Let us cross from Europe to our new and splendid Ally, the United States. There the career of Mr. Lloyd George has always been followed with the closest interest. There was a touch of enterprise—a salt savour—about his Budget that took the fancy of a country always in love with daring. The quick and observant journalists who watch affairs in England on behalf of the American democracy were already warning their people that Mr. Lloyd George was putting them out of date. In a very remarkable sketch of Mr. Lloyd George’s land proposals sent to the American Press in April of 1912 by Mr. James Creelman, he told them that England was on the verge of a revolution that would make America look old-fashioned.
“These are stirring and epoch-making times in Old England.
“The old and powerful order of things is about to pass away.”
And in his bright American way he depicted the English aristocracy crying out:
“Oh! for a way to get rid of the grey-eyed, smiling little Welsh demon who sits at the Imperial Treasury planning new taxes on wealth and land; who puts evil ideas of social justice into the head of the calm, keen, adroit Prime Minister and all the rest of the Cabinet, and who has bewitched the once humble and contented British people until they no longer reverence or respect orthodoxy or the nobility and upper classes!”
Mr. Lloyd George has always been fully as interesting to the leading men of America. When they visit England, it is he whom they most desire to see and to meet. President Wilson looks at the world with a slower, calmer gaze, and arrives at his conclusions very much more gradually.
But President Roosevelt always held Mr. Lloyd George in a fierce admiration, not unmingled with envy for his success in carrying with him a militant democracy. Mr. Roosevelt wrote shortly before his death as follows to a public man in his country:
“Give my heartiest regards to Lloyd George. Do tell him I admire him immensely. I have always fundamentally agreed with his social programme, but I wish it supplemented by Lord Roberts’s external programme. Nevertheless, my agreement with him in programme is small compared with the fact that I so greatly admire the character he is now showing in this great crisis. It is often true that the only way to render great services is by willingness on the part of the statesman to lose his future, or, at any rate, his present position in political life, just exactly as the soldier may have to pay with his physical life in order to render service in battle.”
As to our own far-flung Empire, there never has been much doubt about their views in regard to Mr. Lloyd George.
There are enough Welshmen in Canada to see to that Dominion. Sir Wilfrid Laurier, in a letter of introduction written a year before his death, wrote: