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calling, at the village of Llanystumdwy, once a renowned center of bardic culture, near the little town of Criccieth, a few miles from the northern shore of Cardigan Bay. There the boy grew up, near the heart of Welsh Puritanism and Radicalism. The shoemaker uncle belonged to a fine native type which tends under present-day conditions to become rare. He was an enthusiastic reader, politician, and theologian. His shop was the meetingplace of the intelligence and public spirit of the village, a far better forum than could be found, then or now, in many a pretentious city. At the national school the boy was leader among the rebels; that is, the children of nonconforming parents, who stood up against the imposition of Church of England rites, a result of the state-established hierarchy happily outside the experience of the American citizen. The school, however, was of small account in young Lloyd-George's education except as a field for the exercise of a nascent political talent. His real seminary was made by the union of the cobbler's shop, the village smithy, presided over by a rival theologian, and the little chapel, two miles away, to and from which he tramped to service and Sunday-school three times every Sabbath. The family and the neighborhood spoke Welsh all the time; LloydGeorge learned English as a foreign lanIn his teens he began to preach and to give addresses on temperance, and we may be sure that nothing but the accident of his uncle's sectarian affiliation prevented him from carrying his gifts into the pulpit. Richard Lloyd belonged to a Baptist sect calling itself, with ironical force, the Disciples of Christ. It had, and has, no professional ministry. If things had befallen otherwise, Lloyd-George, like Bernard Shaw's rhetorical dustman, would have had the privilege of choosing between a seat in the cabinet and a popular pulpit in Wales.

guage.

In due time he chose the law, just as he would have done if his lot had been cast in Kentucky or Illinois. He was apprenticed-or articled, as we say, thus marking the snobbish distinction between

a profession and a mere trade-to an attorney in the neighboring town of Portmadoc; and in 1884, at twenty-one, he was duly installed as a solicitor in independent practice at Criccieth.

Meanwhile he had been gaining local fame as a politician. Those were the years of Gladstone's long decline and of Joseph Chamberlain's resounding advance toward the leadership of English Radicalism. The first attack in force was being made upon the strongholds of autocracy: the land monopoly, the hereditary House of Peers, and, in Lloyd-George's country especially, the peculiar privileges of the established church. So ardent a champion as he, with so undeniable a flair for the political game, was predestined for Parliament, and in 1890 he was sent there, being chosen by the old town of Carnarvon, the constituency he has represented throughout. He was twenty-seven, Welshman, and nothing else, as Mr. Roosevelt might say, and he spoke with a Cymric accent which served to emphasize the remoteness of his origin and upbringing from the forms and interests which dominated the House of Commons. The Conservatives were in power. The Liberal party had been riven by Home Rule. Chamberlain had deserted the Radicals.

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There never was any nonsense about the temper in which Lloyd-George followed the pursuit of politics. He was an unabashed careerist. Every speech he made, every stroke he delivered, was exactly timed and calculated. As a youth of eighteen, he had looked into the House of Commons, surveying the chamber as "the region of his future domain." In the law courts at the same time he had listened to eminent advocates of the day - "very garrulous, but they have a despicable cant." When he is accused of having a consuming hunger for renown, he makes a gay admission: "It depends upon what forces of pluck and industry I can muster." Industry had, however, very little to do with his rise; it was by daring and aplomb that he was carried on. He learned with astonishing rapidity, but

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neither then nor afterward had he the faculty of study. He confessed to deadly boredom when there was arduous work to be done, and very early in his parliamentary life he announced that the labor of the committee-room was not for him.

The pages of his private diary, printed by an authorized biographer, are full of intimate revelation of his thoughts and ambitions. He never did anything with out observing and noting its precise effect. "As regards voice and gesture, I never spoke half so well," he writes after his first speech in the commercial metropolis of the North. His eye was unwaveringly fixed on the main chance, and he had in his family and Welsh friends a circle of admirers formed into a league absolutely devoted to his advancement.

There are three clear stages in the public life of Lloyd-George: in the first he is

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Radical free-lance, and primarily a Welsh Nationalist; in the second he is the representative of Radicalism in a powerful cabinet, the architect of new and farreaching schemes of social reform; in the third he is the problematical statesman, made and shaped by the tremendous experiences of the great war.

