MR. LLOYD GEORGE.*

Mn. 13Entali EVANS'S interesting study of Mr. Lloyd George's political character has the advantage of being written by one who has worked with Mr. Lloyd George in close friendship. Friendship too often makes a biographer turn a blind eye to the faults of his subject, but certainly Mr. Evans tries to be impartial, and the final discussion whether Mr. Lloyd George will or will not in the future throw over his Welsh supporters may be said to be even chilly in its detachment. Our complaint against Mr. Evans is not that he fails to take up an honest standpoint, but that his standpoint, sincere though it be, seems to us so wrongheaded that we cannot greatly appreciate any criticism based on such a standard. Mr. Evans regards the Welsh as an oppressed race, and judges Welsh politicialis almost entirely by the intensity of their revolt against the oppressor. His idea of obtaining justice for Wales is to smash the Church in Wales. He looks upon our modern British world as still plunged in the feudal system, those who own land being natural reactionaries and bullies, and those who do not own land being in the position of men who struggle against every kind of arrogance, trickery, and snobbishness. As we cannot recognize our country in this view of it, we find it very difficult to judge Mr. Lloyd George by what is indicated as a declension from the first ardour of his revolt. In our experience, landowners are forced not only into arduous public responsibilities, but into a searching limelight of publicity from which men (frequently far richer) who do not own land may pass their lives wholly free, and thus escape all reproach. A landowner is generally terrified of having it said of him that he has tried to force his labourers to vote Tory, whereas a rich Liberal manufacturer in, say, Cardiff, or some other large Welsh town, may preach the indispensable doctrines of Radicalism to his employees, and let it be known that Toryism among them is an offence, without suffering any castigation whatever from those who uphold the curious political ethics of Mr. Evans.

Mr. Evans sees Mr, Lloyd George at his best when in his

• (1) The Life Bomanco of Goorge. By Borlah Evans. With Intro. duction by Charloa Bandon.. London Everyman, 11 Warwick Lana, E.C. [2a. notj-12) Through 'Terror to Triumph : Speeches nod Pronouncements of the Right lion. David Lloyd George, M.P., since the Beginning of the ar. Airangod by L. Stoyenson, B,E, (Load.). London: Hodder and Stoughton. [11a. act.] youth he was leading revolts against the Church schools and the Magistrates in Wales. Well, we are entirely against forcing any kind of sectarianism on children against the will of their parents, but it should be remembered that when the State provided no education the Church created and maintained a system of education. We cannot discover anything exactly heroic in the spirit which accepts help and vilifies the terms on which it is offered, even though we are content that those terms should be greatly modified. Sometimes the distorting mirror of Mr. Evans's mind makes the aged he examines quite ludicrous. Thus he characteristically writes " The tiller of the soil spoke Welsh; the owner and his agent nothing but English. The distinction extended—even as it did in England after the Norman Conquest—to the animal kingdom. For, while the sheep-dog which helped to earn the tenant's rent for the landlord, responded only to Welsh com- mands, the fox-hounds and pointers which pandered to the great man's pleasures, must needs be commanded in English." The image of people who did not happen to know Welsh acquiring that remarkable language in order to command their fox-hounds in it, and thus avoid the offence of any appearance of inequality, is delightfully idiotic. Not less so is Mr. Evans's vision of the British Constitution Associa- tion. The members of that invaluable society would not recognize themselves in the following description if they had 33ot Mr. Evans's assurance that this is how they really appear. The description occurs in a passage giving examples of Mr. Lloyd George's righteous anger when he is roused:— " It does not follow that this conciliatory spirit and suave manner were always manifested. He could be as keen and cutting In conference as on the public platform. He generally met others in the spirit in which they approached him. A typical instance was that when a deputation, including Lord Balfour of Burleigh, Lord Hugh Cecil, and other titled personages, waited upon him on behalf of the British Constitutional [sic] Association, a sort of harassed landlords' league. Presuming possibly on his humble origin, and confident in their own aristocratic superiority, they began not to plead with him, but to lecture him on the heinousness of his land-tax proposals. He pulled them up sharply, and gave thorn a lesson in deputational manners, a department of learning he deemed to have been neglected in their education."

Mr. Evans adopts the opinion, expressed by some one else, that Mr. Lloyd George's chief characteristics have 'been

courage, oratory, a shrewd use of the Press, and supreme

smartness. This curt summary does not, we think, miss the mark. Such characteristics are a very powerful, but also a very

perilous, possession. They may be used for enormous good

or enormous evil. We are inclined to think that they will be used for good since Mr. Lloyd George, in the great crisis

of the war, has shown his ability to be moderate and con- siderate, and his willingness to prefer the unity of the nation to any such 'triumphs as may easily fall to the bow of the

