The Mirrors of Downing Street / Some Political Reflections by a Gentleman with a Duster

mists that rise

eater seem, not

YD

ed on the earth who attracts so universal an interest a

the great soldiers and sailors charged with their nation's very life in the

and a gilded chair easily to outshine in visible picturesqueness the great Emperor. His achievement, when we consider what hung upon it, is greater than Napoleon's, the narrat

f this unmasking posterity will continue to crowd about the exposed hero asking, and perhaps for centuries continuing to ask, questi

s shop, and whose boyish games were played in the street of a Welsh hamlet remote from all the refinements of civilization and all the clangours of industrialism, announced to a breathless Europe without any pomposity of phrase and wi

into a salience so conspicuous that for a moment one is tempted to confuse prominen

litician has attained even

crets. For a long time this meeting was nothing more than a succession of blunt speeches on the part of provincial manufacturers, showing with an unanswerable commercial logic that the suggestion of revealing these secrets on which their fortunes depended was beyond the bounds of reason. A

aordinary hush, "have you forgotten that your sons, at this very moment, are being killed-killed in hundreds and thousands? They are being killed by German guns for want of British guns. Your sons, you

notepaper before him, shook like a leaf. There was not a man who heard him whose heart was not touched,

eal to conscience with anything like so compelling a simplicity. His failure lies in a growing tendency to discard an instinctive emotionalism for a calculated

enses were greater. The fellow-lodger, who afterwards became private secretary to one of Mr. Lloyd George's rivals, has told me that no public speech of Mr. Lloyd George ever equalled in pathos and power the speeches which the young member of Parliament would oft

ympathy. I remember in particular one occasion on which he told me the story of his boyhood: it was a moving narrative, for never once did he refer to his own personal deprivations, never once express regret for his own loss of powerful encouragements in the important years of boyhood. The story was the story of his widowed mother and of her heroic struggle, keeping house f

Carson. Even the gentle John Morley was troubled by his hot insistences. "I had better go," he said to Mr. Lloyd George; "I am getting old: I have nothing now for you but criticism." To which the other replied, "Lord Morley, I would sooner have your criticism than the praise of any man living"-a perfectly sincere remark, sinc

oint of the ridiculous, is all now left of that fervid period. He has ceased to be a prophet. Surrounded by second-rate people, and choosing for his intimate friend

George was right again and again when all the soldiers were wrong. Lord Rhondda, who disliked him greatly and rather despised him, told me how often Mr. Lloyd George put heart into a Cabine

metimes apt to place upon it. A quick mind may easily be a disorderly mind. Moreover quickness is not one of the great qualities. It is indeed seld

on her when she is driven from her home, when she is wandering and insane. The mad often retain it; the liar has it; the che

with the fortunes of humanity we are able to see how gr

ian militarism was his passion to recreate civilization on the foundations of morality and religion. He was Peace with a sword. Germany had not so much attempted to drag mankind back to barbarism as opened a gate through which mankind might march to the promised land. Lord Morley was almost breaking his heart with despair, and to this day regar

nd his definition of victory was borrowed from the prize-ring. A better world had to wait. He became more and more reckless. There was a time when his indignation against Lord Kitchener was almost uncon

, where boys could earn ￡15 and ￡16 a week by merely watching a machine they knew nothing about, while the skilled foremen, who alone could put those machines right, and who actually invented new tools to make the new machines of the inventors, were earning only the fixed wage of fifty

ine how Gladstone would have appealed to the conscience of his countrymen! Was there ever a greater opportunity in statesmanship? After a victory so tremendous, was there any demand on the generosity of men's souls which would not gladly have been granted? The long struggle between capit

to pay that vast account without the gravest danger of unemployment here and Bolshevism in

onic indigestion assumed for the Prime Minister the proportions of the Damoclesian sword. He numbered himself among the Tououpinambos,

to destroy them. It is all part of life's battle! But one would rather that the Prime Minister of Great Britain was less mixed up in journalism, less afraid of journalism, and less occupied, however indirectly, in effecting, or str

, and with the domestic problems of statesmanship multiplied and intensified to a degree of the g

ness. A woman who knows him well once described him to me in these words: "He is clever, and he is stupid; truthful and untruthful; pure and impure; good and wicked; wonderful and commonplace: in a word, he is everything." I am qui

med. His head is unusually large, and his broad shoulders and deep chest admirably match his quite noble head; but below the waist he appears to dwindle away, his legs seeming to b

a soul of eagle force striving to ris

at gentleman is a far better creature than the cause of his fortunes; and one doubts if Lord Beaconsfield would have trusted even the least frank of his private negotiations to some of the men who enjoy the Prime Minister's political confidence. Nor can Mr. Lloyd George retort that he makes use of all kinds of energ

elcomed; but after an hour an interruption by Sir

et so ignorant a man as Lloyd George!" A greater wit said of him, "I bel

othing pleases him for a longer spell than desultory conversation with someone who is content to listen, or with someone who brings news of electoral chances. Of course he is a tired man, but his fatigue is not only physical. He mounted up in youth with wings like an eagle, in manhood he was able to run without weariness, but the first years of age find him unable to walk without faintness-the sup

riendships, if only he could trust himself to his vision, if only he could believe once a

ir starving mothers. One wonders if the historian sixty years hence will be able to forgive him his rebuff to the first genuine democratic movement in Germany during the war. His responsibility to God a

emotionalism. What power in the world is greater, controlled by moral principle

the war he was the spirit of victory; for all this, great is our debt to him. But he took upon his shoulders a responsibility which was nothing less than the fu

the world as he might have done, as Gladstone surely would have done, was due rather to a vulgarity of mind for whi

CAR

BARON (ARTHUR NI

Chargé, Athens, 1884-85; Teheran, 1885-88; Consul-General, Budapest, 1888-93; Embassy, Constantinople, 1894; Minister, Morocco, 1895-1904; Ambassado