TOPICS OF THE DAY.

POLITICAL VAMPIRISM.—A STUDY IN THREE CHAPTERS.

CHAPTER I.—THE UNIONIST PARTY AND A WARNING.

IVO one is likely to accuse the Spectator of being a thick-

and-thin and-thin upholder of any political Party. We have indeed pained the enmity of the Party managers for our free criticism of the Unionist Party when we have thought it in the wrong. Party Chiefs, and especially Party Whips, are very much like _Mr. Justice Shallow's nian, Davy, and also like the great Falstaff himself. Both, it will be remembered, considered that the only true friend, the only friend worth having, was the man who backed you, not when you were in the right—anybody could do that-- but when you were in the wrong. Rut notwithstanding this inability to rise to the Whip's ideal of good Press advocacy, we are prepared to say that at the present moment the Unionist Party is by far the best and soundest Party in the kingdom, the only political combination worthy of the support of sane and moderate men. We know it will be said that the Unionist Party has no leaders worthy of the name, and few men in its ranks of con- spicuous ability and capacity. Our answer is that this dearth of big men is common to all Parties, and that the Unionist Party need fear no comparisons in this respect. Further, if we judge by the younger men, the men who will be the leaders of the future, there are far more persons of promise among the Unionists than among the Liberals or the Labourites, or any fragments of these two Parties.

The Unionist Party cannot any longer be defamed as wanting in popular sympathies, or for not having whole- heartedly adopted and accepted the Democratic Con- stitution of the State. The Unionist Party is just as Democratic as its rivals. Indeed, if we are to judge of indi- viduals, Unionists are usually truer and better Democrats than the majority of the Liberals or Labour men. The Unionist Party is the Party which most sincerely and whole-heartedly accepts the principle that the will of the majority must prevail. Even in the vexed problem of Self-Determination the Unionist Party is far more liberal and far more consistent than its opponents. Those oppo- nents fiercely deny that right to North-East Ulster, whereas the Unionist Party not only allows it to North-East Ulster, but allows it also to the South and West of Ireland. It regards a closer Union as infinitely the best solution of the Irish problem, but is willing to agree, even if reluctantly, to autonomy for those parts of Ireland in which the majority demand it.

The war record of the Unionist Party is again the best held by any Party. The Unionists can show, in regard to preparation before the war, and willingness to sacrifice Party ambitions during the war, a less tarnished shield than any other Party. The Party as a whole, as well as its leaders, had an instinct and desire for preserving unity of action in face of the enemy which ought never to be forgotten. Though the Party had been out of office for so many years before 1914, it made no attempt to snatch at power, but willingly accepted two Liberal lords and masters—first Mr. Asquith and then Mr. Lloyd George. The country has recognized the self-sacrifice and sincerity of the Unionists. In spite of an adverse by-election or two, it is by far the strongest Party in the State. The General Election proved this beyond all doubt. The electors, as we have so often insisted, are Left-Centre to the core, and the Unionist Party is regarded, and rightly regarded, as the Left-Centre Party.

But though we hold the view of the Unionist Party which we have just expressed, we are not without very grave fears and anxieties in regard to its future. In our opinion, there is need for the utmost vigilance on the part of its leaders to prevent the beginning of a process which in a year or two may leave the Unionst Party almost as complete a ruin as is the Liberal Party.. Though apparently powerful and prosperous, the Unionist Party Is in danger. It is in danger from the same causes that deitroyed its rival.

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CHAPTER IL—MR. LLOYD GEORGE, THE VAMPIRE OF POLITICS.

The dangers that threaten the Unionist Party are to be found in the recklessness, levity, insincerity, and political selfishiness of Mr. Lloyd George. Mr. Lloyd George is a species of political Vampire. He sucks the blood from each political Party in turn. When it is drained dry he leaves it to its fate. He himself flourishes on the process. It is death and damnation to the unfortunate subject of the Vampire's operations. That is how we are obliged to read the past, and, if the Unionist Party is not very vigilant and active, how we shall have to read the future. From the moment that Mr. Lloyd George became prominent and powerful in the Liberal Party that Party began to decline. All that raised him sunk his colleagues and the Party as a whole. Though professing an intense Party zeal, he showed no true Party loyalty. He played almost openly for his own hand. Witness the Budget, the Land Taxes, and the Limehouse campaign. Then came the war and the awaken- ing of the country to the fact that the Liberal Government, though occasionally shivering at the German menace, had failed to make adequate preparation to meet the storm. If all Mr. Asquith's colleagues had held together loyally. they might perhaps have lived down the disconsideration which affected them from this cause. Such co-operation did not suit Mr. Lloyd George. Like the cautious and hedging lover, he whispered. " Ursula, there is danger ! I leave thee," and skipped aside, threw off his old costume and donned one to match the new part he had decided to play. He was quite determined that whoever else was put in the cart he would not be there. Through the Boer War he had been a Pacificist, and though seven months before the outbreak of the Great War—i.e., in January, 1914—he had announced that the time had come to reduce our expenditure on the Navy and Army, he contrived with the aid of a good Press and plenty of self-confidence (in those days the Times and Daily Mail were among his most ardent supporters) to give the country the impression that he, and he alone, could deliver the shells and the big guns.

