Huts in Hell

by Daniel A. Poling

As Major Astor greeted me, we turned to the right; and there on the stairway, with his left hand resting lightly on the banister, and a smile lighting his face, stood the Prime Minister. I shall always be glad that I saw him thus. He had just returned from Versailles, where matters of vast and immediate importance to the western front were discussed and settled. England did not yet know that he had arrived. The morrow was to precipitate him into one of the crucial battles of his ministry.

As he stood there he knew of the impending struggle—and he smiled!—not a perfunctory tremor of the lips, but a warming glow that made the great hall a friendly place. The smile was not for me, but for the gentleman at my side. Mr. Astor is a member of the Prime Minister's personal staff, and by his own worth a favorite and close friend of his chief.

David Lloyd George in the moment when I saw him on the stairway answered any question that may have been in my mind as to the personal quality of his leadership; he is virile and magnetic. Square of shoulder and deep-chested, with a straight neck that gives his fine head an erect setting, he has the appearance of added height that few stocky men possess. His color is good; his long hair, which is inclined to curl at the ends, is turning rapidly now; his eyes are clear, and shine; his voice is rich, and sings. He is one of those irresistible personalities, a man who not only dominates and rules by the mastership of his soul as well as by right of his mental genius, but who binds men to himself. His is the complete opposite of the phlegmatic, judicial temperament; his keen calculations in debate, his weighing of an opponent in a political tourney, are the decisions of an almost unerring intuition, and not the conclusions of a cold casuist.

His oratory and his whole leadership are first of the heart. His enemies have assailed him at this point, but they have not found it a vulnerable one. It is the heart of the world that bleeds and fights and triumphs. Only a master of the language of the soul can speak to it and for it, can marshal its forces and inspire them to superhuman activities, can challenge it over a Calvary and lead it to victory.

Perhaps no other man in Europe has been so long familiar to the American people; certainly no other political leader of the Old World has been so popular with the masses in America as Lloyd George. When he risked his life to deliver his soul against the Boer War, the United States cried, "Bravo!" and in his battle with landlordism, his struggle with the House of Lords, his championing of the rights of labor, and his unrelenting efforts to better the conditions surrounding the poor, he had the heart of America with him.

The story of his life is a familiar one and of the kind that brings a mist to the eyes and a tightening to the throat, as do the tales of the boyhood of Lincoln and Hanly and Grant. He was born in a wee house of Manchester, this Welshman; but an uncle, whose pride and joy he never ceased to be, reared the future statesman among the hills of Wales. The childhood of Lloyd George was typical of the simple customs and the religious faith of his people. He was an active boy. His inclinations from the beginning were toward the platform and public life. In Wales, singers and poets and orators are born, not educated; an education follows, an education in which environment looms large; but a true Welshman could not, if he would, bury himself in the books of universities, the sophistries of a profession, or the formalities of a calling. He remains Nature's child.

The activities of Mr. Lloyd George in connection with the temperance reform began in his childhood when he "spoke the pieces" and participated in the programmes of the Band of Hope. The ardor of his youth fired many an audience of his townspeople with an enthusiasm for "teetotalism" and a determination to conquer the traffic in spirits. It was twenty-eight years ago that he said: "I am a simple Welsh lad, taught, ever since I learned to lisp the words of my wild tongue, that 'whatsoever a man soweth, that shall he also reap.' This traffic, having sown destruction and death, must reap for itself a fruitful harvest of destruction and crime."

But it has been since the beginning of the war that David Lloyd George has delivered his supreme philippics against the "Trade." As Minister of Munitions and as Chancellor of the Exchequer he had denounced rum as the super-traitor of them all. It is not to be doubted that the words, "We are fighting Germany, Austria, and drink, and so far as I can see the greatest of these three deadly foes is drink," more than any other words spoken in either the Old World or the New have advanced Democracy toward total prohibition. They were the weights that turned the balance in Canada and in a dozen States of the American Union. They brought demoralization to the liquor forces. Their unequivocating charge of disloyalty against drink has been irresistible.