The Mirrors of Downing Street by Harold Begbie

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[Illustration: RT. HON. DAVID LLOYD GEORGE]

THE MIRRORS OF
DOWNING STREET

SOME POLITICAL REFLECTIONS

BY
A GENTLEMAN WITH A DUSTER (Harold Begbie)

"_Right and wrong are in the nature of things. They are not words and
phrases. They are in the nature of things, and if you transgress the
laws laid down, imposed by the nature of things, depend upon it you will
pay the penalty_."

JOHN MORLEY.

_ILLUSTRATED_

G. P. PUTNAM'S SONS
NEW YORK AND LONDON
The Knickerbocker Press
1921

COPYRIGHT, 1921

BY

G.P. PUTNAM'S SONS

_Printed in the United States of America_

PUBLISHERS' NOTE

America and England have worked and fought together and have brought to
a successful conclusion the great war in defence of civilization against
a military imperialism which was threatening to dominate the world. They
have now responsibilities together in connection with the measures
needed to assure the continued peace of the world and to secure,
particularly for the smaller states and for communities not in a
position to become independent nations, the protection of their
liberties, to which they have as assured a right as that asserted by a
state of first importance which can support its claims with great
armies.

In this work of helping to adjust the present urgent problems of the
world, England is demanding cooperation from America. America could not
if she would, and would not if she could, escape her responsibilities,
as the strongest nation in the world, a nation standing for the rights
of men, for leadership in the family of nations. With these joint
responsibilities resting upon England and America, the personalities of
the men who have during the past few years had in their hands the
direction of the affairs of the United Kingdom and of the great British
Commonwealth must possess an assured interest for every intelligent
American.

The clever author of _The Mirrors of Downing Street_ has brought
together a series of critical and biographical studies, presented as
"reflections" from the mirror in the Imperial council chamber, of
thirteen typical Britons who have done noteworthy work during the years
of the war and who are now grappling with the problems of the peace. The
name of the author is not given, but he is evidently one who has had
intimate personal association with the statesmen and administrators
whose characters he presents. These analyses are not always sympathetic,
and we are not prepared to say that they will be accepted as final. They
are, however, based upon full knowledge of the conditions and a close
personal study of the men. Intelligent Americans will be interested in
the opinions held by a clear-headed, capable English writer of the
characters of leaders like Mr. Asquith, Lloyd George, Mr. Balfour, Lord
Robert Cecil, Winston Churchill, and others, and they will find in these
pages first-hand information and clever and incisive studies of
noteworthy men whose influence has counted, and is still to count, in
shaping the history of Britain and of the world.

G.H.P.

NEW YORK, December, 1920.

INTRODUCTION

Let me say that I hope I have not betrayed any confidences in these
sketches.

Public men must expect criticism, and no criticism is so good for them,
and therefore for the State, as criticism of character; but their
position is difficult, and they may justly complain when those to whom
they have spoken in the candour of private conversation make use of such
confidences for a public purpose.

If here and there I have in any degree approached this offence, let me
urge two excuses. First, inspired by a pure purpose I might very easily
have said far more than I have said: and, second, my purpose is neither
to grind my own axe (as witness my anonymity) nor to inflict personal
pain (as witness my effort to be just in all cases), but truly to raise
the tone of our public life.

It is the conviction that the tone of our public life is low, and that
this low tone is reacting disastrously in many directions, which has set
me about these studies in political personality.

There is too 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 aeon 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 the interjected arguments of the military and official
gentlemen representing the Government were easily proved by these
hard-headed manufacturers, responsible to their workpeople and
shareholders for the prosperity of their competing undertakings, to be
impracticable if not preposterous.

At a moment when the proposal of the Government seemed lost, Mr. Lloyd
George leant forward in his chair, very pale, very quiet, and very
earnest. "Gentlemen," he said in a voice which produced an extraordinary
hush, "have you forgotten that your sons, at this very moment, are being
killed--killed in hundreds and thousands? They are being killed by
German guns for want of British guns. Your sons, your brothers--boys at
the dawn of manhood!--they are being wiped out of life in thousands!
Gentlemen, give me guns. Don't think of your trade secrets. Think of
your children. Help them! Give me those guns."

This was no stage acting. His voice broke, his eyes filled with tears,
and his hand, holding a piece of notepaper before him, shook like a
leaf. There was not a man who heard him whose heart was not touched, and
whose humanity was not quickened. The trade secrets were pooled. The
supply of munitions was hastened.

This is the secret of his power. No man of our period, when he is
profoundly moved, and when he permits his genuine emotion to carry him
away, can utter _an appeal to conscience_ with anything like so
compelling a simplicity. His failure lies in a growing tendency to
discard an instinctive emotionalism for a calculated astuteness which
too often attempts to hide its cunning under the garb of honest
sentiment. His intuitions are unrivalled: his reasoning powers
inconsiderable.

When Mr. Lloyd George first came to London he shared not only a room in
Gray's Inn, but the one bed that garret contained with a
fellow-countryman. They were both inconveniently poor, but Mr. Lloyd
George the poorer in this, that as a member of Parliament his expenses
were greater. The fellow-lodger, who afterwards became private secretary
to one of Mr. Lloyd George's rivals, has told me that no public speech
of Mr. Lloyd George ever equalled in pathos and power the speeches which
the young member of Parliament would often make in those hungry days,
seated on the edge of the bed, or pacing to and fro in the room,
speeches lit by one passion and directed to one great object, lit by the
passion of justice, directed to the liberation of all peoples oppressed
by every form of tyranny.

This spirit of the intuitional reformer, who feels cruelty and wrong
like a pain in his own blood, is still present in Mr. Lloyd George, but
it is no longer the central passion of his life. It is, rather, an
aside: as it were a memory that revives only in leisure hours. On
several occasions he has spoken to me of the sorrows and sufferings of
humanity with an unmistakable sympathy. I remember in particular one
occasion on which he told me the story of his boyhood: it was a moving
narrative, for never once did he refer to his own personal deprivations,
never once express regret for his own loss of powerful encouragements in
the important years of boyhood. The story was the story of his widowed
mother and of her heroic struggle, keeping house for her shoemaking
brother-in-law on the little money earned by the old bachelor's village
cobbling, to save sixpence a week--sixpence to be gratefully returned to
him on Saturday night. "That is the life of the poor!" he exclaimed
earnestly. Then he added with bitterness, "And when I try to give them
five shillings a week in their old age I am called the 'Cad of the
Cabinet'!"

Nothing in his life is finer than the struggle he waged with the Liberal
Cabinet during his days as Chancellor of the Exchequer. The private
opposition he encountered in Downing Street, the hatred and contempt of
some of his Liberal colleagues, was exceeded on the other side of
politics only in the violent mind of Sir Edward Carson. Even the gentle
John Morley was troubled by his hot insistences. "I had better go," he
said to Mr. Lloyd George; "I am getting old: I have nothing now for you
but criticism." To which the other replied, "Lord Morley, I would sooner
have your criticism than the praise of any man living"--a perfectly
sincere remark, sincere, I mean, with the emotionalism of the moment.
His schemes were disordered and crude; nevertheless the spirit that
informed them was like a new birth in the politics of the whole world. A
friend of mine told me that he had seen pictures of Mr. Lloyd George on
the walls of peasants' houses in the remotest villages of Russia.

But those days have departed and taken with them the fire of Mr. Lloyd
George's passion. The laboured peroration about the hills of his
ancestors, repeated to the point of the ridiculous, is all now left of
that fervid period. He has ceased to be a prophet. Surrounded by
second-rate people, and choosing for his intimate friends mainly the new
rich, and now thoroughly liking the game of politics for its amusing
adventure, he has retained little of his original genius except its
quickness.

His intuitions are amazing. He astonished great soldiers in the war by
his premonstrations. Lord Milner, a cool critic, would sit by the sofa
of the dying Dr. Jameson telling how Mr. Lloyd George was right again
and again when all the soldiers were wrong. Lord Rhondda, who disliked
him greatly and rather despised him, told me how often Mr. Lloyd George
put heart into a Cabinet that was really trembling on the edge of
despair. It seems true that he never once doubted ultimate victory,
and, what is much more remarkable, never once failed to read the
German's mind.

