocial in a way that other forms of property were not, and ought to be subjected to special punitive taxation. He soon became palpably bored with the details of his land-legislation, and when the House of Lords rejected the Finance Bill of the year, he plunged with ardor into the new constitutional issue that its foolish action presented him with.

Yet even then, when it seemed as if the breach between this fiery Radical and the House of Lords could never be healed, he was, as a recent speech of Mr. Churchill’s has revealed, advocating a scheme of settlement by forming a new government from both parties. No authentic account of these negotiations has ever been published, but one suggestion that was put forward was that the Liberals should withdraw their opposition to Lord Roberts’s scheme of compulsory national service, if the Conservatives induced the Lords to give way in their controversy with the Commons. At the very moment when he was stoking the fires of party strife in public, he was revealing himself to his associates as the future coalitionist.

The plain fact is that the same instinct which made Mr. Lloyd George so skeptical about what were called party principles also inclined him to disbelieve in the party machinery. He was too much of a realist to think, as the good party man should, that his opponent was not only wrong, but ugly and immoral, and, if the truth were known, probably a wife-beater too. He played the political game within the conventional limits with rare skill, but for all that, one suspects, with his tongue in his cheek. Party was useful in so far as it enabled him to accomplish the end which he desired; if it was useless for that, well, so much the worse for party. He was as ready to scrap a party or a programme as an American manufacturer is to scrap his machinery.

He disliked the restrictions of Parliamentary controversy, and preferred a public meeting to speaking in the Commons. He doubted the efficiency of Parliament as an instrument of reform, and believed in work done more quickly and promptly, even at the sacrifice of perfection in detail. Wonderful as he was in conference, he did not shine in Parliamentary committee work: he lacked the patience, the industry, and the mastery of detail. Nor as a Parliamentarian did he share the great reverence for the freedom which slowly broadens down from precedent to precedent; he knew too well that the reforms of one generation become the abuses of the next. The lore of history and politics was lumber to him, the law often no more than an accumulation of snags in the way of enterprise and initiative; tradition and formalism were baggage which one who wanted to march rapidly was better without.

He was, indeed, French rather than British in his political temperament and in the complexion of his Radicalism. As French advanced thought is always colored by Napoleonic memories, Mr. Lloyd George’s methods of reform were always influenced, both for good and evil, by the desire to find short cuts. He was a modern of the moderns. Restless, honorably ambitious both for himself and the people, he longed for new and more efficient instruments of progress. Not for him the tactics of the Parliamentary hoplite or the party phalanxes. The tactics he sympathized with were those of his early heroes, the Boers — of light mounted infantry, with vast extensions of a thinly held front, rapid changes in the point of attack, daring raids on communications. His real work was done neither in Parliament nor in his office, but at those famous breakfasts of his, when wits were keen with the morning and familiar illustration could interpret principle.

He had a wonderful knowledge of human nature and a quick eye both for the strength and for the weakness of anyone with whom he was conversing. His flair for a political idea was miraculous; he saw nothing steadily as a whole, but always in a kind of photographic flashlight; not even Disraeli so abounded in brilliant aperçus. As he understood a principle best in a concrete instance, so he liked to see a plan clothed in the flesh and blood of its author. He was a political anthropomorphist.

The reproach of trickiness so often brought against him is not deserved. He had the Celtic desire to please, and a gift peculiarly his own of making everyone think that he agreed with him. It was due, not to any wish to deceive, but to the power of imagination which enabled him to project himself into the mind of the person with whom he was talking. People came away from interviews with him, believing that they had convinced him; and when they found that they had not, they sometimes reproached him with duplicity. But, in fact, what had happened was that Mr. Lloyd George had made them expound their views for his own benefit; and it would be as unjust, because he sympathized with and understood them, to ascribe these views to Mr. Lloyd George, as it would be to saddle Shakespeare with the opinions and sentiments expressed by all his characters. For Mr. Lloyd George is intensely dramatic and always conceives politics as a conflict, not of principles but of personalities. That is what has sometimes made him so hard in the few personal enmities that he made. But he is, for all that, a straight man in his aims, if sometimes a little cynical and unscrupulous in his methods.

He worked hard before the war for an accommodation with Germany. Antipathetic as his nature was to Kaiserism and all its works, he would probably have gone further than Lord Grey, Lord Haldane, or any of the Whigs, to avoid an actual breach with Germany. Indeed, it is said that he was opposed to entering into the war right up to that fateful Council on Monday; and that only the invasion of Belgium determined his resolution to support the war. But no man was less of an Imperialist than he. In fact, a thorough understanding of the motives of Mr. Lloyd George’s reluctance to enter the war would be the best explanation of American delay. Every American citizen will understand his motives, instinctively: for England too has her tradition of isolation from Continental politics, no less than the United States; and it appealed with special force to a Radical like Mr. Lloyd George, interested up to the beginning of the war mainly in domestic reform. Mr. Joseph Chamberlain in one of his early speeches confessed that he was so parochially minded that he thought much more about the parish pump than the scientific frontier of Afghanistan; and there was no real inconsistency between that view and his later Imperialism. Neither was there between Mr. Lloyd George’s reluctance to enter the war and the extreme energy with which, having entered it, he threw himself into the work of victory.

