partner of England, not a dependency; and self-respect, individual and national, is so engrained in the granite of the Scottish character that a Scotsman's difficulty is not so much to hold his own among Englishmen as to conceal his innate sense of superiority. With Welshmen, owing partly to the greater difficulty of the required adjustment, partly to the fact that their nature is not of granite, but of more yielding material, the case is wholly different. The first contact between Englishmen and Welshmen, as any student of character can observe, whether in a West End drawing-room or a Whitehall office or an Oxford study, is not a meeting of equals, but of superior and inferior. It is not the fault of history. Wales might be said to have annexed England with the Tudors as Scotland annexed her with the Stuarts. The fact remains that Welshmen do not feel it so. And the result is that Welshmen, in contact with Englishmen, in face of the massive, unquestioning self-confidence of that naively dominant race, find it well nigh impossible to be themselves and are wont to assume unreal and alien attitudes to cover their confusion and embarrassment. It is this duality, this fluctuating evasiveness, this incessant self-avoidance, this flight from the center of their being, which is the most marked characteristic of Welshmen in their social relations and external contacts; and it is this which supplies the master-key to the career and the methods of David Lloyd George.

A well known German actor who found occasion to visit Genoa during the conference was asked on his return for his opinion of Lloyd George, who had been at pains to receive him. "I form no opinion on him as a states

man," he is reported to have said, "but as an actor he is superb." It was an acute and penetrating observation. He had recognized a colleague in the histrionic art. And no doubt he recognized also how, with this superb endowment, every instinct of Lloyd George's being was driving him to transform the character of what has hitherto been known as statesmanship so as to enable it to conform with the necessities of his own nature and situation. If English politics from 1909 onward, when Lloyd George assumed direction of Liberal strategy, became increasingly dramatic and absorbing, if the issues of the Great War itself were sensationalized and vulgarized in the hands of the experts of propaganda, and if the recent history of Europe for the four years between the armistice and the "tranquillity election" was a constant and sterile succession of well staged crises and momentarily satisfying dénouements, the cause is largely to be found in Lloyd George's genius-for genius it is-for creating an environment suitable for the display of his own virtuosity. And, strange as it may seem, it is precisely this virtuosity, this never-failing talent for improvisation, this supreme opportunism, which is, or at least was until recently, adduced as his title for admiration by gaping and inarticulate English Tories. Like his predecessor Disraeli, Lloyd George could hope to achieve leadership over the Conservative fold precisely because of his dazzling difference from the stolid herd. Faced with problems and difficulties which they felt to be beyond them, Englishmen consented for a few brief years to intrust their destinies to a star performer not because they understood the secret of his art or the drift of his

activities, but because, understanding neither the Welshman nor the situation, they somehow blindly trusted that out of a blending of incomprehensibles something orderly and intelligible would emerge. In the event Europe, as was inevitable, proved intractable to the Welsh magician's skilful, but ignorant, incantations, and as soon as this became apparent, Englishmen not only put a sudden end to the phantasmagoria, but closed down the theater for good. It will be a long time before the English public, particularly the working-class English public, is once again in a receptive mood for a similar performance.

It is to this fundamental dualism, this disintegration of the personality which Plato observed to be the actor's lot, that the characteristics of the Lloyd-Georgian régime can be traced. The strange and unexampled political system established during the brief years of his ascendancy at every point bears marks of the repressed and fermenting activity of a soul divided against itself. Take for instance the most notable feature of his régime in domestic politics-its debasement of British political standards through the pervading atmosphere of personal intrigue. Other statesmen have indulged in intrigue as a convenience; Mr. Lloyd George and his henchmen have elevated it to a fine art. Face to face with a stronger, but less observant and quick-witted, people, Welshmen have developed, as the Greeks developed in face of the Romans and later of the Turks, an astounding capacity for wire-pulling. No one who has not had the privilege of peeping into the secrets of the Welsh Camorra can realize the amount of subtle calculation and devoted labor

which are joyfully expended there on the processes of personal manipulation. If ever the full history of the last five years of British politics is laid bare, historians will do justice to the herculean under-world labors of the expremier's Celtic bodyguard. Unfortunately for their immortality, their most characteristic achievements were in talk, not in writing, so that even when the files of the secretariat are opened, only a relatively meager record will be revealed. It will be left to the imagination of posterity to picture the wizardry which enabled their chief to retain office during nearly four years of peace without a party, without a program, without an independent organization, or indeed any other genuine bond of cohesion than the purchased loyalty or pampered inertia of a Parliamentary majority skilfully divided against itself.