I think that the doom that has fallen upon him comes in some measure
from the amusement he takes in his mental quickness, and the reliance he
is sometimes apt to place upon it. A quick mind may easily be a
disorderly mind. Moreover quickness is not one of the great qualities.
It is indeed seldom a partner with virtue. Morality appears on the whole
to get along better without it. According to Landor, it is the talent
most open to suspicion:

Quickness is among the least of the mind's properties, and belongs
to her in almost her lowest state: nay, it doth not abandon her
when she is driven from her home, when she is wandering and insane.
The mad often retain it; the liar has it; the cheat has it: we find
it on the racecourse and at the card-table: education does not give
it, and reflection takes away from it.

When we consider what Mr. Lloyd George might have done with the fortunes
of humanity we are able to see how great is his distance from the
heights of moral grandeur.

He entered the war with genuine passion. He swept thousands of
hesitating minds into those dreadful furnaces by the force of that
passion. From the first no man in the world sounded so ringing a trumpet
note of moral indignation and moral aspiration. Examine his earlier
speeches and in all of them you will find that his passion to destroy
Prussian militarism was his passion to recreate civilization on the
foundations of morality and religion. He was Peace with a sword. Germany
had not so much attempted to drag mankind back to barbarism as opened a
gate through which mankind might march to the promised land. Lord Morley
was almost breaking his heart with despair, and to this day regards
Great Britain's entrance into the war as a mistake. Sir Edward Grey was
agonizing to avert war; but Mr. Lloyd George was among the first to see
this war as the opportunity of a nobler civilization. Destroy German
militarism, shatter the Prussian tradition, sweep away dynastic
autocracies, and what a world would result for labouring humanity!

This was 1914. But soon after the great struggle had begun the note
changed. Hatred of Germany and fear for our Allies' steadfastness
occupied the foremost place in his mind. Victory was the objective and
his definition of victory was borrowed from the prize-ring. A better
world had to wait. He became more and more reckless. There was a time
when his indignation against Lord Kitchener was almost uncontrollable.
For Mr. Asquith he never entertained this violent feeling, but gradually
lost patience with him, and only decided that he must go when
procrastination appeared to jeopardize "a knock-out blow."

Anyone who questioned the cost of the war was a timid soul. What did it
matter what the war cost so long as victory was won? Anyone who
questioned the utter recklessness which characterized the Ministry of
Munitions was a mere fault-finder. I spoke to him once of the unrest in
factories, where boys could earn L15 and L16 a week by merely watching a
machine they knew nothing about, while the skilled foremen, who alone
could put those machines right, and who actually invented new tools to
make the new machines of the inventors, were earning only the fixed wage
of fifty shillings a week. I thought this arrangement made for unrest
and must prove dangerous after the war. So eager, so hot was his mind on
the end, that he missed the whole point of my remark. "What does it
matter," he exclaimed impatiently, "what we pay those boys as long as we
win the war?"

And the end of it was the humiliation of the General Election in 1918.
Where was the new world, then? He was conscious only of Lord
Northcliffe's menace. Germany must pay and the Kaiser must be tried!
There was no trumpet note in those days, and there has been no trumpet
note since. Imagine how Gladstone would have appealed to the conscience
of his countrymen! Was there ever a greater opportunity in
statesmanship? After a victory so tremendous, was there any demand on
the generosity of men's souls which would not gladly have been granted?
The long struggle between capital and labour, which tears every state in
two, might have been ended: the heroism and self-sacrifice of the war
might have been carried forward to the labours of reconstruction: the
wounds of Europe might have been healed by the charities of God almost
to the transfiguration of humanity.

Germany must pay for the war!--and he knew that by no possible means
could Germany be made to pay that vast account without the gravest
danger of unemployment here and Bolshevism in Central Europe! The Kaiser
must be tried!--and he knew that the Kaiser never would be tried!

Millennium dipped below the horizon, and the child's riding-whip which
Lord Northcliffe cracks when he is overtaken by a fit of Napoleonic
indigestion assumed for the Prime Minister the proportions of the
Damoclesian sword. He numbered himself among the Tououpinambos, those
people who "have no name for God and believe that they will get into
Paradise by practising revenge and eating up their enemies."