politician who is above all things "smart," Of course Mr. Evans regards moderation as a, dereliction of a good Radical's duty. His tentative mistrust of Mr. Lloyd George has been chiefly aroused by the latter's refusal to insist on the crippling of the Welsh Church here and now. Bat, as a biographer who tries to be impartial, he is by no means blind to other defects, as he sees them, in Mr. Lloyd George's career. He notes the breakdown of Mr. Lloyd George's original plan that no Welsh Nationalist should accept office under a Liberal Government until Home Rule had been granted for Wales ; also the collapse of the Cymru Fydd organization, which had the same object ; also the ineffeetive- mess of Mr. Lloyd George's insurrection against Lord Rosebery. But, as Mr. Evans says, Mr. Lloyd George is brilliant at turning defeats to his own ends. He is much better at attack than at defence; and yet he has a wonderful way of diverting the enemy's attack from the true point to some other point which is more easily defensible. Excellent examples of guerrilla sallies by Mr. Lloyd George were his repeated attacks, when he was still fresh to the House of Commons, on Mr. Joseph Chamberlain and Mr. Balfour.

As for Mr. Lloyd George's relations with newspapers, Mr. Evans gives us this glimpse into his methods

"The modern slaves of the pen are beginning to realize that they cannot now, as of yore, count upon enjoying the privilege of a private rehearsal of his great speeches. Formerly a small 'ring' of journalists would meet him by appointment just before the meeting; and to them he dictated what he proposed saying- aot reading from any manuscript, but only at best referring to pencilled notes on the back of an envelope, pacing up and dawn the room while speaking, Latterly, when having some weighty pronouncement to make, his private secretary is accustomed to meet the pressmen and dictate from a typewritten copy what Mr. Lloyd George will say. More recently still, at Manchester (June 3rd, 1915), in delivering his first speech as Minister of Munitions, he made a further departure from earlier custom. Ho prepared no copy in advance for the press' but stipulated that no report of his speech should appear until he had himself revised it. He spoke for within four minutes of the full hour. Three hours after he finished speaking, a typewritten copy of his speech, making four full columns of the Manchester Guardian, was submitted to, and carefully revised by him, he making a number of corrections therein. This, however, is no solitary instance of the extreme care he exercises to ensure that what appears in tho press accurately represents what he wished to say. -His speeches in Wales are, as a rule, delivered in his native Welsh—a, better medium for his frequently poetic imagery than is the more proseie English. And even when the main address is in English, his peroration in which he reaches his highest flights, is most fre- quently delivered in Welsh—which he claims, no doubt justly, to be the language of Paradise. But if the speech is a really important one (e.g., his great speech at the Carnarvon Pavilion, six years ago, on his first historic Budget), he will not run the risk of having his peroration mauled and his views possibly dis- torted in translation, but supplies his own 'authorized English translation' of the Welsh portions of his speech."

Mr. Evans's defence of Mr. Lloyd George against his Welsh Nationalist detractors is that ho could not very well support Welsh Nationalism as a matter of exclusive im- portance while he was a Cabinet Minister. This is true, and we of course acknowledge Mr. Lloyd George's wisdom in this

respect; but to offer this fact as an apology is patently not a. defence at all of the man who drew up and exacted the pledge from his fellow-Nationalists that Welsh Home Rule should come before everything. The shrewdest remark Mr. Evans makes is that when Mr. Lloyd George joined the Cabinet the Welsh Nationalists, instead of listening to his exhortations, should have gone on acting exactly as Mr. Lloyd George himself would have acted had he not been in the Cabinet :— " It was from an altogether mistaken sense of loyalty to bins that they themselves abstained from taking steps which his official position in the Government alone debarred him from initiating. Had they only acted as he would have acted were he still a private Member, they would have immensely strengthened his position in the Cabinet as &facto Minister for Wales. As it was, doubt of their own capacity—differing therein fundamentally from him—deterred them from taking any aggressive action, or even any firm stand, for some years against the Government. Without charging him with conceit, one is justified in saying that Mr. Lloyd George bad a just appreciation of his own qualities, and seldom failed to manifest indomitable faith in himself. Had he ruled at the Vatican, subscription to the doctrine of Papal • infallibility would have been enforced upon every Roman Catholic under pains and penalties hero and hereafter."

Mr. Lloyd George's heroes in history, we are told, are Owen Glendower and Oliver Cromwell. If that be so, we gladly trust to the Cromwellian inspiration. Mr. Lloyd George should be safe from ever becoming what Mr. Evans wishes him to be. In a preface Dr. Sarolea names Mr. Lloyd George

as obviously the man to represent the British Empire in the complicated settlement which will follow the war. Mr. Evans

says nothing about that, but thinks that Mr. Lloyd George may turn his attention to some great matters of Imperial reconstruction. In a sense this would be the line of least resistance, as he would be tracked by no very embarrassing ghosts of the past rising up from the burial-grounds of

domestic legislation. We cannot do more than give a bare mention to the volume

which contains Mr. Lloyd George's war speeches. We wrote at length recently of the preface to this volume. To read the speeches again in the mass is to have a deeper impression of the extraordinary vigour and vividness of Mr. Lloyd George's language. Even when it is grave it does not depress but

rather stimulates. Speeches which have that effect are a valuable national possession.