But the work was done and done with zest and gusto; for to the Welsh spirit, pining for activity and afraid to spread its pinions toward the higher regions of achievement, personal and political issues offer boundless and gratifying opportunities for ingenuity and artifice. As a French cook can make a tasty ragout out of the ragged remains of a lunch, so a Welsh politician, national or local, can prepare a succulent blend of mystification and intrigue out of an issue which would pass almost without notice through the agenda of an English committee. Somebody once remarked in the presence of a distinguished general who had been the victim of Lloyd George's civilian strategy that the premier, as he then was, was "not straight." "I protest," exclaimed the general. "He is perfectly straight-as straight as a corkscrew." Over and over again Mr.

Lloyd George has revealed not merely his unwillingness, but his inability, to do a simple thing in a simple way. Whatever his objective, whether it be the defeat of the House of Lords, the attainment of the premiership, the continuance of the coalition, the carrying of Irish self-government, the isolation of France, he has always preferred to approach it with a stealthy sidewise movement rather than with a frontal attack. And it is in this light that his speeches and policies must be interpreted. Actions like the general election of 1918 and the Irish reprisals must not be judged for their results as seen in retrospect; future historians, ignorant of their author, will be at a loss to understand how he could have come to burden himself with such policies. But interpreted as gestures in the rôle of the moment or as scenes in a film drama where contrast is of the essence of the appeal, they fall perfectly into place.

The same canons of interpretation apply to the ex-premier's oratory. An actor's words are neither true nor false. They are only more or less well spoken, more or less effective; that is, in their appeal to the audience of the movement. For the ex-premier it may justly be claimed that he has never lied; for a lie is a deviation from the truth. One cannot stray from a road on which one has not traveled. A speech for Lloyd George does not represent an effort to communicate the truth, nor does it represent in Talleyrand's phrase an effort to conceal the truth. It is not concerned with the truth at all, but with something else, with what he himself described on one occasion, when he was accused of eating his words, as "political strategy." Reread his speeches in this light. You

will learn nothing, or nothing trustworthy, about the subject with which they are professedly concerned, whether it be taxation, health insurance, land reform, Prussian militarism, the progress of the war, the peace conference, the labor problem, the Irish situation, the Græco-Turkish conflict; but you will learn a great deal about the political situation and the Parliamentary atmosphere of the moment, provided you have trained yourself in the very special art of exegesis which the ex-premier's oratorial excursions developed among those who had inside knowledge of the facts which he mishandled.

One other feature of his oratory must be mentioned-its habitual and unblushing inaccuracy of detail. Other public men have made slips and blunders, but, to use a famous expression, Mr. Lloyd George hardly ever opens his mouth without contriving to put his foot into it. His prodigious ignorance, coupled with his fondness for concrete modes of expression, has constantly led him, even on the most solemn occasions, when every word should have been weighed, to abandon the layer of thin ice provided by his secretaries for his manoeuvering and to plunge headlong into deep and unplumbed waters. Thus, in presenting the Treaty of Versailles to the House of Commons, he informed it, and the German and Danish peoples, that it restored Schleswig-Holstein to Denmark; in presenting the Irish Treaty, and moralizing on its effect on the conduct of the foreign policy of the British Empire, he took occasion to refer to Lord Palmerston's presence at the Congress of Vienna; and, in his war anniversary speech of 1917, he seized the opportunity of the presence of the

scholarly and punctilious foreign minister of Italy to post-date the achieve ment of Italian unity by at least a generation. A student of history with a little time on his hands might do worse than compile out of the ex-premier's discourses an anthology of blunders. It might serve as a reminder that of all the weaknesses to which a politician is prone, to be ignorant of his ignorance is one of the least excusable. To err is human, but to persevere in error, with all the wisdom of a great empire at command, is something less than wise.

84

David Lloyd George is such a perfect specimen of the genus demagogue that it may be instructive to American readers to compare him with this classical Greek prototype.