III

Mr. Lloyd George is not a systematic thinker, and it must not be supposed that he ever, consciously or unconsciously, formulated the heads of his dissent from the accepted methods of government in England, and still less that he ever worked out a scheme of substitution for them. Confirmed empiricist as he was and is, we must always, when we are endeavoring to understand him, think of tendencies of thought rather than of fixed creeds. With this proviso, one is perfectly justified in saying that even before the war Mr. Lloyd George was at heart a revolutionary with regard to the established method of parliamentary government. And the war confirmed his bias against the slow and cumbrous methods of representative government. The Radical mind has none of the Liberal’s instinctive repugnance for autocratic methods, but on the contrary verges constantly toward a species of despotism. The two great autocrats in history, Cæsar and Napoleon, were both of them Radicals to the end of their days; and there was visible in Mr. Lloyd George’s career something of this same intellectual affinity. The Radical is first and foremost a root-and-branch reformer, and only secondly a believer in traditional political methods. But the Liberal of the Asquith type thinks more of the methods of reform than of the reform itself.

However that may be, the war brought to the surface in Mr. Lloyd George certain strata of political human nature which, though they may be very deeply buried, are never wholly lost. It might have been predicted beforehand that the Radical Lloyd George would be all in favor of a small inner War Cabinet, and would quarrel with Mr. Asquith, whose notion of government was to sit as arbitrator at a state council, hear as many opposing views as could be collected, and then ingeniously split the difference between them all. What Mr. Lloyd George wanted was not only a small War Cabinet but a Cabinet in which he should be supreme. And he was right. Mr. Asquith in a small or a large Cabinet could never have done what Mr. George did; and Mr. George, knowing his own power, and convinced, as he might well be, that Mr. Asquith’s methods, if they were continued long enough, would ruin the country, was quite right to drive matters to a point at which Mr. Asquith had to go. The verdict of history will be that Mr. Lloyd George’s premiership saved the country.

Mr. Lloyd George had the gift, invaluable in war, of concentration on one idea. Before he became Premier of the Coalition Government he was Minister of Munitions. It is the fashion in certain quarters to say that, when he went to the Munitions Department, he was only continuing the work that other people had begun. It is not true. He made the Department. Without his fiery energy, the industrial power of Great Britain would never have been harnessed to the purposes of the war as it was; and nothing in his career is more admirable than his intense enthusiasm at this time. It is mere commonplace now to say that the men in the factories are as truly engaged in the war as the men in the trenches, and that, when a nation is at death-grips, there are no non-combatants, but only combatants of the first, second, and third lines. It is becoming a commonplace that the greater part of war is the exercise of civilian virtues applied to a specialized task. But it was Mr. Lloyd George who converted the paradoxes of three years ago into the truisms of to-day. But for him, the country would have gone on regarding war as the business of a small professional caste, not, in England, at all events, over-blessed with brains; and the trade-unionism of the War Office would have lost us the war. It was largely Mr. Lloyd George’s doing that the whole industrial energy and professional ability of the country were enlisted in the winning of the war.

Mr. Lloyd George had strong views on the direction of our strategy in the war. He was an ‘Easterner’ in the sense that he thought it military folly to attack the enemy where he was strongest. But he was never identified, as was Mr. Churchill, with the Dardanelles Expedition. His idea was that Austria was the weak spot in the coalition of the Central Powers. He bitterly resented the folly of allowing Serbia to go under; and when Roumania went the same way, his indignation knew no bounds, and it was on the wave of popular anger with this second failure that he became Prime Minister. For a year he fought a hard battle with the military advisers who, after France had fallen back on the defensive owing to her losses in the first two years of the war, insisted on the British army’s continuing the offensive alone.

Between Sir Douglas Haig and Mr. Lloyd George there was certainly no love lost. George thought him stubborn and uninspired; Haig thought George an amateur meddler in military matters which he did not understand. The writer has, in a previous article in the Atlantic Monthly,¹ tried to do justice to the Haig view of the operations of the British army in 1917; but on the merits the amateur was right, and the professional soldier was wrong. Passchendaele proved it. The energy wasted on the premature offensive at Loos in the autumn of 1915, if expended in Gallipoli, would have saved Serbia from her tragic misfortunes and prevented Bulgaria from coming into the war. Similarly, the energy wasted in the offensive against Passchendaele in the autumn of 1917 would, if it had been directed against Austria, have abridged the duration of the war by months.

