TOPICS OF THE DAY.
MR. LLOYD GEORGE AND THE PREMIERSHIP.
WE expressed last week our belief that the Prime Minister's resignation must be not withdrawn but accepted. A week's further consideration of the subject and of the tremendous issues involved has not altered our view. We do not like the spirit that inspires Mr. Montagu's revelations of how the Coalition Cabinet has acted. They are the disclosures of an intriguing politician who was a willing party to all the misdeeds of which he complains. They show, however, that in the Coalition Cabinet, and in the system under which it has been working, we have had one of the most undesirable forms of government which our country has ever had to endure. Mr. Lloyd George clearly thought himself strong enough to get rid of any touch of Unionist control by the mere threat of "resignation." He regarded himself as the necessary man. If, however, instead of showing this fatal arrogance he had kept his Government going on that system of conciliation which originally brought him into power, the choice of evils would probably have led us, and others of like mind, to think that at this particular moment the law of the lesser evil pointed to keeping him for a little longer in office.
That indulgence would not have altered our general view as to his political levity and political untrust- worthiness or have mitigated our dislike of his system of maintaining power by intrigue. Still, at this particular moment the plea that, having made the Irish mess, he had better clear it up would, we confess, have been a strong one. Now, however, that we have had all the evil effects of resignation, both as regards India and Ireland, we had better go through with them and finish. We cannot have them hanging. over us any longer. After all, the situation is a good deal simpler than it has been represented in the Coalition Press. When the power of making not only Ministers, but Peers, Privy Councillors, Baronets, and the Knights of innumerable Orders has departed from Mr. Lloyd George, people will very soon realize that he is not quite the genius they took him for. Instead of things getting worse, they will very quickly get better. After all, with Mr. Lloyd George and Mr. Montagu gone, we have to omit only a couple of men or so from the Ministry—say, Sir Alfred Mond and Sir William Sutherland—to discover that the remaining members of the Ministry will be quite capable of carrying on and in some shape taking the part of that "Ministry of Affairs" which the country would, we are sure, like to see in office. The prime duty of such a Ministry would be the reduction of taxation and expenditure and the real, not nominal, support of law and order and constitutional government.
It will be said, no doubt, that Mr. Lloyd George would never allow such a Government to remain in power, that he would tear it to pieces in the House of Commons, and so forth. We do not believe a word of it. The Government would, for the first six months or so, be entirely engaged in sweeping up Mr. Lloyd George's worst messes, and these would not be matters on which he would be able to criticize them effectually, even if he so desired. A man who has been in high office, as he has been, for sixteen years, is apt to find directly the shield of power drops from his arm that his time is more than occupied in defending the host of doubtful, if not worse, things which he has done or allowed to be done during his period of power.
We had better be a little plainer, for vague innuendoes, as we see from Mr. Montagu's speech at Cambridge, do not redound to the honour of political life. Lord Halifax, in his Character of Charles H., tells us that Charles IL had a wonderful memory for the defects of his Ministers. There were obvious reasons why he did not say much about them while they were in office, but when any one of them left him it was another matter. Then "the whole inventory came out." The country at large, the British public, is now in the position in which the King then was. Though Mr. Lloyd George has secured a great deal of Press support, we may he sure that there has been a large section of the public which has been keeping a strict record of Mr. Lloyd George's acts. When he goes the whole inventory will come out, and will be found not only a very long one but a very astonishing one. It will not show him as a criminal or a fiend, but it will show the amazing recklessness and irresponsibility with which he has conducted our affairs. It will also show how, like a skilled company promoter, he has contrived to bring under his influence many of the best and most honourable and " safest " men in the country.
But there will be even more than his unexpurgated record to keep Mr. Lloyd George quiet. That political levity, which is his marked characteristic, and to which we must once more allude, has in the course of the last few years made him run up bills in every part of the world. Our unfortunate commitments in India, in Mesopo- tamia, in Palestine, and in Egypt are known to all the world, but there are others, we suspect, not yet known to the public which are very nearly as bad. These must be liquidated, like the more notorious. We are now reaching the period when all these curses, known and unknown, are coming home to roost. No doubt Mr. Lloyd George may hope to escape some of the worst personal consequences by being out of office. Resig- nation will always give him the power to say in after years : "If they had only left me to deal with these problems I could have avoided the troubles which have occurred." For the moment, however, he will not be able to choose this method of confession and avoidance. He will have to bear a great deal of downright criticism for the costly and risky things which will have to be done in order to prevent us either committing a breach of faith or falling into new errors. Liquidation, though a necessary, is never a pleasant process for the head of the firm, and it is still worse for the ex-head.
We now come to Mr. Lloyd George's last line of defence or, let us say, the last line of defence employed by Mr. Lloyd George's friends and advocates. It is one with which, in the abstract, we have a great deal of sym- pathy, and we have no doubt that in many cases it represents an honest and honourable conviction. It takes the form of asking the Unionists not to be so base as to desert in a moment of trouble a man who has sacrificed himself so generously and so gallantly to the interests of the country. Frankly, we cannot find much justification for this plea in the present case. It does not apply. Un- willingness to keep a politician in office after his usefulness is past is not a good ground for an accusation of cruelty and desertion. We are not denying that Mr. Lloyd George did good work, and very good work, when he was Minister of Munitions. As speeder-up of the nation during the War he fulfilled an important, nay invaluable, function. But surely. Mr. Lloyd George's friends are not going to ask us to take bad policy and bad administration from him now because he once did good work. Besides, if they insist upon our judging Mr. Lloyd George by the past, we shall have to take the bad in the past as well as the good. But that will not be altogether a pleasant process. It will not in the balance show either a political judgment of exceptional power or an exceptional sacrifice of self in order to secure the interests of the country. Mr. Lloyd George, as we have always admitted, is by no means wanting in patriotism; but neither were some thirty million or more of his countrymen and countrywomen. We cannot treat that gift as a marvellous exception without doing a great injustice to the British race at home and abroad.
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