The Future of Mr. Lloyd George

APRIL, 1921

BY E. T. RAYMOND

I

IT is just over fifteen years since Mr. Lloyd George accepted his first post as a minister of the British Crown. Since then he has been continuously in office; during nearly thirteen years he has supported the most onerous responsibilities; he has again and again emerged with increased prestige from bogs and sloughs that would have engulfed any politician less agile; finally, as the only possible choice, he was called by acclamation to a position in which he has for four years maintained a despotic, almost personal rule.

In one sense he may be described as the Ararat that still testifies to the existence of a submerged world. Of the chiefs of state who waged war and made peace, he alone remains erect. Clemenceau’s name has an old-fashioned sound; still less readily does the once familiar ‘Père la Victoire’ come to the lips. One can scarcely remember the Italian statesman who held Mr. Lloyd George’s condoling hand after Caporetto and grasped it in congratulation at Versailles. President Wilson has fallen. The names of Michaelis, Hertling, and Kühlmann are recalled with difficulty. But the Nemesis that has waited on so many men apparently strong in the trust of autocrats or the confidence of peoples has either forgotten Mr. Lloyd George, or has been appeased by his modesty, or — perhaps only waits to deliver the most artistic of all its strokes.

On the face of things, one would say that the British Prime Minister has indeed discovered the knack of averting the jealousy of the gods. His prestige is, to all appearances, higher to-day than it was a twelvemonth ago. There has necessarily been some declension from the enthusiasm of the Armistice days; it was not in human nature that that fever of worship should endure in its full intensity. But the Prime Minister’s prestige is still such, that any attack on him recoils on the assailant; and for the most part those who would most willingly wound are most afraid to strike. Not since the time of the elder Pitt has opposition been so easily cowed by mere gesture; a scornful inflexion of the Prime Minister cannot be rendered in Hansard, but counts as much as the most laborious dialectic. For months Mr. Lloyd George has been under no necessity to argue: at most, he has had only to declaim; at least, only to shrug his shoulders. In effect, his whole attitude can be expressed in one sentence: ‘After all, who won the war ? ’ The words are not always spoken. But they are always implied; and so far they have never failed of their effect. The walls of the Jericho of Parliamentary Opposition fall at the first sound of the Prime Minister’s trumpet, and Mr. Lloyd George — convinced that in this regard only what he does himself will be well done — is mainly his own trumpeter.

Undoubtedly this quite innocent and even attractive capacity of self-appreciation in public is a source of considerable strength to Mr. Lloyd George. To the very genuine capacity of this remarkable man, I am by no means blind: he is without doubt the most considerable force in English politics since Gladstone. He has quite extraordinary courage, an amazing faculty of getting to the point, a great talent for choosing efficient instruments — even against his personal taste and his personal liking — when his heart is really set on any particular matter and his reputation is involved. His mere dexterity, whether in managing small or large bodies of men, is amazing. His grip of essentials is such that it largely compensates for a sloppiness in detail that would be fatal to any other practitioner of his method. It is his way to forget to answer the most important letters; and one example of this habit (which I am not at liberty to adduce) would astonish even those who are most accustomed to the lax habits of men dealing with great affairs. Half the misunderstandings, domestic and international, which arise from time to time are due rather to this carelessness than to any deeper cause.

But if Mr. Lloyd George does make many mistakes, he enjoys marvelous luck in escaping their consequences, and shows almost miraculous skill in putting them right. If we think of genius as a divine power of guessing, there can be no doubt concerning his genius for politics. On the large things, he never seems to think or inquire, and he always seems to know. He is the precise opposite of President Wilson, whom a foreigner pictures as carefully and almost prayerfully considering every side of a question, and then — on his own typewriter — reducing his views to precise literary expression. Such a man absorbs and digests facts as one absorbs and digests a physical meal; the process is gradual, and even then the final result may be dyspepsia. With Mr. Lloyd George’s mind the process is quite sudden: one moment there is vacuum, the next, fullness of conviction. He is not conscious of the thing as having sides, and he has no views about it, but merely a certainty; that certainty he jerkily conveys to somebody whom he thinks he can trust, to work out the details, — typewriting included, — and then he puts the matter clean out of his head until trouble again reminds him of it. Thanks to this habit, and to his immense reserve of nervous energy, he is probably, in spite of his immense burdens, the least overworked and least worried minister of Europe.