Stranger still, he somehow persuaded us all, and himself also, that he had always played the part of the brave man struggling with a dumb and stupid world against the folly of inadequate preparation. Without saying either too much or too little in public, he withdrew into the focus of a whirlwind campaign conducted from the Munitions Office.

So_ skilfully indeed did he manipulate the situation that the whole of the responsibility for the lack of preparation fell upon Mr. Asquith and other colleagues, who were in reality not the least bit more guilty, though they were certainly much less adroit, than Mr. Lloyd George. The inevitable consequence was the continued and cumulative disconsideration of the Liberal Party, with the sole exception of Mr. Lloyd George.

When then the first Coalition Government was formed, Mr. Lloyd George appeared to the country to be standing on guard to see that the " old gang " did their duty. This attitude continued for over a year. From the spring of 1915 till the late autumn of 1916 an atmosphere of radiant magnification was skilfully created in the Press, which showed Mr. Lloyd George in heroic proportions doing his best to mitigate the weaknesses and vagaries of his colleagues. All the time, however, he suggested to us that there was locked within his breast the knowledge that only a dictatorship, by a great and patriotic statesman, could save the nation and win the war, and that he was that statesman I At last the time arrived when it seemed right to Mr. Lloyd George to say with dramatic earnestness that things could not go on any longer as they were going, and that he must himself take thehelm, He to it, And thereby, of course, dealt a tremendous blow to his old political associates. But Mr. Lloyd George was not tie man for half-measures. Like Kirkpatrick in the case of the Red Cummin, he " made skeet." He was

not running any unnecessary risk of a resurrection of the Liberal Party. He started by taking over witk him two or three faithful followers of Mr. Asquith. As hrs position became more secure, he attached to his side such specially fair-weather friends of his old Chief as Mr. Winston Churchill, Mt. Montagu, and Mr. Shortt. They-began• by clinging to Mr. Asquith as Mrs. Micavrber clung to Mr. Micawber, but the mood did not last long. Those eminent Liberals and

Democrats. Lord Reading and Sir Alfred Mond (the former must in this context still be considered a politician), had already formed a lively anticipation, characteristic of their race, of the course of events, End were with Mr. Lloyd George trim the outset. They formed the original nucleus of what the French wit described as " Le Ghetto ambulant de M. George." These defections drained the Liberal Party fairly dry, but it was not enough. By a series of political manipulations which must win the intellectual admiration" of the student of practical politics, whatever his political sympathies, Mr. Lloyd George at the General Eleetion of 1918 literally kicked his old Party over the precipice, and stoned them as they lay bleeding and helpless on the ground.

CHAPTER IIL—MR. LLOYD GEORGE AND THE UNIONISTS.

A man less skilled than Mr. Lloyd George in the arts of the Party Manager would probably have thought it better to become a Unionist, since that Party was evidently so willing to acclaim him and to accord him its favours. His strategy was different. No sooner bad he disposed of the Liberals than be began the process of living on the blood of the Unionist Party, but without entering the Party. He set going disintegrating influences similar to those which had ruined the Liberals, and it is clear that unless this process is stopped the Unionists will soon be bled almost as white as the Liberals. The process was begun by Mr. Lloyd George introducing and keeping in the Ministry, as noticed above, a large number of Liberals of more than doubtful political character, a veritable group of Party undesirables, and this in spite of the fact that the great majority of his supporters were Unionists. This alleged reinforcement of the Unionists was commended in the columns of the Government Press, where it became the fashion some months ago to talk loudly if vaguely about " Tories," and to represent theUnionist part of the Ministry as consisting of reactionaries who must be watched lest they did the country a mischief. It was later suggested that the unpopularity which soon began to cloud the triumph of the General Election was due to these so-called Tories. As a matter of fact, the unpopular, the dangerous, the sus- pected members of the Ministry were almost without excep- tion Liberals—the men who had left the sinking ship to serve under Mr. Lloyd George. First among these was Mr. Winston Churchill, a politician who has played a part in some ways not unlike that played by Mr. Lloyd George, but with less skill and success. Mr. Winston Churchill is discredited, and rightly discredited, in the country, for the nation has not forgotten his Irish record, and how just before the war he was making reckless and secret preparations to use the Navy to coerce Belfast and North- East Ulster. Again, it has not forgotten the wayward, eccentric, and self-regarding part, to give it the best name we can, which Mr. Churchill played in the middle stages of the war. Readers will remember how he fidgeted back- wards and forwards between the trenches and Parliament, undecided whether he should give the country the benefit of his services as a great military commander or a great statesman, and how he made ambiguous and oracular speeches, which showed that his politiealsword was at the disposal of the highest bidder. Mr. Churchill was at first on his good behaviour, but there are already signs of his restlessness getting the better of his discretion ; for example, the tactless and irritating circular in regard to " strike- breaking."

