“Besides, he says, there are two councils held;
And that may be determined at the one
Which may make him and you to rue at the other.”
Shakespeare’s Richard III, Act III, Sc. ii.
Italy was saved for the time; but if it was to be saved for all time, and if other dangers were to be averted, it was not enough to pass resolutions at Allied Conferences. The proceedings at Rapallo must be followed up by more effective action.
Mr. Lloyd George has always the instinct in his heart that no public purpose can be thoroughly achieved without the help of the peoples concerned. He is above all things a “crowd-compeller.” It was now his imperious instinct that he should appeal from a secret conference to the great peoples of Western Europe. It was his powerful conviction that he must take them into his counsel as to the reasons for a new centralisation of war-control—in short, that he must appeal over the heads of the Governments to the nations.
If the new Versailles Council was to be anything more than an Aulic assembly, forcibly-feeble, strenuously impotent, it was necessary to rally behind it all the great democratic forces of the Western world. It was urgent to give it a new authority derived directly from the peoples. If this was to be achieved the peoples must be given a franker explanation of the strategy of the war, of the reasons for failure, and the motives for a new policy.
These are the reasons why, quite deliberately, on the way home from Rapallo, on November 12th, 1917, Mr. Lloyd George made that remarkable speech at Paris which was perhaps the frankest utterance of the war.[[112]]
This Paris speech fluttered all the dovecots of Europe, and some of the eagles’ nests as well. It seemed to come as a caprice, a child of sudden impulse, from the brain of the British Premier. And yet the speech was most carefully prepared; a copy of it was sent to the War Cabinet in time for correction in case of need; it was handed over for interpretation before being uttered.[[113]]
There was nothing sudden about it. For the speech represented the slowly matured results of two years of observation, the fruits of prolonged meditation on the events of the war.