“Not that it matters whether he said too little or too much! The speeches have served their turn. I tell you, Lloyd-George is a better journalist than Northcliffe in knowing what the public will want the day after to-morrow! He knew that, when the troops came home to find no job waiting for them, people would forget they’d ever called him ‘the man who won the war’. Before they forgot him for high taxation, high prices, falling wages and a creeping paralysis of unemployment, he had to make himself snug. And he has! Five years of autocratic power with the certainty that something must turn up; five years’ support from the Curzons and Milners who’d never have seen the back-door of office without him; five years’ support from the Monds and Greenwoods of the liberal second-eleven; five years’ support from every man who’s lost a son, every woman who can’t make both ends meet. You need only promise to hang the kaiser and make Germany pay: England was worth a general election.”
Bertrand’s outburst was followed by a long silence; and, as he chewed his moustache and gathered strength, I fancied that he might be reflecting how much he had aged since we incubated the Disarmament League in Princes Gardens and hatched Peace out of a grimy office in Bouverie Street.
“You give this lot five years, sir?,” asked O’Rane.
“Unless they blunder into a new war before then,” Bertrand answered; “or unless we can make an opposition strong enough to break them.”
As he swung round on me, I pointed out that he was forming an opposition before he had anything tangible to oppose.
“We must shape the peace!,” he cried. “I give you till to-night to make up your mind! If you desert me, George, I shall fight single-handed. And I’m getting too old for that. Where’s Barbara? I must explain what’s expected of her.”
I capitulated without even taking my hours of grace. When Bertrand stumped indoors, I knew he was going to depict a shattered and mutinous army of liberals rallying to our exhortations and reconciled by Barbara’s diplomacy. I knew, further, that, outside the pages of a woman’s novel, politics never had been so theatrically arranged. Lord Crawleigh might dine with his daughter, but he would never vote with his son-in-law. Frank Jellaby and the independent liberals might, if we caught them unawares, maintain a civil front to the coalition-liberals, but they would never serve in the same administration as the men whom they charged with stabbing them in the back. None of this, however, was likely to influence Barbara in her present mood of exaltation.
“Liberalism,” said my uncle in one of his fine, vague phrases, “is greater than the liberal party.”
“In the present state of the liberal party,” I answered, “that would not be difficult. But you don’t believe you’re going to make a new party of any kind.”
Bertrand shook his head mournfully and sat with the far-away expression of an old and tired man who had sampled in his time the liberalism of Mazzini and Lincoln, Bright and Cobden, Bradlaugh and Chamberlain, Gladstone and Asquith.