Unfortunately, the wave of suspicion thus put in motion by the eminent Liberal statesmen will fall upon the Unionist Party. Again, the Unionists must bear the minor irrita- tions due to Sir Alfred Mond's unpopular acts, whether in the matter of public offices, or, say, the flower-beds at Hampton Court, though we are quite ready to believe that at Hampton Court, as very likely in other matters, he has done the right thing. It is another eminent Liberal, Mr. Montagu, placed where no member of his faith and race should have been placed—i.e., in supreme power over our Indian Empire—who has actually persuaded his colleagues to let him shake and undermine the pillars of Empire in order to make them more secure, and who is at this moment apparently engaged in the strange. work for a Liberal of preventing a just retribution from visiting the Turks. The Turks, remember, in spite of our old

friendship, fell upon us at the very beginning of the war, and treated the prisoners they made at Rut with cruelties as deliberate and as horrible as those practised even by the Germans.

If we were to enumerate all the injuries done to the Unionist Party by Mr. Lloyd George himself, we should fill a dozen of our pages. His Irish policy, as carried out dining the worst period of the war by his Liberal understudy, Mr. Shortt, was a negation of all Unionism. It was a policy which forced Englishmen and Scotsmen to bear the burden that Irishmen ought to have borne in fighting the cause of liberty as well as their own burden, and let the Irishmen who proclaimed them- selves the allies of Germany go free. Mr. Lloyd George's scheme of urbane conciliation. to let the Sinn Feiners do what they liked, even when that included breaking out of prison and offering unnumbered insults to the national flag and the national uniform, has rendered the condi- tion of Ireland worse than it has been for forty years. Murder, cruelty, iami oppression are rife throughout the land, and we have only just escaped, if we have escaped, a dangerous attempt to make ill-blood between us and the Americans.

Lastly, there is the intolerable ignominy which the unfor- tunate Unionist Party has to bear in the year of victory, due to Mr. Lloyd George's indiscriminate distribution of peerages, baronetages, knighthoods, and other decorations, now no longer deserving of the name of honours.

Besides the discredit which has been brought upon the Unionist Party by Mr. Lloyd George and his gang of Liberal henchmen, there are many signs of disintegration within the Party itself—witness the tone of several of what were once Unionist official organs. Mr. Lloyd George has contrived to play the cuckoo in the Unionist Press as well as elsewhere. We hear of movements amongst so-called Unionist supporters of Mr. Lloyd George which, if carried out, can mean nothing less than the destruction of the Unionist Party. In many places the essential principle of Unionism, the preservation of the Union, or at the very least the safeguarding of the loyalist majority in the Six-County Area, is repudiated as an old-fashioned piece of Toryism. 'Men like Lord Henry Bentinek, who sits for a Unionist constituency as a Unionist, repudiate their Unionist principles without any one daring to call them to account, and there is open talk about the selfishness of the Ulster Party, by which of course is meant the Ulster- men who volunteered, not in the proportion of the rest of Ireland, but almost in the proportion of the Men of England and Scotland, and who were perfectly willing to accept the duties involved in Compulsory Service. -These men are now to be thrown to the wolves in the vain hope that the disloyal egotists of Sinn Fein may be persuaded to accept self-government or virtual independence, Plus huge subsidies from this country, if only they will consent not to be called a republic. We cannot follow this subject any further in detail. We have no doubt, however, as we have said above, that if this process is continued, in a year's time Mr. Lloyd George will have sucked the Unionist Party as dry of blood as he sucked the Liberals.

And what is to happen next ? We venture to say that what will happen next will be that Mr. Lloyd George before it is too late will find that, though he may have been a very devil in the carnal part, he was still always a sad good Labourite at heart. As tired of working with Unionists as he was of working with Liberals, he will tell the Labour Party that they alone■can satisfy him, and he will place at their disposal his experience and his compact and efficient, if small, party, machine. Let them choose him as their Chief, and he will at once secure them office by a raging, tearing propaganda which will include all the most attractive points in the Labour programme. If this does happen, and in our belief it is very likely to happen if Mr. Lloyd George is allowed completely to destroy the Unionist Party, what will the Labour Party say Unless they show more worldly wisdom and prudence than they have yet shown, they will, we believe, in spite of their personal dislike of Mr. Lloyd George, yield to the temptation of taking office, and so give him the opportunity of ruining their Party as he has ruined the Liberals and the Unionists. if he is given that opportunity, most surely he will use it. The only difference will be that the process will probably be rather more rapid owing to the rawness of the Labour legions, a rawness which will make them break all the more rapidly. However, this is prophecy. What we are con- cerned with., and what we implore the Unionist rank-arid- file to consider, and to consider at once,is how to save the Unionist Party from destruction. We are somewhat tired of new societies and new organizations, but in spite of that we would gladly assist in the foundation of an " Anti- Vampire League."