The Mirrors of Downing Street | Page 2

dust intended for the eyes of the public; but I think that the worst of all hindrances to true vision is breathed on the mirrors by those self-regarding public men in whom principle is crumbling and moral earnestness is beginning to moulder. One would wipe away those smears.
My duster is honest cotton; the hand that holds it is at least clean; and the energy of the rubbing is inspired solely by the hope that such labour may be of some benefit to my country.
I think our statesmen may be better servants of the great nation they have the honour to serve if they see themselves as others see them--others who are not political adversaries, and who are more interested in the moral and intellectual condition of the State than in the fortunes of its parties.
No man can ever be worthy of England; but we must be anxious when the heart and centre of public service are not an earnest desire to be as worthy of her as possible.

CONTENTS

CHAPTER PAGE
PUBLISHER'S NOTE v
INTRODUCTION vii
I.--MR. LLOYD GEORGE 1
II.--LORD CARNOCK 19
III.--LORD FISHER 29
IV.--MR. ASQUITH 39
V.--LORD NORTHCLIFFE 49
VI.--MR. ARTHUR BALFOUR 59
VII.--LORD KITCHENER 71
VIII.--LORD ROBERT CECIL 85
IX.--MR. WINSTON CHURCHILL 97
X.--LORD HALDANE 109
XI.--LORD RHONDDA 123
XII.--LORD INVERFORTH 135
XIII.--LORD LEVERHULME 151
XIV.--CONCLUSION 163

ILLUSTRATIONS
RT. HON. DAVID LLOYD GEORGE Frontispiece LORD CARNOCK 20
BARON FISHER 30
RT. HON. HERBERT HENRY ASQUITH 40
LORD NORTHCLIFFE 50
RT. HON. ARTHUR JAMES BALFOUR 60
LORD KITCHENER 72
LORD ROBERT CECIL 86
RT. HON. WINSTON CHURCHILL 98
RT. HON. RICHARD BURDON HALDANE 110
LORD RHONDDA 124
LORD INVERFORTH 136
LORD LEVERHULME 152

MR. LLOYD GEORGE

THE RT. HON. DAVID LLOYD GEORGE
Born, Manchester, 1863; son of the late Wm. George, Master of the Hope Street Unitarian Schools, Liverpool. Educated in a Welsh Church School and under tutors. By profession a solicitor. President of the Board of Trade, 1905-8; Chancellor of the Exchequer, 1908-15; Minister of Munitions, 1915-16; Secretary for War, 1916; Prime Minister, 1916-20.

CHAPTER I
MR. LLOYD GEORGE
_"And wars, like mists that rise against the sun, Made him but greater seem, not greater grow."_
DRYDEN.
If you think about it, no one since Napoleon has appeared on the earth who attracts so universal an interest as Mr. Lloyd George. This is a rather startling thought.
It is significant, I think, how completely a politician should overshadow all the great soldiers and sailors charged with their nation's very life in the severest and infinitely the most critical military struggle of man's history.
A democratic age, lacking in colour, and antipathetic to romance, somewhat obscures for us the pictorial achievement of this remarkable figure. He lacks only a crown, a robe, and a gilded chair easily to outshine in visible picturesqueness the great Emperor. His achievement, when we consider what hung upon it, is greater than Napoleon's, the narrative of his origin more romantic, his character more complex. And yet who does not feel the greatness of Napoleon?--and who does not suspect the shallowness of Mr. Lloyd George?
History, it is certain, will unmask his pretensions to grandeur with a rough, perhaps with an angry hand; but all the more because of this unmasking posterity will continue to crowd about the exposed hero asking, and perhaps for centuries continuing to ask, questions concerning his place in the history of the world. "How came it, man of straw, that in Armageddon there was none greater than you?"
The coldest-blooded amongst us, Mr. Massingham of The Nation for example, must confess that it was a moment rich in the emotion which bestows immortality on incident when this son of a village schoolmaster, who grew up in a shoemaker's shop, and whose boyish games were played in the street of a Welsh hamlet remote from all the refinements of civilization and all the clangours of industrialism, announced to a breathless Europe without any pomposity of phrase and with but a brief and contemptuous gesture of dismissal the passing away from the world's stage of the Hapsburgs and Hohenzollerns--those ancient, long glorious, and most puissant houses whose history for an ?on was the history of Europe.
Such topsy-turvydom, such historical anarchy, tilts the figure of Mr. Lloyd George into a salience so conspicuous that for a moment one is tempted to confuse prominence with eminence, and to mistake the slagheap of upheaval for the peaks of Olympus.
But how is it that this politician has attained even to such super-prominence?
Another incident of which the public knows nothing, helps one, I think, to answer this question. Early in the struggle to get munitions for our soldiers a meeting of all the principal manufacturers of armaments was held in Whitehall with the object of persuading them to pool their trade secrets. For a long time this meeting was nothing more than a succession of blunt speeches on the part of provincial manufacturers, showing with an unanswerable commercial logic that the suggestion of revealing these secrets on which their fortunes depended was beyond the bounds of reason. All