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Page 3
Born, Manchester, 1863; son of the late Wm. George, Master of the
Hope Street Unitarian Schools, Liverpool. Educated in a Welsh
Church School and under tutors. By profession a solicitor.
President of the Board of Trade, 1905-8; Chancellor of the
Exchequer, 1908-15; Minister of Munitions, 1915-16; Secretary for
War, 1916; Prime Minister, 1916-20.
CHAPTER I
MR. LLOYD GEORGE
_"And wars, like mists that rise against the sun,
Made him but greater seem, not greater grow."_
DRYDEN.
If you think about it, no one since Napoleon has appeared on the earth
who attracts so universal an interest as Mr. Lloyd George. This is a
rather startling thought.
It is significant, I think, how completely a politician should
overshadow all the great soldiers and sailors charged with their
nation's very life in the severest and infinitely the most critical
military struggle of man's history.
A democratic age, lacking in colour, and antipathetic to romance,
somewhat obscures for us the pictorial achievement of this remarkable
figure. He lacks only a crown, a robe, 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
narrative of his origin more romantic, his character more complex. And
yet who does not feel the greatness of Napoleon?--and who does not
suspect the shallowness of Mr. Lloyd George?
History, it is certain, will unmask his pretensions to grandeur with a
rough, perhaps with an angry hand; but all the more because of this
unmasking posterity will continue to crowd about the exposed hero
asking, and perhaps for centuries continuing to ask, questions
concerning his place in the history of the world. "How came it, man of
straw, that in Armageddon there was none greater than you?"
The coldest-blooded amongst us, Mr. Massingham of _The Nation_ for
example, must confess that it was a moment rich in the emotion which
bestows immortality on incident when this son of a village schoolmaster,
who grew up in a shoemaker'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 with but a brief
and contemptuous gesture of dismissal the passing away from the world's
stage of the Hapsburgs and Hohenzollerns--those ancient, long glorious,
and most puissant houses whose history for an �on was the history of
Europe.
Such topsy-turvydom, such historical anarchy, tilts the figure of Mr.
Lloyd George into a salience so conspicuous that for a moment one is
tempted to confuse prominence with eminence, and to mistake the slagheap
of upheaval for the peaks of Olympus.
But how is it that this politician has attained even to such
super-prominence?
Another incident of which the public knows nothing, helps one, I think,
to answer this question. Early in the struggle to get munitions for our
soldiers a meeting of all the principal manufacturers of armaments was
held in Whitehall with the object of persuading them to pool their trade
secrets. 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. All the interjected arguments of the military and official
gentlemen representing the Government were easily proved by these
hard-headed manufacturers, responsible to their workpeople and
shareholders for the prosperity of their competing undertakings, to be
impracticable if not preposterous.
At a moment when the proposal of the Government seemed lost, Mr. Lloyd
George leant forward in his chair, very pale, very quiet, and very
earnest. "Gentlemen," he said in a voice which produced an extraordinary
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, your brothers--boys at
the dawn of manhood!--they are being wiped out of life in thousands!
Gentlemen, give me guns. Don't think of your trade secrets. Think of
your children. Help them! Give me those guns."
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