I can see nothing sinister in what some people regard as his plots
against those who disagree with him. He tries, first of all, to win them
to his way of thinking: if he fails, and if they still persist in
attacking him, he proceeds to destroy them. It is all part of life's
battle! But one would rather that the Prime Minister of Great Britain
was less mixed up in journalism, less afraid of journalism, and less
occupied, however indirectly, in effecting, or striving to effect,
editorial changes. His conduct in the last months of the war and during
the election of 1918 was not only unworthy of his position but marked
him definitely as a small man. He won the election, but he lost the
world.

It is a great thing to have won the war, but to have won it only at the
cost of more wars to come, and with the domestic problems of
statesmanship multiplied and intensified to a degree of the gravest
danger, this is an achievement which cannot move the lasting admiration
of the human race.

The truth is that Mr. Lloyd George has gradually lost in the world of
political makeshift his original enthusiasm for righteousness. He is not
a bad man to the exclusion of goodness; but he is not a good man to the
exclusion of badness. A woman who knows him well once described him to
me in these words: "He is clever, and he is stupid; truthful and
untruthful; pure and impure; good and wicked; wonderful and commonplace:
in a word, he is everything." I am quite sure that he is perfectly
sincere when he speaks of high aims and pure ambition; but I am equally
sure that it is a relief to him to speak with amusement of trickery,
cleverness, and the tolerances or the cynicisms of worldliness.

Something of the inward man may be seen in the outward. Mr. Lloyd
George--I hope I may be pardoned by the importance and interest of the
subject for pointing it out--is curiously formed. His head is unusually
large, and his broad shoulders and deep chest admirably match his quite
noble head; but below the waist he appears to dwindle away, his legs
seeming to bend under the weight of his body, so that he waddles rather
than walks, moving with a rolling gait which is rather like a seaman's.
He is, indeed, a giant mounted on a dwarf's legs.

So in like manner one may see in him a soul of eagle force striving to
rise above the earth on sparrow's wings.

That he is attractive to men of a high order may be seen from the
devotion of Mr. Philip Kerr; that he is able to find pleasure in a far
lower order of men may be seen from his closer friendships. It is
impossible to imagine Mr. Gladstone enjoying the society of Mr. Lloyd
George's most constant companion although that gentleman is a far better
creature than the cause of his fortunes; and one doubts if Lord
Beaconsfield would have trusted even the least frank of his private
negotiations to some of the men who enjoy the Prime Minister's political
confidence. Nor can Mr. Lloyd George retort that he makes use of all
kinds of energy to get his work done, for one knows very well that he is
far more at his ease with these third-rate people than with people of a
higher and more intellectual order. For culture he has not the very
least of predilections; and the passion of morality becomes more and
more one of the pious memories of his immaturity.

Dr. Clifford would be gladly, even beautifully, welcomed; but after an
hour an interruption by Sir William Sutherland would be a delightful
relief.

M. Clemenceau exclaimed of him, lifting up amazed hands, "I have never
met so ignorant a man as Lloyd George!" A greater wit said of him, "I
believe Mr. Lloyd George _can_ read, but I am perfectly certain he never
does."

I detect in him an increasing lethargy both of mind and body. His
passion for the platform, which was once more to him than anything else,
has almost gone. He enjoys well enough a fight when he is in it, but to
get him into a fight is not now so easy as his hangers-on would wish.
The great man is tired, and, after all, evolution is not to be hurried.
He loves his arm-chair, and he loves talking. Nothing pleases him for a
longer spell than desultory conversation with someone who is content to
listen, or with someone who brings news of electoral chances. Of course
he is a tired man, but his fatigue is not only physical. He mounted up
in youth with wings like an eagle, in manhood he was able to run without
weariness, but the first years of age find him unable to walk without
faintness--the supreme test of character. If he had been able to keep
the wings of his youth I think he might have been almost the greatest
man of British history. But luxury has invaded, and cynicism; and now a
cigar in the depths of an easy-chair, with Miss Megan Lloyd George on
the arm, and a clever politician on the opposite side of the hearth,
this is pleasanter than any poetic vapourings about the millennium.

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