Contempt of the amateur in war was certainly not justified by what happened in this war, for the principles of military strategy are so elementary that their application depends much more on temperament than on professional accomplishment. All the greatest soldiers of history have been men of a peculiar intellectual temper, with a taste for military affairs—never technicians. Mr. Lloyd George had that temper, and though his ideas on an offensive into Italy in 1917 were never worked out and would never have had a fair chance if they had been, they would have saved the Italians the disaster of Caporetto and the British army the losses of the Flanders offensive.

In fact, Mr. Lloyd George had in him the makings of a greater soldier than anyone engaged on either side, with the possible exceptions of Foch and Ludendorff. Born under other social conditions, he might well have been in the army; and in that case the British Army would have thrown up another Marlborough.1 Except for his impatience, which would have told against him in war as Napoleon’s did against him, one is sometimes tempted to regard him as a great soldier mislaid in politics rather than as a masterful civilian meddling in military affairs which he did not understand.

Even now few people realize what a revolutionary Mr. George was in military matters. He had been brought up to regard conscription as the evil thing, yet he was not content until he had enlisted, not only the thews and sinews of the country, but its brains too, in the service of victory. He belonged to a party which was keenly non-interventionist in European affairs; yet he not only intervened, but surpassed all the Whigs, whose policy was far more antiGerman than his ever was, in the degree to which he was prepared to let our destinies be bound up with those of France. While the dominant section in the War Office councils could think of nothing but the obsolete plans of a separate British campaign in Belgium, he rose to the conception of a single united command, not only in France, but on the whole of the Western Front, and finally succeeded in imposing it on his advisers. They were like the Dutchmen under Marlborough, who had to be cajoled into marching to Blenheim.

He had the gift of strategic secondsight. They were the provincially minded; he, the provincial, was the true cosmopolitan, who saw in the war, not a dozen campaigns, but one; divined the causes of our failures; and fought for the conditions of success. How much of his policy was his own invention, and how much was borrowed from others, is not yet known, nor does it greatly matter. It is nearly as great and as rare a gift to recognize the truth as soon as it is presented as to discover it. But undoubtedly, when every deduction has been made for Mr. Lloyd George’s faults, he will go down in history as perhaps the greatest of British war premiers. Chatham had dominated British strategy for more than a century and a half, and Mr. Lloyd George was the first since his time who could draw his bow.

IV

Mr. Lloyd George took to the Peace Conference a plentiful lack of knowledge of European politics and two or three very firm convictions. He realized that new conceptions of democratic government were in the air, and that the people would not be content in the future with the catchwords of liberty, but would insist on the substance, alike in their political and in their economic life. He saw that Imperialism in every form had begun to stink in the nostrils of the people, and that the future greatness of the country lay in the paths of peace. War Radical during the war, when it ended he became in all his instincts the old Peace Radical again. And, lastly, he firmly believed that Great Britain and the United States together had a great duty to the world to perform, which depended on the establishment of a firm friendship between them.

The history of the Conference has still to be written, but it will be found that all of Mr. Lloyd George’s action there was determined by his attempt to apply these few convictions. Their application was far more difficult than he had expected. He had hoped that France would be satisfied with the guaranties for her future security given by the new League of Nations, and he had great difficulty in adjusting her demands for material guaranties and compensation for her losses with her new philosophy of international peace within the League of Nations.

Eastern Europe gave him even more trouble. He feared that Polish Imperialism would bring Russia and Germany together, and he got himself into serious trouble resisting its claims to Danzig. With regard to Russia, he had no faith in the ability of the ‘ loyalists ’ to overthrow the Bolsheviki; and the alternative policies that presented themselves to his mind were war with Russia or an active policy of peace. The alternative of war he rejected, and he characteristically swung over to the other extreme and made the Prinkipo proposals. He did not know the people with whom he was dealing, and the rejection of his proposals by the Bolsheviki was a severe blow to his policy.

Sound as his general principles were, his lack of precise knowledge, the distrust of the ‘experts’ which always marked his actions, and the policy of secrecy unwisely adopted at Paris, which in the circumstances inevitably meant intrigue, hampered and distorted his policy. For all these reasons the Paris Conference was in some respects a period of anti-climax in the Prime Minister’s career. The actual treaty was on the whole satisfactory, but it took too long in the making, and the absence of any clear current exposition of the principles that were being worked out did an injury to the reputation of Mr. Lloyd George, and perhaps of others.

