If Mr. Asquith is the brain of the Cabinet and Sir Edward Grey its character, Mr. Lloyd George is its inspiration. No matter what the wave that rolls in, he is always on its crest. He is light as a cork, swift as a swallow, prompt as a tax-collector. There is the magic of genius about this glancing, wayward, debonair Welshman, who, with nothing but his own native wit and dauntless courage, his sling and his sling and his stone, as it were, - has stormed the seats of the mighty and changed the whole current of British politics. For ten years the fiercest battle in modern political annals has raged around his crest. All the forces of wealth, influence, society, and privilege have been mobilized for his suppression; for with a true instinct they have seen in his agile mind, his far-reaching aims, and his unrivaled influence over the democracy, the supreme peril to the dominion of the aristocratic order in the sphere of public affairs. And at the end of the breathless struggle, when the country is fighting for its very existence, his fiercest foes are thanking heaven for Lloyd George, and the city bankers are suggesting, half in jest, but half in earnest, that his services should be rewarded with a dukedom. The secret of this unprecedented career is not obscure. He is the first real expression of the suprema

cy

of the democracy. Other men have interpreted democracy from without, philosophically, objectively; but here is one who comes hot from its very heart, uttering its thoughts in its own language, feeling its agonies and aspirations with passionate sympathy, making them vivid and actual with the glow of his mind and the swift imaginative illumination of a poetic temperament. All his thought and action comes from his direct experience of life. No man of distinction ever carried less impedimenta, or was more free from the dominion of the past or of other minds.

He lives by vision, not thought; by the swiftness of his apprehension, not by the slow correlation of fact and theory. If he wants to introduce a shipping bill, he takes a voyage to study the life of the sailor at first hand; if he wants to know about coal-mining, he goes down a coal-mine; if he wants to know what is wrong with casual labor, he mixes with the crowd at the dock-gates in the early morning, to hear with his own ears and see with his own eyes. It is this directness and actuality, this independence of all theory and doctrine, that give him his astonishing volition. He is not encumbered with precedent, but leaps to his own conclusion and flashes to his own goal careless of all the criticisms of the learned. He takes his sympathies for his counselors and leaves political doctrine to the schoolmen. It follows that he is least convincing and least convinced when his case rests on a statement of theory. For example, he has made the most brilliant series of speeches delivered during the past fifteen years; but though the fiscal issue has been one of the prominent subjects of discussion, I cannot recall one really weighty contribution that he has made to the Free Trade case.

There is, of course, a peril in this empiricism. It is the source at once of the glamour that invests his movements and the nervous expectancy with which those movements are watched. But he has two safeguards. The first is his real passion for the common people. With all his success and all his wanderings into high places, his heart is untraveled. It turns unfailingly to the little village from which he sprang, between the mountains and the sea, and to the old shoemaker uncle who watched over his childhood and taught himself French that he might pave the way of the boy to the law, and who still lives to marvel at the man who has made a sounding-board of the world. That love

of the people, sincere and abiding, is his saving grace. And, in the next place, he is not unconscious of the quality which is at once his strength and his weakness. He has no petty vanity; and though he does not go to textbooks, he goes to men. On every subject as it arises he gathers round him the best expert minds available; thrashes out the problems over the breakfast table, in committee, on the golf links, everywhere; and with his easy accessibility to ideas arrives at conclusions which are at once informed and practical.

It is this practice which makes the giddy and daring path he has followed so secure, and so triumphant. And it is this practice also which, during this crisis, has made him the idol of his former enemies. The nation was confronted with the menace of an incalculable financial disaster. A timid man, hedged round with academic restraints, would have brought the city to ruin. Mr. Lloyd George seized the situation with the imaginative courage of a creative mind. The old foundations had gone. He had to extemporize new ones on the spot; and, with that instinct for the men who matter which is so conspicuous a feature of his genius, he converted what might have been a disaster into a triumph which has won a cheer even from the ranks of Tuscany.

Like Mr. Lloyd George, Mr. Churchill, too, is essentially a man of action, though in his extraordinarily various equipment the gifts of abstract speculation and philosophic detachment are not wanting. No one absorbs the atmosphere of a situation more readily than he does, or exhales it with more intellectual conviction, or with a more assured grasp of underlying principles. But though he has a rare power of арpeal to the popular mind, his sympathies are not engaged, and his interest in life is essentially the interest of a man of action and adventure. He brings