The first period need not detain us. For our present purpose it is important only as the formative, stage of Lloyd George's development. His activities in the early Welsh period were almost wholly confined to the politics of the church and the school. His slogan for Wales was "a free religion and a free people in a free land," and during his first years in Parliament he was a guerilla fighter in that cause on the flanks of the Liberal party. It was the South African War that made him a force in imperial affairs. In his stand against the war policy he was gallant and self-sacrificing and single-hearted. He risked his popularity, his career, and more than once his life. He fought as a Radical and a Nationalist, not, strictly speaking, as a pro-Boer, still less as what in those days was called a Little Englander. In all matters of policy save that of the war he was in sympathy with the imperialist wing of the

Liberal party. He was fiercely eloquent, extraordinarily ready and resourceful, a master of language and of moods, wielding what few English politicians nowadays care to touch, the weapon of emotional and imaginative oratory. And he pursued Chamberlain with unrelenting fervor. Indeed, it would be accurate to say that he did more than any man to break the power of that masterful personality.

With peace in South Africa came the certainty of a Liberal revival at home, and with the return of the Liberals to power the offer of a high place to LloydGeorge. When the Liberal cabinet was formed at the end of 1905 he was untried in administration of every kind. No one could guess at his abilities in office, and for all that was known to the contrary he might prove to be as helpless in charge of a government department as John Bright had been. But, as it happened, he had a surprising revelation in store. Judged by the standards of Whitehall, he was poor enough as a departmental chief. He detested drudgery, was incapable of routine, and had a glorious disrespect for correspondence. But he was ready for the larger tasks, and he developed powers of negotiation which enabled him to carry through several pieces of unusually difficult legislation; for example, the reconstruction of the Port of London, the Merchant Shipping Act, the reform of the patent laws. Parliament admired his skill, and big corporations rejoiced in the discovery that the Welsh Radical agitator was a much more intelligent and reasonable person to deal with than many a Conservative politician or orthodox public official. His two years at the Board of Trade earned a new reputation for LloydGeorge, though clearly this was not his right place or work. He needed an office which would give him scope as a democratic leader and a molder of national policies, and that he was now to attain. Mr. Asquith in 1908 succeeded Campbell-Bannerman as prime minister; Lloyd-George became chancellor of the exchequer.

Here we approach the stage of his career by virtue of which Lloyd-George is one of the commanding figures of the world. Consider the circumstances. Five years before, Joseph Chamberlain had broken the Conservative party by his swing to protection and his declaration in favor of making the tariff the dominant issue in British politics. The unexampled Liberal triumph was thereby made a certainty. But it was impossible for the people of England, wearied by ten years of reactionary rule, to be satisfied with a Government representing any brand of stand-pat Liberalism. Since the Gladstonian epoch, the country had undergone a profound transformation. Year by year the forces of social idealism and economic reconstruction had gathered strength. The democracy was becoming socially and politically educated. A developed tradeunionism, coupled with an active, if undefined, socialism, had produced remarkable results. From end to end of the land was heard the call for an ideal and a program of social justice. American politics are a whole world different from English, but by way of a partial parallel the American reader may usefully think of the advent of Lloyd-George to power in terms of Republican insurgency and Progressivism before 1912. Chamberlain had been beaten easily enough in the first election after the South African War, but it was plain to everybody that the old Liberalism could not win any more electoral victories. Lloyd-George had foreseen this. Years earlier he had warned his party that the negative free-trade policy would not do. The protectionists were making headway with their cry of "Tax the foreigner" and their promises of social reform to be paid for by the proceeds of a duty on imported goods. The signs showed that it needed only a spell of bad trade and unemployment for the tariff to capture the electorate. Within two years of its triumph the Liberal Government was so discredited that, had an appeal to the country come then, it would have been swept away. Lloyd-George realized that the only hope lay in a platform of aggressive and constructive Radicalism.

And no sooner had he reached the second place in the cabinet, with its control of the exchequer, than he got to work. After carrying through the important little measure-not his own, but Mr. Asquith's -bestowing pensions on the aged poor, he made the great stroke of his career by launching the budget of 1909.

