It is a curious historical fact that in another great struggle another great Celtic orator, fighting a lone fight against an unjust war-passion in these islands, uttered very much the same proud boast. When Mr. Edmund Burke sent to the Sheriffs of the City of Bristol in 1777 that famous letter on the affairs of America he wrote:
“If you and I find our talents not of the great and ruling kind, our conduct, at least, is conformable to our faculties. No man’s life pays the forfeit of our rashness. No desolate widow weeps tears of blood over our ignorance.”
“A conscientious man would be cautious how he dealt in blood.” Comparing the two passages, Mr. Lloyd George’s words are a curious unconscious echo of Edmund Burke’s—showing how, under similar stress, great minds will ever leap to the same expression.
Throughout all these storms Mr. Lloyd George always showed that steady, clear-headed shrewdness which is perhaps his supreme characteristic.
Never was this more conspicuously shown than in his contest with Mr. Chamberlain over the connection with Kynochs. Here was difficult, dangerous ground, where he had to tread delicately. On one occasion, in that attack, he was constrained to make use of some figures published in a newspaper. Shortly before the debate, he sent to his partner an urgent request that he should verify his figures at Somerset House. A clerk was sent along, and after careful checking it was discovered that there was an error of no mean dimensions—an excessive 0 in one of the statements of share-holdings. At the last possible moment the error was telephoned to him at the House of Commons.
As Mr. Lloyd George waded his way through the figures in the press report, Mr. Joseph Chamberlain, sitting on the Treasury Bench, leaned forward, waiting to pounce. He, too, knew of the error, and he was intending to use it for his assailant’s destruction. He well knew the cost of one such slip in the House of Commons.
But when Mr. Lloyd George came to the figure, he paused, and passed it by. Mr. Chamberlain leaned back in his seat pale to the lips, disappointed and baffled. He had met his match.
The climax in this crisis in Mr. Lloyd George’s career came when Mr. Chamberlain, in September 1900, suddenly dissolved Parliament. In the famous Khaki Election that followed certainly Mr. Chamberlain seemed as if he might look with security to one great triumph, and that was the final political extinction of Mr. Lloyd George. It was surely improbable that a constituency which had just burnt him in effigy would return him to Parliament. But if Mr. Chamberlain staked much on that throw it only shows that he did not know Wales.
I happened to be with Mr. Lloyd George through that election. It was a very astonishing affair. When he first came down to Carnarvon he seemed to have few friends in the Boroughs. The people were sullen, if not hostile. Then he began talking to them in their own language; and it was curious to watch, in meeting after meeting, all their old tribal loyalty gradually coming back to him. He moved from town to town, slowly and cautiously recapturing their affections. He left no stone unturned. In private he calculated his chances with all the close shrewdness of a business man. Daily he reckoned up the voting probabilities in his pocketbook. In public he worked indefatigably. He had against him a retired military officer, Colonel Platt, chosen doubtless for the khaki suggestiveness of his title. All the feudal powers of Wales put forth a supreme effort to destroy their life-long terror.