V

But the troubles in Paris were less serious than those at home. The end of the war found Mr. Lloyd George without very clear ideas about the new political world that was shaping itself. Who had, or could have, clear ideas before the issues were formed, and after four years of terrible war in which every consideration of domestic policy had had to be sacrificed to the one supreme end of victory? It was natural that he should wish to gain time for the consideration of new problems. The peace had come a year sooner than he expected, and the No-Man’s Land between peace and war was a dangerous and unexplored region. The boldest British statesman might well be forgiven for walking warily across it.

There were two alternatives before him. One was, to continue the existing government and existing Parliament until the new problems had shaped themselves and an appeal on a real issue could be made to the country. He had nothing to fear, for his reputation stood at a great height and a government that would have had to do for the purposes of the war had it continued, would surely do for the period of the armistice. The other alternative was an election, and unfortunately the Prime Minister chose it.

It was the most unreal general election in British Parliamentary history, and it produced the most unreal result. Had the Prime Minister been ready with a policy, there was much to be said for an election. Had he been prepared to commit himself either to one of the existing parties or to an entirely new party, such a step would have had its uses in clarifying the issues. But he was not. All that the election did was to prolong into the peace a political organization invented for the special purpose of carrying on the war. Instead of strengthening the Prime Minister, it weakened him. His enormous Parliamentary majority was useless to him, because it stood for nothing in particular. Nay, it was worse than useless, for it compromised him, diminished his freedom of choice, and tarnished his prestige with the mistakes of his colleagues.

It soon became evident that the new House of Commons did not represent the mind of the country except on the winning of the war, which was no longer an issue. A ramshackle programme of social reform had indeed been dangled before the electors; but though its generalities were approved, the country gave about as little thought to the means of executing it as the government itself had done. The national temper was highly uncertain. Nerves were irritable, and the blessings of peace had, during the war, presented themselves in such vivid colors, that people chafed angrily at the delay and blamed the government for their disappointment.

At the same time, to many the war had brought prosperity such as had never been known before. It is literally true that thousands of poor people in Great Britain never knew what it was to be well fed until the unrestricted Uboat campaign; and those who have once tasted comfort have had new desires awakened which will ever after cry out for satisfaction. You cannot have a people’s war without a people’s peace. In the field there had been a partnership in the sufferings of war, and class prestige had been broken down in the squalor of the trenches. Should not there be a partnership also in the rewards of peace? If the workmen were good enough to help to win a war, might they not also be good enough to help to run a business? A new doctrine of equality sprang up, no longer confined as heretofore to the exercise of the political privilege of voting, but transferred to the economic sphere.

A few there are who preach Bolshevist theory to the workmen; but there is nowhere any disposition in Great Britain to deny to other classes than the workers their rights. But everywhere the theory of labor as a chattel, a commodity to be bought and sold in the highest market is dying. 'Persist in treating it as that, they say, ‘and I will give you as little as I can for my money I can buy my labor in the cheapest market and sell it in the dearest, as you can your commodities. But admit labor to equal partnership with capital, and my measure of work shall be given without stint.’ Some such train of thought as this is at the bottom of the miners’ insistent demand for nationalization of the coal industry.

Here, one would think, is a situation after the Prime Minister’s own heart. No single party is powerful enough to solve it; only a coalition can avert a period of strife which may inflict incalculable and permanent injury on Britain. Only Mr. Lloyd George, who has filled the political stage for more than ten years since the death of CampbellBannerman, has a personality powerful enough to restore discipline and avert anarchy.

That he means to essay the task is certain, but how? Will he go right or will he go left? The present Coalition is useless as an instrument of government; it exists only by smothering its differences of opinion; but any coalition, to be effectual in peace, must have one mind, one policy.

There are two alternatives before the Prime Minister. He may, as Mr. Winston Churchill would have him do, don the mantle of Lord Randolph Churchill, and found a new Tory Democracy. This party might or might not call itself a Centre party. It would include about half the Liberals, an equal number of Tories, and a fraction of the Labor Party. Outside it would be the Labor Socialists, the Asquithites, and the old Tories. If such a party could agree on a common policy, it would hold power for a very long time, and do an immense service to the country. Such a party might have been formed before the election if Mr. Lloyd George, who made the mistake of underestimating his power in the country, had had the courage to shake himself free of the Conservative party organization, which was as powerless to hurt him as the Liberal organization. Now it may be too late.

The other alternative is for Mr. Lloyd George to swing to the left. He can capture the Labor Party as the old Socialist Independent Labor Party did before him; for the only reason why the Socialists gained such an influence in the Labor Party (which is itself a coalition of Liberal and Conservative workingmen) was that they had most of the ability and the only definite policy. This is the real coalition for Mr. Lloyd George, and he will carry into it a great number of Liberals and an appreciable fraction of the Conservatives who have worked with him. And this creation of a new Labor Party, capable of taking office and striking out a genuine national policy, will be the greatest service that his genius could render to the country.