TOPICS OF THE DAY.
THE HISTORY OF MR. LLOYD GEORGE'S FIRST AND LAST (?) ADMINISTRATION.—I.
Youoan fool all the people some of the time, and some of the people all the time, but you cannot fool all the people all the time.'
MR. LLOYD GEORGE has forfeited the confidence of the people of this country, and must pay the penalty. The Administration of which he has been not merely the head and presiding genius but the autocrat, must be widened under a saner and safer leadership into a National Administration capable of bringing the war to a successful issue, and, when the time shall come, of making a Peace which shall give the cause of Freedom and Democracy security for the future. We say this not out of any personal antipathy to Mr. Lloyd George, nor for any Party reasons, but solely because he has been tried and found wanting. It has become abundantly evident that it is impossible to make any arrangements by which his powers for evil can be restricted and his powers for good maintained. The arguments against placing him in supreme authority in 1916 were acknowledged to be many and great, but they were overborne by the plea that with all his faults he was a war 'winner, and that, so potent was his capacity for rousing 'the nation, and for inspiring the public with what was believed to be his own fiery and exalted-spirit, it was worth 'while to run very great risks in order to secure the services of this "-speeder up " of our energies. He was Chatham ,redivivus. Were we to be so foolish as to reject him because of his politioal past ? He believed, like Chatham, that he could save the nation, and -that nobody else could. Was it not worth while therefore to give him a chance?
For ourselves, we very much doubted the wisdom of this attempt ; but when circumstances had placed Mr. Lloyd George in power we felt that there was only one patriotic course to pursue. It was to make the best of him ; to hope 'that responsibility, as it was urged, would steady him ; to hope .that the good side of him would grow, while the side of the -astute Parliamentary and Party tactician and ambitious poli- tician would dwindle away. In any case, the die was cast in .December, 191.6, and Mr. Lloyd George assumed supreme power with the best wishes and with the loyal support of the whole country. Never had statesman such an opportunity as he was given. Never did statesman throw it away so com- pletely or prove so unworthy of a free people's choice. He was surrounded not only by a body of able and devoted colleagues drawn mainly from the Unionist Party, but also, in spite of the soreness of the Liberals, by a considerable sprinkling of his own Party. Further, he had the very pick of the Labour Leaders to assist him, and the active support of the ablest business men of the type of ' Sir Albert Stanley and Sir Eric Geddes, a body of men chosen by himself from the great commercial ad- ministrators of the country. No one could say that he had his Ministry forced upon him. Ile chose them for himself from every -section of .the nation, and to answer his eall was looked upon as a sacred duty. Moreover, Mr. Lloyd George began with • the support of practically the whole Press. Radical papers like the Daily Chronicle, the Manchester Guardian, and Lloyd's Weekly News, and the most widely circulated of Sunday papers, like the News of the -World, vied with Conservative journals like the Morning Post, the Scotsman, and the Glasgow Herald to secure him a'fair field and no favour. The Harms- worth Press, with its special relations to him, joined with the Hul ton newspapers to guarantee him the widest and most favour- able publicity. We ourselves, though we so greatly • disliked the methods by which the fall of the Asquith Ministry was brought about, resolved that we would not think of how he had gained his power, but Inly of how in the future he might use -it in the interests of the nation and for the Winning of the war.
It is our purpose to trace the story of the year and a half during which Mr. Lloyd George has had the whole of the resources of Britain, nay, of the British Empire, at-his com- mand. In December, 1916, we asked : " What will he do with it ?" We now ask : " What has he done with it 1 " Three great problems had to be met and solved by Mr. Lloyd George when he took office. The first and most important of all was the application of Conscription to Ireland. His business was to tap a reservoir that could give us three hundred thousand fighting men at a time when in truth we needed them almost as much as we do now, though the need was not so tragically visible. The next problem was the Arraying of the Nation as a whole for war, and the preparation of the machinery, not merely for the combing out of the younger men who then remained at home and their replacement by older men, but for the compulsory calling to the nation's aid, civil as well - as purely military, the pick of the men up to fifty, or even beyond. The third was the problem of Shipping—the provision of ships to make good the losses suffered by the attacks of the German submarines. It is impossible for Mr. Lloyd George to say that he could not foresee these things. They were apparent to all the thinking people of the nation, and were,-for example, again and again set forth in these pages. Remember also that the case against Mr. Asquith's Government was largely based by Mr. Lloyd George, and those who supported from the outside his attacks from the inside upon the Administration of which he was one of the most prominent members, upon' the failure of the First Coalition to do the three things we have just named. The complaint against 'Mr. Asquith was that he had failed to deal adequately with these problems, and especially with the problem of applying Compulsory Service to Ireland.
On this part of the indictment, then, immediate judgment may be claimed on the ground that the defence put for- ward by Mr. Lloyd George and his supporters is no defence at all. He has failed us in each particular, and failed not owing to the force of circumstances, nor from inability to see what was required, but from unwillingness to grasp the nettle lest it should sting. In 1916 the country would have refused him nothing. He could have carried the application of Conscription to Ireland without difficulty, though of course he would not have had the support of Mr. Redmond and the Irish members of the House of Commons.
At that time Sinn Fein had hardly dared to raise its head.
