In law, as in journalism, provincial experience is a far better school for a young man than that of London; for in the provinces work is less specialised, and the young clerk in a busy lawyer’s office has a chance of such varied work as his powers show him capable of. David Lloyd George, for instance, now found himself often called upon to undertake responsible tasks; to watch the interests of his firm in the Police Court or in the Quarter Session; to collect rates and taxes; to find his way through that complicated network of wire entanglements which British wisdom had thrown around the exercise of the suffrage. The canvassing work which he did for his firm in their capacity as Liberal agents stood him in very good stead later on which he had to do the same work for himself. It was during this period that he acquired, too, that intimate mastery of the details of rural rating with which he afterwards astonished the House of Commons. During the same years he achieved an insight into the surprising affairs of many county families. There is no surer way of finding out the secrets of the English land system than to look at them through the peep-holes of a good lawyer’s office.
No doubt the young Lloyd George lost much by being plunged so early in life into the urgencies of practical work. But he also gained. For it would have been difficult to devise a training more suitable for a coming statesman.
For a time the young man was absorbed by his new work; and, indeed, it was enough to take up his energy. David Lloyd George was from the beginning a keen lawyer. He was not content with practical experience; he read hard at the law; but in his case law did not take form in his mind as a fixed dead thing, but as a vital function of growth, with possibilities of perpetual change and reform.
Thus his apprenticeship began to feed and stimulate his instinctive interest in public affairs. His daily experience led him back at every turn into larger public interests and speculations. He had his week evenings free; and so gradually among the young men of Portmadoc he was led into that life of debate which has always been his very life-blood.
In 1880 his uncle, his mother, his brother, and his sister gave up the little cottage at Llanystumdwy and moved to “Morvin House” in Criccieth. Richard Lloyd and Mrs. William George, their mother, had now saved enough to enable Uncle Lloyd to give up the bootmaking; and his interest was now so much centred round David that he decided to make a move that would enable the youth to live at home. The little house where David was to live for the next ten years was just beneath the walls of that shattered Norman castle which crowns a precipitous cliff on the very edge of the sea. Now battered and worn by the assaults of man and the ravages of the ocean, that castle was once a strong link in that scheme of blockhouse fortresses which the Normans built to keep down North Wales. The ruins typify to-day the valour of this land of bards, and prove the power of a little nation over a mighty conqueror. At its strongest, the rule of the Normans extended very few feet beyond those castle walls. Now this fortress is in ruins; and all around the very portals of that ancient blockhouse you will hear few words of any language except the very tongue which the Normans tried to ban and to bar.[[16]]
To this house David Lloyd George now came home every evening and he was able to give up his kindly lodgings in Portmadoc. This return to the strongest influence in his youth perhaps explains a certain deepening of purpose which now becomes visible in his diaries[[17]]; but there emerges also a new independence of spirit. Somewhat to the alarm of the uncle, the youth was beginning to exhibit a rambling interest that went far outside that still lagoon of puritanism which was the home of that high, simple spirit. There was already a touch of that defiant self-confidence which has so often since puzzled and troubled both the followers and the counsellors of Mr. Lloyd George. The young man was reading widely and daringly—not merely sermons, but plays, histories, and novels. He was going through crises of spiritual doubt unknown to the securely anchored soul of his foster-father. He was catching the malady of his age, and finding its remedy, as so many others of that time found it, in the vague anodyne of books like Carlyle’s Sartor Resartus.
His growing spirit was finding outlets in every direction. He was attending political meetings and listening eagerly and critically to such gospel as his elders preached. He had begun writing regularly for the newspapers; and over the challenging name of “Brutus,” the North Wales Express was producing a series of articles,[[18]] vigorous and combative—a little young and flamboyant, but always arresting and stimulating to the audience of young Wales.
Already in the 1880 Election those articles, written by a boy not yet 18 years of age, played no insignificant part in North Wales: and now the people of Carnarvonshire were beginning to ask of the young David, as in the old days another people asked of a greater prophet—“Who art thou? What sayest thou of thyself?”
To these questions the daring youth soon began to give an answer with both speech and action. In 1881, the third year of his apprenticeship, he was elected a member of one of those little centres of intellectual energy which were growing up all over Wales in the dawn of this new time. The Portmadoc Debating Society may have meant little to the world; but it meant a great deal to itself and to the town of Portmadoc. This little assembly met weekly in a room over a shop in the Portmadoc High Street. There came together an eager throng of young Welshmen determined to discuss for themselves all the problems of the day. Their debates covered every great question of the eighties. David Lloyd George, now eighteen years of age, did not intend to be a silent member. He soon began to speak often. He took part in debates on all the great problems that occupied his later life—Franchise and Free Trade, Trade Unionism and Irish Land, even the Channel Tunnel. On all these subjects he expressed bold and progressive opinions, and in this little school he began to train his power of speech.
Such a passion for debate is a common disease of youth, and often passes like a fitful fever. But with the young Lloyd George it was not to be so. It was soon clear that the power of speech was with him a very special gift, and he threw into it a great deal of care and industry. Men at Portmadoc will still describe how he could be seen walking along the high-road gesticulating as he practised his speeches; and there is no doubt that at this moment of his life he already had some dim perception that he possessed the magic gift of oratory.