MR. LLOYD GEORGE'S SPEECHES.
'VTR. LLOYD GEORGE made two speeches at Wolver- hampton last Saturday. In them he further elaborated his political programme. In almost all his abstract statements and in many of his specific proposals the nation in general will be heartily with him. Especially is this the case as regards his main contention that the task before the Govern- ment and the new Parliament is " to make Britain a fit country for heroes to live in." With his next proposition there will also be general agreement. It ig that the first thing the war has shown us is the appalling waste that used to prevail in this country. Again, Mr. Lloyd George was well inspired in pointing out that the worst example of this waste was the waste of man-power owing to our indifference to hygiene. A large proportion of our population was not properly fed or properly housed, and was overworked because the work was badly organized, with the result that we have not as healthy a population as we ought to have. Mr. Lloyd George was perfectly right in saying that the essential remedy for this evil state of things was to obtain for the workers higher wages, greater leisure, better houses, better food, better clothing, and better conditions generally. Finally, he insisted that these could in the long run be got only by increased production.
We wish, however, that Mr. Lloyd George had taken this opportunity to point out that the chief reason why so much larger a proportion of the male population of Germany than of our own land was found from the bodily point of view war-worthy, was owing to the military training which the vast bulk of the German population had received for two or three generations. Quite apart from military consideratior a great hygienic advantage is undoubtedly secured by com- pelling every man to join the ranks. Universal Service enables every man at the critical age (i.e., at the age when he is just beginning to take up hard bodily labour) to receive a careful medical scrutiny and to be compelled—however careless and indifferent he may himself be about his own health, as most young men are—to undergo a remedial physical regime which, if often rough and ready, is nevertheless capable of producing excellent results. As long as it is not overdone, military training, as very many of our soldiers in France will now readily admit, is a great health-giver. For ourselves, we have no doubt that it would be well worth our while to insist, purely for health reasons, that every man of eighteen or nineteen shall be obliged to join the Territorial Force and do first a recruit course of. three months, designed with a special eye to healthy physical development, and after that a fortnight in camp every year till the age of twenty-five. The hygienic results achieved would be well worth the expenditure involved. Some people will perhaps say that three months is not sufficient, but we who can remember the Spectator Company on its day of assembly and what was its appearance three months afterwards when it paraded before King Edward, realize how much can be done in a quarter's intensive training. And our tiny experiment was amply confirmed by the experi- ence of the New Armies. We hope that it was to inadvertence and not to any desire to curry favour with the Trade Union leaders that Mr. Lloyd George's omission was due. We say Trade Union leaders " advisedly, for if Mr. Lloyd George were to consult typical samples of those soldiers who unhappily are to be largely disfranchised by hurrying on the election, he would find that a vast number of them, though often keen Radicals in their principles, are now strongly iu favour of Compulsory Service for the coming generations. They recognize what military training has done for them physically, and they want their sons to have similar advantages. With what Mr. Lloyd George has to say about agriculture and the waste of land-power we need not deal. It is a matter on which the whole country is heartily with him. Our only caveat is that though reclamation and afforestation are most attractive and delightful things, they are also things on which it is specially easy to spend thirty shillings and produce a pound. No doubt " to hve among trees is an ideal life," but these sylvan dreams may very easily end in what can only be described as a financial orgy :- "Through his young woods how pleased Sabinus strayed, Or sat delighted in the thickening shade."
Delightful at the moment, but how if Sabinus goes home to find that he has planted himself into bankruptcy I We pass from the proposals in regard to land for the soldiers, and generally for the resurrection of rural life, and also from Mr. Lloyd George's very sound remarks in regard to trans- portation and its vast importance (the matter on which we dwelt last week), to the fascinating subject of canals. The natural man in us is as much touched by Mr. Lloyd George's enthusiasm for canals as it is by his lyrical invitation to the greenwood. But again, one must remember that there is nothing so expensive as playing with water. Dams, as many a hydraulic amateur has found, too often mean financial damnation. At the same time, we are sure Mr. Lloyd George is right when he envisages the ideal canal programme rather as a scheme for access to the sea than as a mere improvement of our placid and rush-fringed inland navigation. Other things being equal, what we want to do is to allow sea-going vessels to tie up in the heart of our inland cities. To take a specific example by way of illustration, we want Birmingham to have its ship canal as well as Manchester. We do not forget that the capital of the Midlands is five or six hundred feet above the sea, but, after all, modern locks enable our ships to climb hills very easily. Electricity has made the working of the huge locks child's-play. " A lever in a damsel's hand," let alone in that of a twelve-stone Land Girl, will do the trick. You have only to press a button to operate the mammoth locks on the Panama Canal.