The worst of the extremist agitators were safely under lock and key, and the Southern Irish dared not, as they dare now, openly avow themselves the allies of Germany— men whom it would be an oppression to conscript for the side they detest. Instead of facing the Irish question boldly and dealing with its realities, 114r. Lloyd George preferred the camouflage of a Convention and of a so-called policy of con- ciliation, the only result of which was to give the Sinn Fein leaders the opportunity to show their fellow-countrymen that it paid very much better to threaten and coerce the brutal Saxon than to make terms with him. It was fear, and nothing else, they urged, which induced John Bull to relax his grasp upon the prisoners, and to let them return to their homes and their practice of sedition without even a pledge that they would not indulge in any further overt action.
Mr. Lloyd George trifled with the whole Irish question until, a month ago, under the coercion of his own colleagues and of British public opinion, he was forced to pretend that Irishmen are to be compelled to bear their share of the common burden. And then came his final triumph in the art of trifling with the nation's-clearest interests. He made Conscrip- tion depend in fact, though of course he promised that it should not so depend, upon the application to Ireland of a system of Home Rule which could be applied only by the breaking of the most solemn pledges, pledges given not only by himself but by every party in the State, to the people of North-East Ulster. He pointed the cannon at the pro- German rebels of Ireland, but so arranged the mechanism that it could not be fired without firing another piece of artillery pointed at the heart of the British Empire. We are to have Conscription in Ireland only at the price of handing over a part of the United Kingdom to our avowed enemies and the avowed friends of Germany. What is more, with cynical indifference Mr. Lloyd George made it clear that Conscription was to be applied to Ireland only after he had provided the machinery which, it was universally admitted, must render its working impossible. This is the condition to which he has brought Ireland and the problem of Man-Power in Ireland after a year and a half of waiting and seeing, of intriguing and pledge-breaking, of political " manceuvring in depth." When North-East Ulster, faced with his violated pledge, complains and points to his plighted word, he tells her that the war has lasted longer than he expected!
There is, alas not much need to dwell upon the Govern- ment's failure to array the nation till we were actually under the fire of the German guns. The opportunity for doing this essential work, not in a panic and a hurry but with caution and deliberation, must have been purposely rejected by the head of the Government, for we know that the need was before Mr. Lloyd George's eyes. It was the same with ship- building. He must have known the problem was vital, and yet, as we now see, he did not begin to insist upon the matter being taken, not merely seriously but in deadly earnest, till a month ago. In the case of these most vital problems he con- sented to wait and see until it was too late, or at any rate so late that we have to run risks, and terrible risks, which we need not have run. It is idle for him to tell us now that he did his best, that circumstances were too strong for him, and that he was deceived by promises which were not kept. Such excuses might weigh in the case of a Minister who had inherited office from the times of peace. They are not available for one whose only excuse for the methods by which he obtained office was that he was a war winner, and that he could put into the Government an energy not given to other men. Any Front Bench politician that we could name could have neglected the shipbuilding problem as successfully as Mr. Lloyd George.
Mr. Lloyd George's actual war record, by which we mean his dealings with the soldiers and the Army, is fully as bad as his Irish record, but that we must leave over for another occasion. Bad also is his record as regards his relations with the Press and his manipulation of the organs of public opinion. Worst of all perhaps is the way in which he formed inside the Ministry a camarilla of self-seeking politicians and second-rate men of business, either forced upon him by outside pressure or selected of his own free choice. Mr. Lloyd George altered his tune half-way through his Administration. The Govern- ment were, as far as membership went, a fair enough Government when they began, but see how Mr. Lloyd George has changed them. He brought in from the Liberal Party one of the most dangerous and most untrust- worthy of politicians, Mr. Winston Churchill, a man not only unstable as water, but one who, quite apart from any charges of self-seeking, can be shown to have the worst judgment of any public man of our times. Witness the madness of his declarations in regard to our Naval policy. Further, Mr. Lloyd George allowed one of our most rightly respected Ministers, Mr. Austen Chamberlain, to go, in order to make way for Mr. Montagu. He brought Lord Rothermere and Lord Beaverbrook into the very heart of the Government, and made Lord Northcliffe an official of high importance. But this, again, we must leave, like his dealings with the Army, to another article. We will only say here that he illustrated the terrible words with which Wordsworth ended one of the greatest of all his political sonnets, the sonnet which begins, " Another year !—another deadly blow ! Another mighty Empire overthrown ! " The poet tells us that, in spite of the awful menace of the hour, all will be well if only " they who rule the land Be men who hold its many blessings dear, Wise, upright, valiant ; not a servile band, Who are to judge of danger which they fear, And honour which they do not understand."
It is true that within the last few days the moral force of the Ministry has been greatly strengthened by the inclusion of Mr. Austen Chamberlain, and that certain other resignations have improved it. But considering the bias of the Govern- ment in the first quarter of the year—i.e., till the German onset put the fear of men into the Prime Minister's heart—we can only say that the Ministry contained within it " a servile band," a band involving terrible perils to the nation for the very reason that Wordsworth gives. Their judgment of our danger was brought to naught by their fears, because, as the record of the Prime Minister's pledges has shown, honour is a word to the understanding of which the hearts of many of them are altogether closed.
(To be continued.)
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