To Mr. Asquith's eternal credit he rated unity in cabinet and country higher than any tactical advantage that he might have secured by a dialectical brawl with his energetic lieutenant. Mr. Lloyd George, who was now so anxious to "get on with the war," had been less anxious to follow his chief into war at the outset; "too late here," he complained, "too late there," but in every decision, were it the Dardanelles expedition or the shell controversy, he shared full and equal responsibility with the head and every member of the cabinet, he could have resigned in protest—and with greater dignity than he shewed in rounding upon his colleagues for mistakes in which he participated. From the time of Lord Kitchener's death until the December crisis, he was himself secretary of state for war with a predominant voice in all military decisions.
It was easier to forget his own record and to focus the attention of his audience upon the future. After the failure of the Somme offensive, the apparent failure of the Jutland action, another winter campaign became inevitable; food was running short and would become shorter if German submarines were given free play; the evidence collected by the Dardanelles commissioners threw a disturbing light on the happy-go-lucky methods of cabinet government; ministers were allowing themselves to be bullied in the House of Commons; and from a hundred different quarters there gathered a hundred thousand wisps and wreaths of fog which intensified in a tarnishing cloud of mistrust and disapproval. Under the military service act a man could appeal for exemption on the ground that he was indispensable in his present employment; from the first days of the war Mr. Asquith was hailed as the indispensable prime minister. It is impossible to draw any chart to shew the change in psychological attitude towards him; but by the autumn of 1916, perhaps on the day when he persuaded parliament to accept conscription and imposed it upon the country without a revolution, he was no longer indispensable; very soon the antagonism strengthened into a feeling that the war would never be won so long as he remained at the head of the government.
This feeling was crystallised by Mr. Lloyd George in a memorandum which proposed that a committee of three, excluding the prime minister, should have full direction of the war. Discussion and correspondence followed; the proposal was made public in The Times of December 4th; there was one day's more correspondence, ending with Mr. Asquith's abrupt announcement on December 5th that he had tendered his resignation to the king. It seemed unlikely, to the outside spectator, that either Mr. Bonar Law or Mr. Lloyd George would be able to form a new administration, if, as was expected, the liberal and unionist ministers remained loyal to their old chief in resisting an ambitious colleague's effort to supplant him; but those responsible for the upheaval were leaving nothing to chance in the "well-organised, carefully engineered conspiracy" which Mr. Asquith described as being "directed" in part against some of his late unionist colleagues, but in the main against Lord Grey and himself. Mr. Bonar Law lost no time in handing on to Mr. Lloyd George the opportunity of an experiment in cabinet-making; the unionist members had been approached in advance, Mr. Balfour and Lord Robert Cecil consented to take office and the small fry followed their lead.
So perished the first coalition, the liberal party and the political ascendancy of Mr. Asquith. Now, as before, his supporters were not consulted any more than when he plunged them into the first coalition or incurred that earlier debt of honour which was not an obligation, but which had the compelling force of an obligation in committing them to hostilities; though he expected and received their fealty throughout the first two and a half years of war, he never found it necessary to take them into his confidence before sacrificing every principle of liberalism, placing every liberal pledge in suspense and, at the end, abdicating from his half of the political throne. Ministers had an unchallenged, victorious majority; there was no adverse vote; the white flag fluttered into view before a shot had been fired; and it was not until he assembled the liberal party at the Reform Club on December 8th and hinted at the conspiracy before which he had retired that the party knew its fate. By that time the majority of the party was grown restive under this one-sided loyalty.
Those were days of terrible passion and bitterness. No abuse was too strong for the perfidy of Mr. Lloyd George on the one hand or the lethargy of Mr. Asquith on the other. Ingratitude and bad faith were spluttered from one set of lips; incompetence and indifference from the other. A "defeatist" cabal in the cabinet was discovered or invented; and ministers were accused of not winning the war because they did not want to win the war. More than four years have passed since that black week and it is still too early to return an impartial verdict. No one is likely to question that Mr. Asquith's loyalty and generosity to his colleagues are without parallel in our political history: throughout the vulgarity of the Limehouse campaign, the tragi-comedy of Mr. Churchill's Sidney Street offensive and the squalor of the Marconi scandal, the prime minister's wide and indulgent cloak was ever at the disposal of the intemperate youngsters of his cabinet; never was indulgence repaid with blacker treachery. Those who like to fancy the workings of providence in human affairs may think that, as Mr. Asquith neglected and misled his party more thoroughly than any other prime minister, so he was overtaken by a more malignant nemesis.
To suggest that he would have lost the war, if he had continued in office, is hardly less fantastic than to believe that Mr. Lloyd George won it. A press-ridden people is liable to exaggerate the difference between one prime minister and another; by 1917 a number of amateurs had learned something of war, and the new prime minister profited by experience as the old would have done; but through the organised clamour and dust of the next two years it is hard to discern a single act of courage or of decision which ranks higher than the day-by-day courage and decision displayed by the government in the first half of the war or which entitled Mr. Lloyd George more than Mr. Asquith to be regarded as a great war-minister. It was under Mr. Asquith's rule that the country was converted from peace to war, that the great armies were raised and all but one of the great alliances concluded. If Mr. Lloyd George can claim credit for the unification of the higher command, he must allow that from no one but Mr. Asquith would conscription have been accepted; his own effort in 1918 to raise the age-limit and to include Ireland was hardly a triumph of practical efficiency or of political honesty. The difficulties of administration had, if anything, decreased by 1917: if Russia was no longer dependable, America—with all her resources of food, money and men—came to redress the balance. While Mr. Lloyd George's buoyant and inspiring optimism deserves all praise, Mr. Asquith's optimism, if more restrained, was no less constant; his determination, even when no longer in office, to prosecute the war with all possible vigour was a cause of perplexity and of offence to those of his party who wished him to lead a movement in favour of a negotiated peace and to those who hoped to see him retaliating on the new government for the guerilla so long waged against himself.
As the fate of the country they governed is more important than that of either man, so the fate of the party they led is more important than the transitory fortune of its leader. One who lunched at the Reform Club on December 8th, in sight of Sir Henry Campbell-Bannerman's portrait, may perhaps be excused for thinking of the library overhead and of the shattered host that listened there to the belated apologetics of its leader; he may be pardoned for putting on those kindly, shrewd lips the words: "Vare, legions redde."
III
Even the rout of the liberal party is inconsiderable by comparison with the death of liberalism which took place that day. The old shibboleths of peace, economy, personal liberty and internationalism were discarded; when next liberal candidates made profession of faith, they deafened themselves with a cry for revenge and for indemnities which could not be exacted, until the "war to end war" culminated in a peace to end peace. Forgotten were the aspirations of August 1914; nationality was blessed in the distant security of Czecho-Slovakia but ignored in Ireland; of the ideals with which Sir Henry Campbell-Bannerman's lost legions had come into power there remained not one, of practical achievement their record shewed little more than a statute-book cumbered by bold acts of parliament which their authors had rendered inoperative.