What then did Beaverbrook expect as reward for his political services, beyond a peerage and the sublime sense of having "done his duty" where he saw it?
Governor-Generalship of Canada?
Ambassadorship to the United States?
Secretaryship of State for the "Colonies"?
Or the Chancellorship of the Exchequer?
There is really nothing else left for an ambition like this except the Premiership of Great Britain. Brilliant, plotting, crafty and phenomenal, this young man has still the spirit of the corsair. England has not absorbed him. But there is a general election pending over there. The Coalition is not on Gibraltar. Party cleavages are rife. Labour, Liberals, Socialists, Syndicalists, Bolshevists and old-line Unionists are all pitching camps about the Premier's Verdun. When the battle really begins will Gen. Beaverbrook be in the citadel, or working in a headquarters tent to merge any three of the common enemy into a force that will haul down the Coalition flag?
"Why do you think Lloyd George will come back as powerfully as ever?" he was asked here, after his admission that for the time being the Premier was in the doldrums of unpopularity.
"Because—he always does!" was his cautious reply; in which one almost detected the suspicion that he might not; and if so—what?
These are some of the unpredictables. Even the answer Beaverbrook himself might give to-day might be challenged by his action of to-morrow. But this man has always succeeded in finance when a country was prosperous, and in politics when the nation was confronted by emergency. He is still too ambitious to adjourn permanently to Leatherhead, Surrey; too young to write his memoirs. England is a new world. And it may be—unless he has already alienated his personality from his genius—that one of its picturesque discoverers will be Lord Beaverbrook.
Meanwhile he remarks that most of his friends are in Canada. One misses at least a fumbling guess, if in the days to come he will not value those friends, whoever they may be, more than he ever did when he was making millions here or merging politicians over there. Such a man seldom moves his forces just for parade. As Aitken used this country to get himself preferment in England on account of the Empire, so it may be suspected that he has used England—not impossibly—to reclaim in this country whatever credit he lost some time before he left it.