5 JULY 1913, Page 10

Of the Attorney-General's speech at the National Liberal Club luncheon

we can only say that it was the kind of utterance which the candid critics of the eighteenth century would have called "a spaniel speech," so fulsome was its adulation of Mr. Lloyd George. Its frowsy rhetoric was, however, enlivened by one touch of unconscious irony. "He," the Chancellor of the Exchequer, " has already erected monuments to himself which will last long beyond our time, and all that he has done is nothing compared with what is in front of him still to achieve." The vision rises before us of the Chancellor of the Exchequer unveiling a magnificent monument of himself in whitewashed brass, dressed as the Red Cross knight of Public Purity killing the hideous dragon of " Shares-on-the-ground- floor."