into public life the spirit of the eternal boy, curious, eager, intense, egoistic. His career has been an astonishing hand-gallop through every realm of experience, — war, literature, journalism, pleasure, travel, politics, — and it is a source of unceasing wonder that with this furious activity of living he has been able to accumulate such stores of ordered thought, such an air of statesmanlike authority, such mastery of the whole instrument of political life. But through this versatility there runs the outlook and spirit of the soldier, and he translates all the terms of politics into the strategy of the battlefield. His vision is picturesque and dramatic; and if, in the drama of his mind, he sees himself a colossal figure touching the skies, it cannot be denied that his gifts are equal to his ambitions. He is more admired than trusted, for his amazing energy and impetus are felt to be the instruments of a purpose which is wayward, personal, and autocratic. But if on questions of policy he is regarded with some disquiet, in the executive field the powers of his mind, the swiftness and directness of his vision, and the spaciousness of his understanding are invaluable; and it is recognized that the wonderful preparedness of the fleet for the great emergency that has come, is — next, of course, to the work of Lord Fisher — due mainly to his breathless years of activity at the Admiralty. Perhaps the most important feature of that activity was the ruthlessness with which he swept away the less efficient admirals who obstructed the path of the Jellicoes and Beattys. The mortality was frightful. They went by the dozen, and as they went, the agonies of the old brigade became more hoarse and more incoherent. It is this rough handling of the ark that is the source of the attacks on Mr. Churchill which have proceeded from Conservative quarters even during the progress of the war, and its

The part which Lord Kitchener has played has, of course, been purely administrative. His introduction to the Cabinet marked a new departure which was disliked by Liberals, but which was justified by the wholly unprecedented situation. Lord Kitchener is a legend of strength and efficiency. The extraordinary dominion he has over the popular mind was in itself an asset of the first importance. If Kitchener was there, it was all right. If Kitchener wanted more men - well, more men there must be. It would be an interesting study to examine the growth of the legend and the materials out of which it has been fashioned. There are those who regard it as an interesting myth. Certainly the main credit for the extraordinary smoothness and rapidity with which the Expeditionary Force was dispatched belongs, not to Lord Kitchener, whose arrival on the scene was too late to influence the arrangements, but to the war machine created by Lord Haldane, who, for his reward, has been openly assailed in the Conservative press as a pro-German who ought to be out of office if not in the Tower.

IV

There is no space here to deal with the other members of the Cabinet, but something needs to be said on the remarkable coherence that has distinguished it. That coherence is due to the confidence in Mr. Asquith and the spirit of loyalty that is universal in regard to his leadership. But for this fact, there can be no doubt that the Cabinet would have collapsed like a house of cards at the shock of the crisis. It came with such appalling suddenness, the decision had to be so instant, and it had to be made by a cabinet so passionate ly averse to war, that the survival of

der. At first, I believe, it is true to say that none but the inner Cabinet were clear on the subject; and even so late as Sunday, August 2-a day of almost incessant meetings - the dissentients were, if not in a majority, at least so numerous and so powerful that a coalition cabinet seemed inevitable. But as the position of Belgium became more clear, the opposition weakened, and in the end only two members of the Cabinet, Lord Morley and Mr. Burns, resigned. They were accompanied in their retirement by Mr. C. P. Trevelyan, one of the under-secretaries. It was a surprisingly small disruption in the presence of a crisis of such magnitude, and it left the position of the Government practically unaffected. This conveys no reflection upon the respect universally entertained for the two dissentients. Neither of them has since made any public utterance on the subject, and we can only speculate upon the motives of their action; but in both cases I think it will be found that the cause of disagreement is to be looked for in events anterior to the immediate crisis rather than in the facts of the crisis itself. In the case of Lord Morley, a very powerful factor in his decision had undoubtedly no relevance to the duty of the country in the matter. He was the oldest member of the Cabinet, and for a long time his sensitive temperament had chafed under the strain and irritations of office. When, to the general surprise, he took a seat in the House of Lords, he did so, as he said in a letter to Spence Watson, for two reasons: because he found the pressure of life in the House of Commons made the fulfillment of the duties of his office too severe a task; and because, as he was childless, there was no question of a hereditary peerage. It is probable that in any case he would have found himself unequal to the strain of office dur

ing a prolonged struggle, and it was natural that, with his lifelong devotion to the cause of humanity in its widest and least insular aspects, he should not desire to close his public career amid the tumult of universal war. The reasons which operated in the case of Mr. Burns are less apparent, and not least apparent to those who know him best. That he was definitely opposed to intervention is certain; but it is equally certain that there were collateral causes, and among them the indisposition, as the first representative of labor who had ever sat in a British cabinet, to be associated with the conduct of a great war. Since his retirement he has put himself entirely at the service of the Government in those external tasks of administration created by the war, for which his long experience at the Local Government Board have peculiarly fitted him.