In the eighth book of "The Republic" Plato has drawn us a picture of the demagogue as he had observed him in the city state politics of Greece, laboratories not so very much smaller than the principality of Wales. The The coincidence between the Platonic type of demagogue and the type of déraciné Welshman, incarnated in David Lloyd George, is very striking. Plato's demagogue is born, we are told, of a "miserly and oligarchical father, who has trained him in his own habits"; he represents a reaction, in other words, against the constriction of his natural exuberance and ambitions, of which a clever boy brought up in a pious home in a Welsh village would early become aware. The young man, Plato goes on to tell us, "comes to associate with fierce and crafty natures who are able to provide for him all sorts of refinements and varieties of pleasure." There we have the pert young solicitor

(as Mr. Cecil calls him) enjoying his first taste of the famous delights and temptations of politics. The young man, continues Plato, "is changed by a class of desires coming from without to assist the desires from within"; the impulses repressed and driven underground by the strict contracts of Welsh life emerge, on a lower level, at the call of appropriate stimuli from the world outside the village. "Then there arises in his soul a faction and an opposite faction, and he goes to war with himself. There are times when some of his desires die and others are vanished; a spirit of reverence enters into the young man's soul, and order is restored. And then again, after the old desires have been driven out, fresh ones spring up, which are akin to them, and because their father does not know how to educate them, wax fierce and numerous till at length they seize upon the citadel of the young man's soul, which they perceive to be void of all accomplishments and fair pursuits and true words." How often in the story of the rake's progress described as "arrival" has this description proved prophetic! And how true it is of the village boy of whom, when he had climbed the heights of power, his oldtime associates and contemporaries were asking why he seemed to have forgotten his early ideals!

There is no need to continue the citation at length, but the culminating passage must be quoted because it sums up so perfectly the indifference and opportunism, the insensitiveness to all genuine values, the state of luxuriating, yet faded, titillation into which a demagogue inevitably falls. He ends, says Plato, "by living in a sort of equilibrium, putting the government of himself into the hands of the

one which comes first and wins the turn; and when he has had enough of that, then into the hands of another; he despises none of them, but encourages them all equally." (Those who remember the way in which the expremier's bodyguard watched him, as though he were an Oriental sultan, and seized the right mood and moment for putting in the appropriate word and request will appreciate this touch.) "Neither does he receive or let pass into the fortress any true word of advice; if any one says to him that some pleasures are the satisfactions of good and noble desires, and others of evil desires, and that he ought to use and honor some and chastise and master the others whenever this is repeated to him, he shakes his head and says that they are all alike and that one is as good as another. Thus," he continues, in a passage replete with detailed touches of anticipation, "he lives from day to day, indulging the appetite of the hour; sometimes he is lapped in drink and strains of the flute; then he becomes a water-drinker and tries to get thin; then he takes a turn at gymnastics; sometimes idling and neglecting everything; then once more living the life of a philosopher; often he is busy with politics, and starts to his feet and says and does whatever comes into his head; and if he is emulous of any one who is a warrior, off he is in that direction, or of men of business, once more in that. His life has neither law nor order; and if in this distracted existence, he knows joy and bliss and freedom." Surely Plato, from his tower in Elysium, must have watched our hero in these recent years as he passed from the cabinet and the lobby to the platform, from the rhetoric of temperance meeting to the intoxica

tion of Eisteddfodau and hymn-singing, now asking his fellow-Baptists to pray for him in temptation, now running headlong with danger so as to give ample substance to their prayers, now engaging in a flutter on the stock exchange, now planning offensives for the soldiers, now coquetting with the wild men of Moscow, who fascinated him by the strength and consistency of their destructive purpose, now dreaming, like Disraeli, of a great new British Empire in the East. "Yes," Plato would say, recalling the closing words of his own description, "his life is motley and manifold, and an epitome of the lives of many.”

For who shall cast stones at this poor victim of the chaos and perplexities of our age? Who of us can affirm with confidence that he has never yielded to the master temptation of dividing in order to rule? If David Lloyd George has thriven through the world's confusion and disintegration, if he has been a Mephistophelian force sowing distrust throughout a continent, dissolving previous alliances, cleaving parties in twain, and embittering personal relationships, it is because, first of all, like legion in the gospel story, he was himself in disintegration. He who would serve others must first achieve verity within himself. If through the strange vicissitudes of politics David Lloyd George, the village boy, was given an opportunity of service, in war and peace, greater even than that which fell to the rail-splitter from the Middle West, his failure to rise to it, and thereby to shed lasting luster on the nation to which, despite all, he belongs, must be set down to the fact that, unlike Lincoln's, the key-note of his soul's life has not been union, but duality.