Herbert Henry Asquith.
Herbert Henry Asquith, Yorkshireman by birth and barrister by profession, has been Prime Minister for seven years, succeeding his late Liberal chieftain, Sir Henry Campbell-Bannerman, in 1908. Asquith, whom Bannerman used to call "the sledge-hammer," because of his lucidity of thought and expression, was sixty-three years old in September, 1915. Although not a Pitt, nor even a Disraeli or Palmerston, the statesman who looks like a Roman senator and is gifted with eloquence in keeping was considered in many respects a Heaven-sent blessing in the melting-pot era of British history, for as a purely steadying influence he is probably without a peer in contemporary politics. As a politician in the narrower sense of a party disciplinarian, manager and leader he will rank with the craftiest names in his country's tortuous history. British Liberalism has skated on perilous ice following the reaction which swept the Conservative Party from power after the Boer War and throughout the era of Democratic radicalism in which Great Britain has meantime had its being. That Mr. Asquith's party is enabled to celebrate ten years of sovereignty still strongly intrenched is by general consent due to the astute generalship of its commander-in-chief. Asquith is not commonly accused of imaginativeness. He is too typical a British statesman for that. His temperament is devoid of the adventurous, like that of the true intellectual, and he is pathologically fonder of harking to public opinion than boldly leading it. When he coined the "Wait and See" epigram during the Ulster crisis, he gave utterance to a phrase which accurately epitomizes the tentativeness so preponderant in his political career. British procrastination and vacillation at vital periods of the war were undoubtedly the reflex action of the Prime Minister's own low-speed mental processes. Yet in the revolt of the Curragh Camp officers, that strange curtain-raiser of the impending Ulster crisis, which threatened to embroil these fair isles in another Cromwellian trial of strength between Parliament and the army, Mr. Asquith, by a courageous stroke of positive genius--his own assumption of the Secretaryship for War in succession to the compromised Colonel Seely--resolved into tranquillity and hope a situation more menacing to civil peace in England than living Britons had ever before lived through. Beneath Mr. Asquith's polished exterior, unemotional mask and sweet reasonableness Germany, mistaking his for a peace-at-any-price nature, made one of the most egregious of her numerous and glaring miscalculations.
Only the results of the Peace Conference will determine the true ramifications of Sir Edward Grey's reputation. It was deservedly high when the war began. No Foreign Secretary in Europe approached him in stature, with the possible exception of Delcassé. He had long been Germany's bête noire, being looked upon as the incarnation of the British diplomatic policy of blocking German ambitions for a "place in the sun" wherever and whenever they manifested themselves. As long before as December, 1912, Professor Hans Delbrück, the sanest of German political professors, told me in a prophetic interview for The Daily Mail on "What Germany Wants" that unless England abandoned her policy of "arbitrary opposition to legitimate German political aspirations; if she had no inclination to meet us on that ground; if her interests rather pointed to a perpetuation of the anything-to-beat-Germany policy, so let it be. The Armageddon which must then, some day, ensue will not be of our making." That was a fairly plain warning of coming events. The Germans, as I have said, considered Sir Edward Grey anti-Germanism personified. They regard him to-day as the "organizer of the war." Taking an obviously short-sighted view, I used sometimes to think that it would have been good politics for Britain to buy off Germany with a Trinkgeld (tip) of some sort. If Bismarck was right when he called the Germans "a nation of house-servants," they could obviously have been bribed. Delbrück himself once confessed to me that Germany did not need more oversea territory; she only hankered for it for window-dressing purposes. She wanted as expensive millinery and high-powered a car as her rich neighbor across the way. Colonies were fashionable, and she had to have them. I occasionally thought that England would be staving off trouble for herself by bribing avaricious Germany with a coaling-station on some inconsequential trade-route or even shutting the eye to some burglarious descent on territory or concessions in Asia Minor or Central Africa. But such notions left the German character, the Oliver Twist in it, fatally out of account. The German is the most eager person in the world to covet a mile if given an inch. Concessions to his rapacity would have meant purchasing turmoil for the conceding party not eliminating it. British opposition to Pan-Germanic designs, typified by Sir Edward Grey, was based on thoroughgoing insight into the German nature and German ambitions, epitomized for all time by Bernhardi when he said that nothing would appease the Fatherland except World Power or downfall. Hush-money to Germany in the shape of periodically new "places in the sun" would have kept her quiet for spells. But the blackmailing process would have been resumed. It is the German way. "Mr. Balfour tells us we must not expect Englishmen to support our aims in the direction of territorial expansion," said Delbrück. "What remains then for us, except to enforce the accomplishment of our purposes by strengthened armaments?" Could avowal be plainer-spoken?