It is when we have passed the statement of his programme and come to ways and means that we begin to feel anxious as to the path which Mr. Lloyd George desires that we should take. He will " bash us on the head " if we do not tread it in a properly docile, not to say gleeful, mood I We hear an ominous note when he tells us that " you must have a Parlia- ment that will see these plans through," and when he warns us that this means a Parliament which will operate " without mere carping and nagging." We cannot forget that men whose enthusiasm is greater than their discretion are always apt to dub even the timeliest warnings as to dangers " mere carping and nagging."
Here we must interpolate a word as to the amazing passage in which Mr. Lloyd George spoke with reprehension of the " Irish Members who were organizing their little conspiracy to prevent troops being raised in Ireland to assist our Army." Surely he has not already forgotten the great assistance rendered to that conspiracy by the Government's refusal last April to apply Conscription at once to Ireland.
The Prime Minister next developed what in our opinion is the most dangerous demand ever made in a country with a Con- stitutional and representative system—the demand for a majority pledged to back the Bills of the Government, what- ever they may be, without criticism. Mr. Lloyd George's plan is unpleasantly like the device employed by Napoleon III. and other Imperial democrats of his epoch in their patent Constitutions. You had an Assembly elected by universal suffrage, but it was not given the power to criticize or to " nag," or indeed to do anything but approve the proposals of the Imperial Executive. If this approval was not vouch- safed, the Assembly was promptly dissolved or suspended. Criticism was nagging, and nagging was a form of mutiny. Mr. Lloyd George's remarks about the necessity of a Parlia- ment that will not " nag," but will say " Yes " promptly to the schemes of the Executive, is also perilously like the system which, as we have pointed out elsewhere, was the foundation of the beneficent tyranny of Imperial Rome. In the Justinian Code is embalmed the final word on legal tyranny. " Quod prinoipi placuit legis habet vigorens" (Whoa pleases the Prince has the force of law). Our version is apparently to run : " What Mr. Lloyd George decides to-day Parliament votes to- morrow.'
But in truth this is not Mr. Lloyd George's only piece of borrowing from the Caesars. In a passage of no small amount of literary charm he alludes to the fact that the Divine Augustus settled his soldiers on the land, and that it was only then that you had real peace and prosperity in the Roman Empire. That is a charming picture, and no doubt Mr. Lloyd George will expect our soldier settlers to say with the militant farmer in Virgil's Eclogues " Deus nolyis hio otia fecit" (A god has given us this good time). By the way, we wonder who is to be Mr. Lloyd George's Virgil, who in new Eclogues and new Georgics will sing our soldiers bank to the land. Will it be the duty of the Board of Agriculture or of the Ministry of Information to find him ? If the latter, we feel sure that Colonel John Buchan, whose knowledge of poets, major and minor, delights all his friends, would be quite equal to the task of selection. Our own suggestion is Mr. Masefield. If he undertook the job, he could combine it with a lyric cry for ship canals. Once more we should see the daffodil fields united with the spreading canvas, and be able to say :— "Who did these songs compose Again has brought the sea-foam to the rose."
But we must not wander away from Mr. Lloyd George's really dangerous proposal for a Parliamentary majority drilled like a well-ordered platoon to form fours or wheel right or left with a click at the sergeant's mandatory syllable. That sort of thing has been tried again and again in our history, but it has always failed. The English people will have free speech and free discussion, and no amount of calling it criticism or nagging " or obstruction ever succeeds in the end. In this connexion, indeed, we hope we shall not be thought frivolotta if we recall the immortal stanzas of Coleridge, or Southey, or Porson, or whoever it was who was the author of " The Devil's Ride " :— " The Devil saw a Minister,
A Minister to his mind, Go up into a certain House With a majority behind.
And the Devil quoted Genesis
Like a very learned clerk,
How Noah and his creeping things Went up into the Ark."
Mr. Lloyd George may be able to get a first-class creeping majority at the Polls, but we venture to say that within six months of their assembly they will be asking tiresome ques- tions, and within a year they will actually be " nagging " and demanding to know whether it is good policy to build so quickly that the building tumbles down before the roof is on.
We do not, however, wish to part from Mr. Lloyd George's speeches on a jarring note. In spite of our having had to " nag " and criticize a little, we are most sincerely anxious that ho should be given every opportunity to carry out his policy. But we would once more in all sincerity urge him not to spoil his schemes by over-emphasis, over-haste, and, above all, by the petty tyrant's trick of declaring that the man who ventures on a caveat is his personal enemy and the enemy of his schemes. As a matter of fact, a critic is often the best friend of both, and the unreasoning adulator the greatest of enemies.
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