"L. G." : AN APPRECIATION
By SIR ARTHUR SALTER, M.P.
pOSTERIM is selective in its nomenclature. It chooses the name associated with the events that give a claim to enduring fame in preference to the formal title at the time of death. Disraeli has survived the Earl of Beaconsfield, though it was the Earl who first brought back a disputable "peace with honour" from Germany. We may be sure that it is "Lloyd George," without the 'prefix -" Earl," which will survive in public memory. But it is as "L: G." that those who served him in his great period will think of him at this moment.
Perspective is the difficulty of the contemporary writer. Recent memories loom large, and he has to look back over an intervening screen of lesser years to those that matter most. "L. G." ceased to be Prime Minister in 1922. For him the change was not, as it commonly is for rearing Premiers, softened by leadership of a great opposition party, an alternativ,f. Government, with a prospect of return to office. He lost at once and for ever both office and all great responsibility. He remained as a great personality—and a great voice from the past, but vox et praeterea nihtl. And his dynamic energy was always at its best when yoked to a great task ; at other times he was like a powerful motor which is thrown out of gear, "races" and suffers damage. It is the more necessary to concentrate attention, as the historian will, on those two great decades in which he towered, In commanding eminence, over the public life of his country, Europe and—for a time—the world ; and to recall, before they are forgotten, from that time some of the personal impressions which escape the historian more easily than recorded events.
No man of his time approached him in his combination of creative force, courage and magnetism. I recall, shortly before the last war, a tirade by a political opponent, killed later in the conflict. He was a Conservative, an English country gentleman. a High Churchman, bitterly antipathetic to "L. G." as a radical demagogue, a Celt and a Nonconformist. After a long denunciation of every aspect of "L. G.'s " policy and personality, he paused for some minutes, and then, in a •different voice, added: "But, having said all that, if England is ever fighting for her life, I would choose him as our leader:" Albert Thomas told me he took "L. G." to Verdun—they were both Ministers of Munitions at the time. They met some hundreds of French officers, momentatily withdrawn from the line for a hasty meal. They spoke no English, "L. G." spoke no French. But he raised his glass with "Viva la France" and a few added words of deep emotion. His personality radiated from him and swept his listeners. "There was not one of those men who would not then have died for him. I have never seen such personal magnetism," said Thomas, himself rich in the quality.
There was a hard fibre about his purpose which both used popu- larity and defied it. No man who has risen rapidly from obscurity to great power has ever been less the victim of vanity and social, flattery. Coming suddenly into public notice as a young Welsh lawyer entering Parliament, he took the unpopular view about the Boer war. He was not silenced. Then, a few years later, as Presi- dent of the Board of Trade, he handled with great success some menacing industrial disputes. The country suddenly realised his persuasive skill and magnetism. For a moment he was popular with all those who had most hated him. Every door in London was open to him ; the tempting prize, then more glittering and less attainable than it became later, was dangled before the arriviste ; but in vain. He was not diverted from his purpose for a moment. He proceeded with an agitation and a policy which for a decade brought him once more the hatred of the privileged classes. He was hated as Roosevelt is hated in Wall Street—and was as little deflected from his goal. But "L. G.," unlike Roosevelt, had no background of assured position to support him. There is, of course, another side. For good and ill alike, he was ruthless in personal relations. He had little of the personal loyalty of Asquith and the present Prime Minister. He parted without excessive regrets from those who had, in his view, ceased to serve him well. He showed little mercy to those who were broken in his service (he had, said one who knew him well, a kind of animal repulsion from a sick member of the herd). He was capable ol receiving the credit for achievements which would have been more justly shared with others. His wit was wounding and unforgettable, "A mind like a grasshopper," "standing like a stork by the Lake of Locarno," "he sat on the fence until the iron entered into his soul," and many another barbed phrase rankled in the minds of the victims, and left lasting enemies. With a general outlook on ultimate goals that was not easily changeable, he was to an exceptional degree an opportunist in the development of his policy. To the logical, the precise, the meticulous, his methods were exasperating. It was a tragedy for both countries that, at the most crucial stage of their relations, the leading figures in France and Great Britain were as temperamentally antipathetic as Poincare and Lloyd George. His approach to a problem was intuitive rather than logical. His presentation of a situation was impressionistic rather than photographic—with more truth in the general picure than in the detail of inconvenient fact. He was uneasy in dealing with powerful organisations—whether Trade Unions or the Civil Service—through their established hierarchy and by the orderly methods to which they are accustomed. He preferred a more fluid medium of responsive personalities, on whom, as he knew, he could impress his own.
