EMOTIONAL FORCE

Otago Daily Times, Issue 25805, 28 March 1945, Page 6

EMOTIONAL FORCE

GIFT OF IMPROVISATION LIFE OF GREAT SURPRISES Science performs miracles daily, but it can neither provide nor explain the force of nature called David Lloyd George. Nothing in his ancestry would have foretold his career. A century hence historians will variously expound it. He enjoyed none of the advantages of Eton and Harrow, but a shoemaking uncle, in whose house he was entered, proved to be a firstclass private tutor. He went neither to Oxford nor to Cambridge, but to a Welsh Baptist chapel and a village debating society, and was immersed in the Bible, Nonconformity, and the Gladstonian tradition. As a young lawyer he showed from the first a defiant audacity in the courts, critic cised his “ betters ” in the press, became a county council alderman at 26, and a radical member of Parliament at 27. He had to earn his own living, and was entirely without influence other than his abilities could command. He not only did not belong to the governing class; he was so much an outsider that Mayfair was certain he had no manners, so thick was the slime with which he plastered his *• Limehousing ” speeches. He opposed the Boer war and countenanced passive resistance to the Balfour Education Act of 1902. Critics Surprised

He was never in a minor parliamentary office but went straight to be President of the Board of Trade under Campbell-Bannerman in 1906, and two years later was Chancellor of the Exchequer and talking of robbing hen-

roosts. In both offices he surprised his critics by displaying qualities of action which do not normally go with those of a brilliant rhetorician. At the Treasury he saw that finance could be used as a constructive instrument of reform and he launched the Liberal Party on a social programme which, had it not been internin' by the war, would most certainly have anticipated most features of the Beveridge Report. Because of an abnormal gift of improvisation he was charged with having no basic philosophy, and there is a sense in which this is true, as his readiness to use all parties showed; but he was always a radical democrat in principle and a New Dealer in practice, more akin to Franklin Roosevelt than to Woodrow Wilson; at once an opportuntist and an optimist, a supple and nimble negotiator, unhampered by precedents, swift to exploit the mistakes of opponents, ready to embark on large schemes without a paralysing attention to their details, which he left where they belong—to the civil servants. , His reluctance to enter the war in August, 1914, was resolved by the German threat to Belgium and once war was declared he wrought with untiring energy first at the Treasury and then at the Ministry of Munitions and the War Office. No subordinate office could contain or content him. His pace was faster, his sensibilities were more acute, his transmitting and receiving antennae more numerous, than those of his colleagues. Holstein’s comparison of Bismarck to a conjuror with five balls in the air at once fitted Lloyd George. He was a whole coalition of diverse qualities in himself, intensely and simultaneously interested in all fronts, home and foreign, naval and military, sacred and secular.

He, more than anyone else, was responsible for the Coalition Government of May, 1915, and his impatience with Asquith’s direction of the war ultimately brought him to the Premiership in December, 1916. Just as few rich men like to look back on the ways in which they made their first hundred thousand, so few occupants of high political office are proud of every step on their way to the summit. Certain it is that Mr Lloyd George was always a bigger and a better statesman when loaded with the tremendous responsibilities of office than when burdened with leisure outside. Submarine Conquered

Within a few weeks of his elevation he did’ more to change the machine of government than any Prime Minister since Walpole by his creation of the War Cabinet, the two Secretariats, the new Ministries. He imposed his own energy into all parts of the war machine: he learnt from. colleagues; he listened to mutinous juniors in the services and conquered the submarine. He had an actor’s emotional force and an artist’s concentration. The flattery of “ society ” could not corrupt him. He was too humorous to be vain about himself, and no Prime Minister laughed more deliriously at a good joke or a comical situation; his outbursts cf passion, like Napoleon’s, were rarely allowed to rise above his chin. During the “ stunned pessimism" of the U-boat danger, when hope died down in others, it shone in him like a pillar of fire. Of course, he made mistakes, some hard to fcrgive, and chiefly after the war; the 1918 election, the deference in Paris to the Northcliffe telegrams, the encouragement of the Greeks before Chanok.

On October 23, 1922, he paid his last official visit as Prime Minister to the King, and at 4 o’clock that afternoon “ the man who won the war ” as Hitler once described him, walked out of 10 Downing street alone, with his coat collar turned up, swinging a single golf club, a parting gift from a janitor, happy as a sand boy. Nobody in England that day imagined that the Prime Minister who for years had filled the world with his name and fame would never come back. His life had been full of great suprises, and this was the greatest. In that same week the Fascists marched on Rome and the King of Italy made way fcr Mussolini. At home old party rancours revived. The Liberal Party dissolved into fragments; the Labour Party lost its first fine careless rapture; the Conservatives relapsed into Safety First. The mood of the country had changed. The hour for national tranquillity had struck and, with occasional alarms like the general strike, it lasted nearly 20 years, almost long enough to prove that it was a synonym for treason. Lloyd George was far from being a retired or even a reticent volcano; from time to time he burst forth with incendiary

pamphlets and speeches on planning, the land, the coal industry, unemployment. To-day these heretical fireworks look like becoming the orthodox street lamps of the New Britain. But in the thirties there were still many old scores against him. He had often lashed his opponents with merciless, if picturesque, invective, and he got back what he gave. The fires of these ancient controversies are silent in dust and ashes.—The Observer, January 17, 1043.