But these qualities, great as they are, would not alone suffice to maintain his prestige with the public. On that side he is helped by a curious insensitiveness. It is not exactly want of dignity: on occasion, he can speak and act with a sort of severe and statuesque magnanimity that the great aristocrats of the eighteenth century would hardly have deemed inadequate. But, like the Tudors, — who also were Welsh, — he has the knack, so to speak, of vaulting off his throne, having a bout of fisticuffs with an inferior, and vaulting back again, without serious loss of prestige. Henry VIII wrestled with a butcher; Elizabeth often boxed the ears of her maids of honor, and sometimes of her nobles; neither compromised princeliness in doing so. A similar want of reserve is indulged, with similar immunity, by Mr. Lloyd George, and he even derives, as the Tudors did, a specific political advantage from it.

Mr. Asquith fell, no doubt, partly from his own weakness; but his fall was certainly accelerated by the attacks of Lord Northcliffe’s newspapers. On the one side, there was a chorus of cleverly manipulated depreciation, in every key and genre, from the organ-notes of the Times to the syncopated shrillness of the cheaper dailies and weeklies. Every hour of the day, — week after week, month after month,—the attack was maintained, with all the art of a supreme genius in the manipulation of public opinion. On the other side, was dignified and even wooden silence. Mr. Asquith, with Peel and Gladstone in his mind’s eye, winced, but did not retort: he rashly deemed it beneath him to take cognizance of a thing not less obvious than Niagara, and (for one in his position) not less dangerous.

Mr. Lloyd George, more alive to actuality, took care not to make the same mistake when his own time came. When he in turn was galled by the same converging fire, he let no question of the dignity of a minister of the Crown qualify the sting and destructive force of his repartee. He treated Lord Northcliffe exactly as he used to treat an impudent back-bencher, or a truculent Opposition leader, or the late German Emperor. With a sort of gay ferocity, he aimed straight at the weak point in his opponent’s harness, got in his weapon, and turned it round with cruel glee.

‘Lord Northcliffe says this and that. Why does he say this and that? Of course, everybody knows that it was because — ’ And here followed exactly the last thing the great journalist would like to have the public know. For Lord Northcliffe, while contemptuous of what he calls ‘newspaper shrapnel,’ — the kind of criticism that has only a general objective, — is easily terrorized by fire that is carefully aimed and threatens to let daylight into his own dugouts. He has never quite recovered from the Prime Minister’s perfectly undignified and very effective riposte. The press campaign goes on, of course, and more bitterly than ever. But while lofty silence would have given it authority, familiar and bantering speech certainly impaired its moral value. By treating the matter in the spirit of a personal vendetta, Mr. Lloyd George has succeeded in getting it largely recognized as such.

This freedom from restraint is, I repeat, a great source of strength to Mr. Lloyd George. It makes people think twice before they cross him. The knowledge that no consideration will count with him when his back is to the wall; that he will fight, not only with blade and fist, but with feet and nails, if necessary, undoubtedly cows much opposition that might otherwise declare itself, and accounts largely for the singular deadness that has fallen on British politics. It is in this deadness that the only real interest of the present situation resides. For the deadness is so complete, that only one of two things is possible: there must be either decay or resurrection; and the blend of certainty and uncertainty is, at least, piquant.

II

After a full meal of the British Constitution and of the British party organizations, Mr. Lloyd George shows a certain tendency to somnolence. It is true that he can never doze like another: with him repose merely means an accentuated jerkiness, action at rather longer intervals and with less certain direction; by his bedside, as by Mr. Pecksniff’s, there must always be a little table with a pencil and a notebook, handy for jotting down any constructive inspiration which may occur to him in the watches of the night. No colleague is safe from the chance of being asked, like Mr. Pecksniff’s pupil, what is his notion of a (political) grammar school, or of being entreated, like Mrs. Todgers, to declare his views on the subject of a (political) wooden leg.