The first Lloyd-George budget was a capital event in the history of modern England. From it must be dated a new epoch of legislation and of conflict. It changed alike the political atmosphere and the temper of controversy. It brought two things into being: on the one hand, a new and extraordinarily vivid sense of power and hope to the democracy; on the other hand, a virulence of hostility which was fiercer and more general among certain classes than anything known in England since the earliest struggles over parliamentary reform.

As we look back we see that the violence of the debate was absurd and unreal. Lloyd-George had not invented a new system of taxation, nor, strictly speaking, had he devised any fresh ways of laying the rich under contribution. Every tax in his schedule was a commonplace of revenue-raising in one civilized country or another. The graduated income-tax and the distinction between earned and unearned were already well established in England; so, too, was the principle of the super-tax upon large incomes. Heavy succession duties on estates passing at death had been in force for many years. It was perfectly natural that the possessing classes should make a stand against the indefinite extension of such imposts, but in the end the fury of the storm which broke in the summer of 1909 must be explained mainly by reference to the startlingly provocative personality of the author of the budget. Yet those who fought him were right enough in their instinct. They saw that the new instrument was based upon the assumption that the burdens of the enlarging state must be placed upon the shoulders of those most able to bear them. Nor were the landlords at fault in their conviction that the taxes on the unearned increment of urban land values and on undeveloped land in the country represented the beginning of a revolution which, if unchecked, would transform the character of feudal England. Subsequently these provisions were greatly modified; and the clauses which the more radical land reformers held to be most valuable and the Conservatives to be most pestilent were made of little or no account. The budget as it finally passed into law was not revolutionary; but the educational influence of its progress could not be overrated.

Lloyd-George throughout was the center of an unexampled storm. He defended his proposals in a series of speeches which swept through the country with the force of the great pamphlets of the revolution era. The press of all parties combined to give him unlimited advertisement. It was not a little curious that the printed speeches should have encouraged rather than dissipated the legend that Lloyd-George was a foul-mouthed agitator, devoted to the preaching of predatory finance and particularly to the abuse of landlords and peers. He had, it is true, a sardonic way with him, and both in the budget campaign and in the one immediately following, against the lords, he was given to holding up a system or a person to unmerciful ridicule. But he was singularly free from rancor, and no one could deny that to all except the victims his sword-play was uncommonly good fun. As a matter of fact, the exasperation of his enemies was increased by the invincible gaiety of his manner no less than by the quality of his speaking. He is not an orator in the old sense of that carelessly used term. Lloyd-George on the platform is no more like what Daniel Webster and Gladstone were than he is like what W. J. Bryan is. His most effective speeches have an astonishing air of spontaneity. No speaker was ever readier to take a hint or exploit an interruption. He catches it on the wing, and in an instant it is woven into the discourse. Before he has been speaking ten minutes he has established familiar relations with his audience. Whatever structure he had pre

pared seems to have been abandoned, and the hour is apt to be spent in a running interchange between the platform and the floor. A speech of the budget period would commonly appear in print as an amalgam of laughter and interjections, and the morning after its delivery the country would be ringing with the delighted laughter of Lloyd-George's admirers and the spluttering rage of his enemies. In seizing upon the interruptions he was always reckless. The afternoon head-line had no terrors for him, and as often as not he was not himself guilty of the phrases that stuck and stung. Thus in one of his orations against the peers and landlords he would say:

"An aristocracy is like cheese. The older it gets-"

A voice from the floor:
"The more it stinks."
Lloyd-George:
"The higher it becomes."

When such things were coming out week by week, we may imagine the anger and consternation sweeping over ten thousand elegant households in the suburbs and the country-side.

And yet, a few outrageous impromptus apart, Lloyd-George's speeches were not improvisations at all. From the beginning of his political life he made a practice of preparing with the utmost care and writing out every word in advance. The speech might be delivered from a brief outline or with the aid merely of a few key-words, but none the less was it in substance and wording the speech that had been planned out. In Lloyd-George's case memory has not played false. He has succeeded in retaining his freedom of utterance, while great speakers like Mr. Asquith and Winston Churchill, following a similar method, are, as the Scots say, slaves to their paper. A bilingual speaker is invariably at his best in the vernacular, and Lloyd-George is happiest when addressing his own people. He leaps from English into Welsh as the mood takes him, gives unfettered play to fancy and poetic allusion, and incidentally discloses how close the seasoned politician has re

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