The Mirrors of Downing Street | Page 2

much dust on the mirrors of Downing Street for our public
men to see themselves as others see them. Some of that dust is from the
war; some of it is the old-fashioned political 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 æon 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,