Sir Edward Grey is fifty-three years old and has been a childless widower since 1906. He has been a Member of Parliament continuously since he was twenty-three years of age. Though an Oxford graduate and successful barrister, he is in no sense a scholar, and his experience of foreign affairs up to his becoming Foreign Secretary in the Campbell-Bannerman ministry in 1905 was confined to an under-secretaryship of the Foreign Office in the preceding (Rosebery) Government. Grey, who is also of the smooth-shaven Romanesque type of statesman in external appearance, is an amazing example of natural British aptitude for the higher politics, for he is not a linguist (he speaks nothing but English) and except for a visit to France with the present King a couple of years ago was said never to have been abroad in his life. His hobbies are tennis, fly-fishing and birds. The only book he ever wrote was a treatise on the piscatory art and he tramped through the New Forest with Colonel Roosevelt talking ornithology all the way. Yet a man has only to read the British White Paper--he need not, indeed, do much except read Sir Edward Grey's dispatches to his ambassadors on July 29, 1914--to realize that the Foreign Secretary is a statesman of marvelous force and capacity to grapple with the essentials of a situation. No state papers of modern times outrival Grey's diplomatic correspondence on the eve of the war. They ought to insure him, as I believe they will, immortality, no matter how the war ends. Sir Edward Grey's speeches are like his dispatches--devoid of irrelevancy or rhetorical claptrap and incisive in the highest degree. They ring conviction and sincerity and their argument is usually unanswerable. Doctor von Bethmann Hollweg's clumsy attempts to parry Grey's mid-bellum dialectics have only brought out the latter in bolder relief. The war has notoriously eaten into Grey's soul. Germany calls it guilty remorse. Men who know are conscious that he labored for peace to the last minute with unflagging enthusiasm. His industry during the war has been intense, and his insistence upon looking at things for himself has threatened more than once to cost him his eyesight. As it is, intermittent relaxation has to be forced upon him by his colleagues and his medical advisers. Sir Edward Grey's permanent disappearance from Downing Street would rejoice Germany like a victorious battle. Grey has been violently blamed for the failure of Britain's mid-war diplomacy, especially in the Balkans. His own defense against charges of failure in that region is likely to seem plausible in the light of history, viz., that, unaccompanied by commensurate military successes, the efforts of Allied diplomacy in the Near East were almost hopelessly handicapped.
One night during the South African War a Radical M.P., advocating the downtrodden brother Boer's cause at a mass-meeting in Birmingham, received such a warm reception from the crowd that he had to flee for his life through a back-door, disguised as a policeman. His name was David Lloyd-George, whose present occupation is that of England's man of the hour. He was Chancellor of the Exchequer when war broke out and introduced the initial war budgets, earning thereby encomiums from the financial community which for years before looked upon him as capital's demagogic arch-foe. To-day, Minister of Munitions--the circumstances under which he became such are treated in a subsequent chapter--Lloyd-George comes far nearer being Britain's national hero than any of his contemporaries. He is charged by his detractors with the design to make himself Dictator. England could have a worse one.
If Lloyd-George were an American instead of a Welshman, he would have been President of the United States by this time, or at least as close to it as Bryan has ever been. There is in fact very little typically British about him. He is emotional, for example, and he has an imagination. His whole make-up is trans-atlantic, which is Anglice for sensational. Picture, if you can, a strong solution of Booker Washington (I mean, of course, only his eloquence), of flamboyant and appealing Billy Sunday, of the Boy Orator of the Platte at his silver-tongued best, and of our inimitable T. R. in his most rampageous form, and you will have Lloyd-George in composite. It was because he is all this that he was chosen for the "shells portfolio" in the reconstructed Asquith cabinet.
Lloyd-George.
He knew very little--probably nothing--about munitions seven months ago. It could not have been very much before that when he probably thought that guncotton was raw material for pajamas. But he is the prize "enthuser" of the Kingdom, a master of the tedious art of welding drowsy Britons into a race of real war-makers. All the ingredients for supplying the army with the shells it needed were in existence; but they needed organization. The manufacturers and their works needed organization. The workmen needed organization. The public spirit needed organization; and the whole business needed a Lloyd-George. It got him ten months after it ought to have had him, but not too late. Obviously the diminutive Welsh country lawyer who had brought about the disestablishment of the State Church of Wales, imposed State Insurance and Old Age Pensions on a reluctant Kingdom, assailed the vested interests of the House of Lords and demolished them, was the man to impress the country with the true meaning of the shells tragedy. He took the stump, his natural element, for the purpose. He went to the people, especially in the great industrial centers, and told them the truth. He burned into their conscience--that was the only way to get the stolid British to wake up to a real peril--that shells, shells, and then shells, and nothing but shells, were required if Britain meant to win the war.