But if these were the defects of his qualities, he had also the qualities of his defects. The other aspect of his opportunism in method was his accessibility to the ideas, the special knowledge, the trends of opinion around him. "The great temptation," he once said, "of a man who reaches supreme office is to 'cease to listen.
It was a temptation to which he himself never succumbed either in or out of office. There are those—Woodrow Wilson was notably among them—who sustain their strength by detachment from immediate personal influence, who shun contact with strong per- sonalities around them as if to preserve the integrity and indepen- dence of their own thought. Btlt Lloyd George both gave and received in ceaseless and intimate talk with men of every age and aptitude. It was a part of—and a medium for—his irresistible per- sonal charm. I recall an evening some ten years ago when most of, the company were young Conservatives of the progressive wing. AU were entranced, the more because their own ideas were woven into the fabric of his theme and seemed to enrich it. As we came away they exclaimed with one voice, "Oh, if we had such a leader! " And I have seen the same effect on younger men as far on the left of his political position as these were on the right. I will venture to summarise an impression of these same qualities as they were displayed in the Conference period of the early 1920s, in words I wrote nearer the time. "Magnetic, eloquent, dominating, per- suasive ; with gaps in his knowledge, but understanding so much more than he knew ; gathering his impressions from those around him as if by invisible antennae ; indirect and unexpected in method, but courageous, skilful and inflexible in the pursuit of his main objective ; intolerably irritating to the precise, the exact, the official—at every meeting of the Powers at this period incessu patuu—he was visibly the greatest personality of all those present."
These qualities were projected, over twenty years, on a great and enlarging screen of public events. In his first period he was the Social Reformer. More than any single man he shaped the course of Britain's new democracy ; he paved the way, laid the founda- tions, fixed the design for what is now the vast and still growing structure of social security. To Asquith as well as to him is due the credit for Old Age Pensions ; to the present Prime Minister u well as to him the credit for Labour Exchanges and Unemployment Insurance ; Masterman served him well in National Health Insur- ance. But his was the driving force, his wit and eloquence were the high explosive that blasted obstructions from the path. And how formidable were those obstructions in the now distant days of the
"doctors' strike" and the "servants' tax" it is not easy to realise in an age grown accustomed to the social objectives of which he was pioneer. None but he at that time could have cleared them. But if a Reformer, and a Radical, he was not a Revolutionary. For all the violence of his attacks on privi- lege, for all that was called his demagoguery, for all his oppor- tunism, there was a consistent moderation in his ultimate outlook —which is easier to realise by the standards of 1945 than of 1910. He wanted less inequality, he wanted equality of opportunity, but not a dead level of equality. He was a Liberal—a radical Liberal— but neither a Socialist, nor in the full sense an egalitarian.
The second period is that of the War Leader. He mobilised the country to its greatest effort—as, again, no one else could then have done. And again it was with a great handicap. Under the different conditions of this war it is not easy to appreciate the disadvantage of a Prime Minister who was not Chairman of the Conservative Party, but a Radical. It was a very difficult matter then to make a change io the higher military command. None of those who worked with, or under, him would, I think, question the greatness of his leadership. He had flair, indefatigable energy and resilience—his courage rose to meet disaster and never quailed before it. He had in his Cabinet some great men ; some forceful personalities ; some difficult colleagues —Balfour, Milner, General Smuts, the present Prime Minister, Carson, both the Chamberlains. But there was no doubt who was Prime Minister. All acknowledged his ascendancy, though some—not the greatest—forgot rather easily afterwards. In his third period as Peacemaker, he had as a support to his policy, at the end of the war, the strongest Navy, Army and Air Force in the world. He was not, however, helped by the new Parliament of 1918, for whose character the electoral appeal he had himself made, in a rare moment of flagging faith, was in part responsible. But for a brief period, after defeat or illness had taken both Wilson and Clemenceau from the scene, he towered above every leader in the world. The culmination, and turning-point, of his world leadership was the Conference of Genoa. Another Prime Minister remarked to me, "When he rose, it was the voice of Europe speaking. He was for the time, visibly to all men, the greatest man in the world." When the Conference ended in failure, his inter- national position, too, was doomed. A few months later his term of office at home was ended too. In his last period of Elder States- man he showed for the greater part of two decades the same inde- fatigable energy and flashes of the old genius. Powerful inter- ventions, but diminishing influence, were his fate ; and gradually his personal force and penetrating judgement were less continuous. The rest of his life was, indeed, prologue and epilogue to the greatness of a score of years, which will leave him, beyond cavil and question, a pivotal figure in British—and indeed in world—history.
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