Nevertheless, there are signs of a slowing down, even though they may superficially seem rather to indicate a speeding up. For four years, and in a more marked degree for two years, Mr. Lloyd George has resembled one of those Japanese acrobats who balance a family and the furniture of a small flat while standing on one hand. So long as he is fresh, the acrobat seldom changes hands; as he grows stale, the shifts become more frequent. For a long time Mr. George stood on the Liberal hand mainly; then he rested himself on the Tory hand; latterly, he has changed from one hand to another with bewildering suddenness and rapidity. And really the whole interest of British politics—apart from incidentals of the moment— is in the question how he will arrive, as sooner or later he must, at stable equilibrium. Some convulsion there must be before that happens, however cunning the performer; the question is, what form it will take, and whether the performer, at the end, will be on top—or elsewhere.

On general principles Mr. Lloyd George would no doubt prefer to settle down on a basis mainly Liberal. Apart from any higher considerations, it is easier for him to think in what he would call ‘democratic’ terms. He is in no sense what he loves to call himself — ‘a child of the people’: his origin is purely middle class. But he has known poverty and the proud man’s contumely; for years he was a rebel against things as they are; and one is always conscious of a certain strain when he talks in the formulæ of Toryism. It is rather a difficulty of imagination than an abhorrence of dogma. I doubt very much whether the Prime Minister has ever thought deeply enough on any subject to acquire the dignity of the true dogmatist; the whole sap of his mind is toward action, and he is never less impressive than in seeking to justify logically even those decisions on which he is practically most right. However, if he has not thought deeply, he has always felt and spoken in a certain way; and it is not easy to acquire another habit in late middle age.

But besides the fact that he has been used to a tone inappropriate to a Tory leader, and may well think it a nuisance to acquire a new accent, he has, I think, always in mind the fate of Joseph Chamberlain, who missed the greatest by indentifying himself with a party wit h which he had little temperamental sympathy. That fate Mr.Lloyd George will certainly avoid if he can, and his resolution to this effect explains, I believe, much in his recent tactics of alternately raising and depressing hopes that he has decided to throw in his lot with Conservatism. If he is forced to accept the leadership of the Tories, then, I think, he will do his best to break down or dilute the spirit of Toryism, to ‘pasteurize,’ so to speak, the pure milk of the Conservative word.

The facts, however, are awkward for him. His own Liberal followers are rather a feeble folk, destined to be absorbed in one party or the other. They are represented by a singularly insignificant press. They have no leaders of character or ability. What is genuinely sturdy in Liberalism is undoubtedly anti-Coalition; though, like Miss Arabella Allen, it best knows what it does not like, and has for the moment no positive love. For, whatever Mr. Asquith’s merits, he does not shine as a ‘daring leader in extremity.’ He has always been used to a comfortable political bed; things have come to him rather easily; his fibre has grown a little relaxed by too much deference and selfindulgence; and he rather resembles the old French commander who chose his positions as much with a view to the dainties of the season as to military advantages. Such a man may, by his experience and technical command, inspire confidence at the head of a wellfed, well-disciplined, numerous army; he does not raise the spirits of a routed remnant shivering in sodden trenches on short rations.

So for the moment true Liberalism is dormant, sick, and listless, like a patient who has been under chloroform. It will, I think, revive, but not without some powerful moral tonic; and I see none among the Liberal politicians dismissed two years ago who could administer medicine of the required potency. They include some excellent men of business, some skilled debaters, some shrewd judges of a situation, but they are all made too much in Mr. Asquith’s image: they lack the sort of power that makes a small company formidable. Conservatism may do without enthusiasm; a Liberal army must have its dancing dervishes as well as its masters of manœuvres; and the most fatal mistake of Mr. Asquith was that he allowed Mr. Lloyd George to remain the sole provider of spiritual munitions to his host.

But though there is no great enthusiasm for the Asquith leadership, there is positive and increasing dislike and distrust of the Coalition; and though it is just possible that Mr. Lloyd George may, by some miracle of manipulation, detach the Asquithians and reunite the Liberal Party, the indications are as little promising as they can well be.

