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Page 5
I think that the doom that has fallen upon him comes in some measure
from the amusement he takes in his mental quickness, and the reliance he
is sometimes 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 seldom a partner with virtue. Morality appears on the whole
to get along better without it. According to Landor, it is the talent
most open to suspicion:
Quickness is among the least of the mind's properties, and belongs
to her in almost her lowest state: nay, it doth not abandon her
when she is driven from her home, when she is wandering and insane.
The mad often retain it; the liar has it; the cheat has it: we find
it on the racecourse and at the card-table: education does not give
it, and reflection takes away from it.
When we consider what Mr. Lloyd George might have done with the fortunes
of humanity we are able to see how great is his distance from the
heights of moral grandeur.
He entered the war with genuine passion. He swept thousands of
hesitating minds into those dreadful furnaces by the force of that
passion. From the first no man in the world sounded so ringing a trumpet
note of moral indignation and moral aspiration. Examine his earlier
speeches and in all of them you will find that his passion to destroy
Prussian 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 regards
Great Britain's entrance into the war as a mistake. Sir Edward Grey was
agonizing to avert war; but Mr. Lloyd George was among the first to see
this war as the opportunity of a nobler civilization. Destroy German
militarism, shatter the Prussian tradition, sweep away dynastic
autocracies, and what a world would result for labouring humanity!
This was 1914. But soon after the great struggle had begun the note
changed. Hatred of Germany and fear for our Allies' steadfastness
occupied the foremost place in his mind. Victory was the objective and
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 uncontrollable.
For Mr. Asquith he never entertained this violent feeling, but gradually
lost patience with him, and only decided that he must go when
procrastination appeared to jeopardize "a knock-out blow."
Anyone who questioned the cost of the war was a timid soul. What did it
matter what the war cost so long as victory was won? Anyone who
questioned the utter recklessness which characterized the Ministry of
Munitions was a mere fault-finder. I spoke to him once of the unrest in
factories, 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 shillings a week. I thought this arrangement made for unrest
and must prove dangerous after the war. So eager, so hot was his mind on
the end, that he missed the whole point of my remark. "What does it
matter," he exclaimed impatiently, "what we pay those boys as 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."
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