It cannot be doubted that the survival of the Asquith Ministry, practically intact, has been a fact of enormous value to the cause of the Allies. There was at the beginning of the war much speculation as to the advisability and probability of a coalition cabinet; but this passed away with the progress of events and the evidence of the extraordinary efficiency of the Government. There were no thinkable alternatives on the other side to the men filling the chief offices, and it would not have been possible for the Conservatives to accept simply a number of the less important positions. Nor, indeed, did they desire office. Freedom from responsibility left them free to criticize, and free also from the odium which the conduct of a war usually brings upon a government, however efficient and successful it may be. It is just to them to say that they have exercised their freedom with great restraint. The truce which the war has brought about in party politics has been so far, on the whole, very fairly

observed. There has been no attempt to create difficulties for the Government, and there has been a general, even generous, recognition of their success. Moreover, although there has been no official intercourse between the front benches, there has been much unofficial consultation. Mr. Austen Chamberlain, Chancellor of the Exchequer in the last Tory Administration, has accepted Mr. Lloyd George's invitation to place his experience at the service of the Treasury; and although he has preserved full freedom to criticize, he has, with that touch of magnanimity which makes him so agreeable a figure in the public life of the country, cordially and even enthusiastically indorsed the measures which his successor in the chancellorship has adopted.

As to the attitude of the House generally, it is one of almost unquestioning acceptance of the decisions of the Government. There has never been such a reign of absolutism in the land since the days of the Stuarts; and the British people, like Warren Hastings, may well express astonishment at its own moderation, at the obedience with which it has surrendered liberties which it had thought were the breath of its existence, at its whispering humbleness in criticism, at its acceptance of an iron discipline of the press, at the unmurmuring instancy with which it gives whatever the Government asks, without so much as requesting details. 'We used to have more bother to get a vote for £1000 through committee than we have now to get a vote for £300,000,000,' said one of the Government whips to me, after Mr. Asquith had asked for the last vote of credit. It would be a mistake to argue from this strange spirit of compliance that the country has undergone any loss of its tradition. It only means that it is overshadowed by a peril that has blotted out temporarily all the ordinary separa

tisms of society, and that there is a universal disposition to avoid any spirit of nagging or querulousness, and to trust the Government absolutely with the fate of the country.

But this restraint will disappear the day that the peril is safely passed. Then an internal struggle of unexampled magnitude will begin. Already behind the stage of the war there is widespread activity and preparation. Among those classes of society (represented in the press by the Morning Post and the Spectator) which for nearly a decade have been vainly resisting the avalanche of social legislation that has proceeded from the Government, there is a strong belief- perhaps it would be truer to say a strong hope that one result of the war will be a powerful reaction in domestic affairs.

The hope, quite frankly, turns upon conscription, or, as it is more discreetly called, national service. Militarism, it is felt, is a thoroughly mischievous thing in Prussia; but it would have great virtues at home. The particular virtue aimed at is internal rather than external. With the overwhelming triumph of the voluntary system, the case for compulsory service and military necessity has vanished, and the peculiar needs of the empire are opposed to conscription. But it is felt that universal service, which has resulted in such subservience to the landed interest in Prussia, would be an effective bulwark in England against the rising tide of democracy and the new tendencies toward social unrest and equalitarianism. If the war and the alarms to which it has given rise leave behind a militarist state, it is felt that it will not have been in vain. The country came very near witnessing a military dictation a year ago, and during the later phases of the Home Rule crisis, the Conservatives (having lost the absolute veto of the House of Lords

as their stand-by) quite openly treated the army as their ultimate line of defense against the authority of the House of Commons. 'A nation in arms' would make that defense invulnerable.

Over against these anticipations, however, there are many considerations to be set. The Labor party has supported the Government with great loyalty, but it has supported it in order to destroy militarism in Prussia and not in order to establish it in England. There is, in spite of the hostile feelings aroused by the war, a singular absence of any real popular antagonism to the German people; there is a very widely and deeply held belief that the struggle is, incidentally, for the liberation of that people, as well as of the peoples of Europe generally, from the domination of the Prussian militarists. Much, of course, will depend upon the character of the settlement and the internal results of the war in Germany; much, also, upon the after-effects of the war with its incalculable economic consequences. But democratic opinion has received a great impulse from the events of the past eight months, and especially from the striking experiments in collectivism which the necessities of the war have imposed upon the country. Not least important among the factors that are being released and that are not likely to work for reaction, is the moral result of the experience through which three million young men, the industrial flower of the nation, are passing in the trenches and camps of France and Belguim.

The direction in which the new forces that are coming to birth will flow will be governed largely by the fate of the Government. That it will survive the war is now generally regarded as certain; but its prospects after the war are beyond the range of profitable speculation. There is this, however, to be re