But if the Lloyd George party is to be mainly Conservative, there still remain some extremely difficult problems for him to face. He has won the Conservative leaders; he has not won the Conservative Party. It acquiesces sulkily in its leaders’ advice, but always with a reservation. In fact, the sole unifying influence is fear. The Tory Party hates the great taxation incident on ‘social reform.’ It detests social reform for its own sake. It dislikes the newfangled and very expensive ideas about education. The interference with land, and with the general liberty of a man to ‘do what he likes with his own,’ are abhorrent to it. But for the present it can always be cowed by a reference to ‘Bolshevism.’ The government, indeed, is rather like a whip-top, and the whip that keeps it going is the Labor Whip; when Labor remains ‘moderate’ for long together, the top begins to wobble; when the Labor ‘extremists’ gain control, the top reverts to the perfect vertical. England is determined that, whatever happens, there shall be no Russian experiments; and so long as any serious danger can be apprehended from the Labor side, the Conservatives will use Mr. Lloyd George, even if they must allow themselves in time to be used by him. But they do not love him, and he has shown, so far, little of that special talent which enabled Disraeli, starting as the rather despised lackey of the squires, to become their master and idol.

It is quite possible, however, that this failure is in no way due to a lack of tact or perception. It is at least equally tenable that Mr. Lloyd George intends to act the part of that very intelligent insect which (I believe) is known to entomologists as the ichneumon fly. This interesting little beast lays its eggs in the body of the caterpillar of another species. As its larva can exist only on living tissue, it is necessary to sting the caterpillar victim into a state of paralysis, meanwhile avoiding any fatal injury. Such an experiment. Mr. Lloyd George may well be contemplating with regard to the corpus vile of British Toryism; and it must be said that, if such should be his design, the circumstances are entirely favorable. For, while the Cabinet is predominantly Conservative, — for nobody would now class the one able ex-Liberal minister, Mr. Churchill, as other than Conservative, — its Conservatism is of that special type which would hardly have been recognized as authentically Conservative twenty years ago. It is plutocratic, dividendsubsisting, landless, urban, and even somewhat suburban.

Mr. Balfour, though an aristocrat, is mercantile on the paternal side, is a Scot, and, in the main, a townsman; he is not, after all, a typical Tory; and his every taste — his golf, his music, his Burne-Jones pictures, his philosophy, his blue-and-white china — proclaims him a very different being from the plain Tory of the shires, who rides, shoots, and thinks straight. Mr. Bonar Law, who drinks hot milk, clips his words in the Glasgow fashion, foregathers with Lord Beaverbrook, and cherishes in his modest house at Kensington a cast-iron statue of Robert Burns, — with a big ridge running down the nose, — is still less the English Tory; what of him is not Scottish is Canadian. Mr. Austen Chamberlain, uninspired and uninspiring, with some parts but no magnitude, is quite urban. That brilliant gamin, Lord Birkenhead, who has made his own kind of success of the Lord Chancellorship, comes immediately from the Temple, and ultimately from a Liverpool middle-class family. Lord Curzon, though of old descent, is much of a cosmopolitan and little of a squire The only true squire in the Cabinet is Mr. Walter Long, whose ruddy cheeks advertise the health and breeziness of the chalk hills; but Mr. Long is old, ordinary, fully aware on which side his bread is buttered, and far too cautious to take any decisive line of his own. Over thirty years in departments accustoms a man to most kinds of political bedfellows; and Mr. Long is not the less inclined to doze because he may disapprove of some of his company.

Proceeding to a detailed examination of the social standing of Mr. Lloyd George’s Ministry, we find four peers of new creation — Lord Curzon (as regards his senior title), Lord Milner, Lord Lee of Fareham, and Lord Birkenhead; two untitled landowners — Mr. Balfour and Mr. Long; the grandson of a duke—Mr. Churchill. This short list includes all who can be called, by any stretch of language, aristocratical; the rest of the Cabinet belong to trade or to the professions, and are mostly rather below than above the average social level of their callings. There is no single great nobleman of the true territorial type: Lord Curzon, though savoring of the grandee a league off, is not a great landowner; Lord Milner’s domain is a barn-like place just, off the road, near Canterbury; Lord Birkenhead, with his passion for hunting, remains a true cockney; Lord Lee, who has, with a very noble self-sacrifice, divested himself, for the sake of English prime ministers, of his beautiful Chequers estate, began life as a subaltern, with little more than his pay. ‘The Dukes,’ against whom Mr. Lloyd George fulminated only ten years ago, have disappeared from the political landscape; and among those who have succeeded them, not one out of five bears a name that was known thirty years ago. To estimate the extent of the change, it is necessary only to compare the present Cabinet with a few of the recent and fairly recent past. Disraeli’s most famous government included three dukes, a marquess, three earls, and the heir of a duke. Gladstone’s 1886 government, even after the Home-Rule secession, could boast five great nobles. Fifteen years ago the radical Campbell-Bannerman allotted five posts to indubitable patricians of ample territorial possessions; and the tradition, in weakened form, persisted under Mr. Asquith.

