Evening Post WEDNESDAY, JANUARY 30, 1935. SIR AUSTEN INTERVENES

Evening Post, Issue 25, 30 January 1935, Page 10

Evening Post WEDNESDAY, JANUARY 30, 1935. SIR AUSTEN INTERVENES

Mr. MacDonald still has nothing j to.say-afcout Mr. Lloyd George and his; New Deal. Mr. Baldwin also is silent, and it begins to look as though the Government would have been in a better position if Sir John Simon had remained silent too. The fear which we expressed on Monday that, in publicly making what was virtually the1 offer to Mr. Lloyd George of a place in the Cabinet, he had spoken too soon seems to have been better founded than our hope that the whole matter had been definitely settled before an exceptionally discreet Minister had thus committed his colleagues. . The Government which was made to look cheap and small by its eagerness to welcome Mr. Lloyd George is maYle to look a good deal cheaper and smaller by the lack of any similar eagerness oh his part. It is possible I that his speech at Birmingham reported yesterday was made before he knew of the offer made by Sir John Simon at Rexhill-on-Sea, but it -is not likely, and even if it. had been the fact there are other ways of replying .besides a public speech, and Mr. Lloyd George has not availed himself of any of them. He has allowed at least 48 hours to pass without any public acknowledgment of a very handsome personal compliment and an offer of practically everything that the Government had to give. It does not look polite but it is not cheap, and it has doubtless improved his chances of exacting the. terms that hp desires. Apart from this aspect of the case the Birmingham meeting has obviously improved,Mr. Lloyd George's position very greatly. The congratulations that he received from Lord Sriowden: and Mr. Churchill .on his Bangor speech were those of two of the ablest men in public life, but in representative weight they were trifling in comparison with the compliment that he received at Birmingham. Lord Snowden is an Ishmaelite with no organised following at all. Mr. Churchill calls himself a Conservative, . but rie may at any time elect, or be compelled, to take his place beside Lord Snowden in the wilderness. He is already in open revolt against the party's policy on India and other matters, and he mingled with his congratulations to Mr. Lloyd George a cruel and contemptuous gibe at the Prime Minister which certainly did not add to their weight. As. an expert in the diagnosis of public opinion Mr. Lloyd George would recognise in the mere presence of Sir Austen Chamberlain at his Birmingham meeting something of much greater value than the eulogies of these far abler men. For, whereas Lord Snowden and Mr. Churchill are brilliant and irresponsible Bohemians much like himself, Sir Austen is a man of the solid, conscientious, and sure-footed type that faithfully represents the genius of the British nation and therefore commands its confidence. It is probable that outside the Cabinet nobody, and inside it Mr. Baldwin alone, carries greater weight with the public than Sir Austen Chamberlain.

The presence of such a man at one of Mr. Lloyd George's meetings would have seemed a sheer impossibility a few days agol But on this occasion not only was Sir Austen present to supply the element of character in which Mr. Lloyd George is conspicuously lacking, but he may be said to have given him a certificate of character in a speech which Mr. Lloyd George himself could not have improved if he had had the writing of it. The speech is said to have been brief, but even if it went no further than the single sentence of our cabled report it must be recognised as one of the weightiest and most significant that the nation has listened to for a long time.

Ho said that ho believed that everyone, no matter what Ms political opinions were, admired tho contribution which Mr. Lloyd George made in the spirit of the" opening sentence of his great speech at Bangor, the spirit of! a man who had had all that ambition could offer, who had no personal ob-

jccts to fulfil, no feuds to purßUo, but thought that he could contribute something to the recovery of his country.

It was a magnificent complement, a compliment of the kind that even Sir Austen Chamberlain's opponents would have regarded as-perfectly appropriate if it had been applied to him, and if even his own party do not question his competence to pass it on, the way will be cleared for a reconstruction of the Government that will greatly relieve the anxieties of the nation.

As "The Times" pointed out in its comments on the Bangor speech, Mr. Lloyd George's, chief handicap is "that very many of his countrymen are not disposed to give him their complete confidence." Hitherto Sir John Simon, Sir Austen Chamberlain, and virtually the whole Conservative Party have been among the number. Sir John is now able "alike on personal and on national grounds" to welcome Mr. Lloyd George back to active political life, and, doubtless with the consent of the Cabinet, to offer him a place. Have Sir John Simon and his colleagues anything to justify their sudden change of front but this one brilliant speech? Sir Austen Chamberlain is quite content to rely upon that speech alone, for he finds in it "the spirit of a man who had had all that ambition could offer, who had no" personal objects to fulfil, ho feuds to pursue, but thought that he could contribute something to the recovery of his country." If the last of these points be excluded, anybody of Sir Austen's way of thinking who had spoken in this1 fashion of Mr. Lloyd George a week or two ago would have been I suspected of irony. There have, of course, been many sudden, sincere, and permanent conversions, and it is quite possible that this may be one of them. But are responsible statesmen justified in so regarding it, and in basing upon it decisions that, for good or for evil, may be of incalculable importance to the country, on the,faith of a single speech, however brilliant? The glamour of a brilliant speech is, indeed, as evefybody who is not under its immediate spell knows perfectly well, no evidence of its soundness, and may be just as potent to lead in a wrong as in a right direction. With his wonderful oratorical powers, Mr. Lloyd George himself has illustrated this so often that one might have expected that men who know him as well as Sir Austen Chamberlain and Sir John Simon do would be particularly on their" guard, and perhaps they were. But to an outsider it looks as though they were risking too much on the impressions made by a single powerful speech. We trust that the risk may prove to have been justified, and that when Mr. Lloyd George breaks silence on a point which everybody else is talking about it will be to show that he has abandoned his vendetta against the Prime Minister and become a loyal member of a reconstructed and greatly strengthened Cabinet. ..-..'..