long as we win the war?"

And the end of it was the humiliation of the General Election in 1918. Where was the new world, then? He was conscious only of Lord Northcliffe's menace. Germany must pay and the Kaiser must be tried! There was no trumpet note in those days, and there has been no trumpet note since. Imagine 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 capital and labour, which tears every state in two, might have been ended: the heroism and self-sacrifice of the war might have been carried forward to the labours of reconstruction: the wounds of Europe might have been healed by the charities of God almost to the transfiguration of humanity.

Germany must pay for the war!—and he knew that by no possible means could Germany be made to pay that vast account without the gravest danger of unemployment here and Bolshevism in Central Europe! The Kaiser must be tried!—and he knew that the Kaiser never would be tried!

Millennium dipped below the horizon, and the child's riding-whip which Lord Northcliffe cracks when he is overtaken by a fit of Napoleonic indigestion assumed for the Prime Minister the proportions of the Damoclesian sword. He numbered himself among the Tououpinambos, those people who "have no name for God and believe that they will get into Paradise by practising revenge and eating up their enemies."

I can see nothing sinister in what some people regard as his plots against those who disagree with him. He tries, first of all, to win them to his way of thinking: if he fails, and if they still persist in attacking him, he proceeds 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 striving to effect, editorial changes. His conduct in the last months of the war and during the election of 1918 was not only unworthy of his position but marked him definitely as a small man. He won the election, but he lost the world.

It is a great thing to have won the war, but to have won it only at the cost of more wars to come, and with the domestic problems of statesmanship multiplied and intensified to a degree of the gravest danger, this is an achievement which cannot move the lasting admiration of the human race.

The truth is that Mr. Lloyd George has gradually lost in the world of political makeshift his original enthusiasm for righteousness. He is not a bad man to the exclusion of goodness; but he is not a good man to the exclusion of badness. 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 quite sure that he is perfectly sincere when he speaks of high aims and pure ambition; but I am equally sure that it is a relief to him to speak with amusement of trickery, cleverness, and the tolerances or the cynicisms of worldliness.

Something of the inward man may be seen in the outward. Mr. Lloyd George—I hope I may be pardoned by the importance and interest of the subject for pointing it out—is curiously formed. 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 bend under the weight of his body, so that he waddles rather than walks, moving with a rolling gait which is rather like a seaman's. He is, indeed, a giant mounted on a dwarf's legs.

So in like manner one may see in him a soul of eagle force striving to rise above the earth on sparrow's wings.

That he is attractive to men of a high order may be seen from the devotion of Mr. Philip Kerr; that he is able to find pleasure in a far lower order of men may be seen from his closer friendships. It is impossible to imagine Mr. Gladstone enjoying the society of Mr. Lloyd George's most constant companion although that 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 energy to get his work done, for one knows very well that he is far more at his ease with these third-rate people than with people of a higher and more intellectual order. For culture he has not the very least of predilections; and the passion of morality becomes more and more one of the pious memories of his immaturity.

Dr. Clifford would be gladly, even beautifully, welcomed; but after an hour an interruption by Sir William Sutherland would be a delightful relief.

M. Clemenceau exclaimed of him, lifting up amazed hands, "I have never met so ignorant a man as Lloyd George!" A greater wit said of him, "I believe Mr. Lloyd George can read, but I am perfectly certain he never does."

I detect in him an increasing lethargy both of mind and body. His passion for the platform, which was once more to him than anything else, has almost gone. He enjoys well enough a fight when he is in it, but to get him into a fight is not now so easy as his hangers-on would wish. The great man is tired, and, after all, evolution is not to be hurried. He loves his arm-chair, and he loves talking. Nothing 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 supreme test of character. If he had been able to keep the wings of his youth I think he might have been almost the greatest man of British history. But luxury has invaded, and cynicism; and now a cigar in the depths of an easy-chair, with Miss Megan Lloyd George on the arm, and a clever politician on the opposite side of the hearth, this is pleasanter than any poetic vapourings about the millennium.

If only he could rise from that destroying chair, if only he could fling off his vulgar friendships, if only he could trust himself to his vision, if only he could believe once again passionately in truth, and justice, and goodness, and the soul of the British people!

One wonders if the angels in heaven will ever forgive his silence at a time when the famished children of Austria, many of them born with no bones, were dying like flies at the shrivelled breasts of their 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 and to man is enormous beyond reckoning. Only the future can decide his place here and hereafter. It is a moral universe, and, sooner or later, the judgments of God manifest themselves to the eyes of men.

One seems to see in him an illustrious example both of the value and perils of emotionalism. What power in the world is greater, controlled by moral principle? What power so dangerous, when moral earnestness ceases to inspire the feelings?

Before the war he did much to quicken the social conscience throughout the world; at the outbreak of war he was the very voice of moral indignation; and during 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 future of civilization, and here he trusted not to vision and conscience but to compromise, makeshift, patches, and the future of civilization is still dark indeed.

This I hope may be said on