This decrease in aristocratic representation is, of course, partly attributable to the general decline of the aristocratic caste. For a good many years the owners of static wealth have fallen behind the great commercial magnates, whose means are constantly on the increase. They were liberal enough, or foolish enough, — the selection of the word depends on the point of view, — to admit mere wealth to their circle; and from the moment of that decision, they were doomed to take, with nominal precedence, a substantially secondary place. Society at once caught its tone from the new rather than the old rich; and the representative of the old order whom one occasionally meets at a ‘smart’ affair is generally a rather submissive person, acutely conscious of his position. ‘The Dukes,’ in fact, have suffered an astonishing social eclipse.

But this fact alone would not explain the strange disappearance of political talent from the landed and historic families. The truth would seem to be that political ambition is lacking, probably because the rewards of politics have shrunk, while their interest has greatly decreased. The pay of an undersecretary is derisory; and the subjects uppermost — questions of wages, tradeunions, social reform, and economics generally — are not calculated to intrigue young politicians. The cadets of noble houses find too little fun and too much work in the Lower House; and there is really no great point in trying to be anything in the Upper House, since for thirty years or more there has been no reality in the debates of that Chamber. Those debates are often admirable enough on a show night; but they are for show, and for show only; no vote is ever affected by them, and a career cannot be founded on mere paradeground service. Thus the spirited young aristocrat of the period is much more likely to go in for lion-hunting if he is rich, or for selling motor-cars if he is poor, than to apprentice himself to the declining political trade.

So it happens that, although the Tory Party is still considerably the strongest in England, the real heart of it is practically unrepresented in the government. It is still less represented in a House of Commons consisting mainly of war parvenus. It will readily be seen that such a position makes it comparatively easy for Mr. Lloyd George, if he wishes, to manipulate Toryism to his own purposes. He is quite as necessary to the present Tory leaders as they can be to him; they know perfectly well that, if a split came, and the party at large had its say without let or hindrance, they would be discarded as traitors to the true ‘backwoodsman’ faith. Mr. Balfour has already been condemned; Mr. Churchill, once hated as a renegade, is only distrusted the more for his reconversion; Mr. Bonar Law already can never see two or three gathered together in one place without suspecting a new mutiny; Lord Curzon has never been popular. These men are, therefore, tied to Mr. Lloyd George so long as he wants to keep them; with them goes command of the Tory machine, and through it the Prime Minister can largely influence the character of the party in the House of Commons. Whether that influence can be held to account for the fact that almost every Tory candidate now belongs to urban plutocracy or its vassal connections, must be a matter of conjecture. But the fact is certain, and it is one of truly immense import.

Two great powers in England are now virtually excluded from Parliamentary influence. One is labor, whether of hand or brain; the other is land. A certain type of Radical did represent labor in general, and possibly rather better than the trade-union member himself, who thinks solely in terms of trade-unionism. It is precisely this type of Radical that is now barred entrance by the Coalition. A certain type of Tory did represent the interest of land in general, if he also represented the landlord in particular. It is precisely this type of Tory that the Coalition rules out. The one predominant and vastly over-represented type is the not specially scrupulous man of new wealth; the present House of Commons is the richest and least intellectually distinguished in history.

It is these facts which lead me to suggest that changes must come before long, and that they can take no form but decay or resurrection. Many thinkers — they include Mr. Belloc and Mr. G. K. Chesterton — are honestly convinced that the British parliamentary system, which has endured in substantially the same form for two centuries and a half, is doomed. Personally, I would venture prediction no further than to say that, if Mr. Lloyd George is not mistaken, it is not likely to burst the cerements in which it is industriously wrapped. Certainly the changes of the last four years amount, collectively, to a revolution not less decisive — and not much more offensive — than that achieved by Augustus. If nothing happens, the new order will consolidate and the old order will die. Still, many live men have been treated as dead, and have none the less disappointed their heirs. Perhaps, after all, the British Constitution and party system will prove another Athelstan of Coningsburgh.