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However storms may interfere with travel, telephone operators are at their posts

An Unfailing Service

AMERICANS rely upon quick communication and prove it by using the telephone seventy million times every twenty-four hours. In each case some one person of a hundred million has been called for by some other person and connected with him by means of telephone wires.

So commonly used is the telephone that it has come to be taken for granted. Like the air they breathe, people do not think of it except when in rare instances they feel the lack of it.

Imagine the seventeen million American telephones dumb, and the wires dead. Many of the every-day activities would be paralyzed. Mails,

telegraphs and every means of communication and transportation would be overburdened. The streets and elevators would be crowded with messengers. Newspaper men, doctors, policemen, firemen and business men would find themselves facing conditions more difficult than those of fifty years ago, before the telephone had been invented.

To prevent such a catastrophe is the daily work of three hundred thousand telephone men and women. To maintain an uninterrupted and dependable telephone service is the purpose of the Bell System, and to that purpose all its energy and resources are devoted.

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IN ITS SEMI-CENTENNIAL YEAR THE BELL SYSTEM LOOKS FORWARD TO CONTINUED PROGRESS IN TELEPHONE COMMUNICATION

Vol 113

November 1926

No 1

I

LLOYD GEORGE NOW

The One Consummate Master of the Great Game
S. K. RATCLIFFE

T cannot be disputed that during the past few years Lloyd George has seemed more interesting to Americans, and more important, than he has been to his own countrymen. Many times since his fall from power in 1922 I have asked friends in the United States for a statement of the American view of his present standing and an estimate of his chances. The answers, of course, have been as varied as the answerers, but in one thing they have agreed. All have implied that there would be nothing at all startling to Americans in the return of Lloyd George to the head of affairs. Seen from a distance, he appears to have all the marks of a still unexhausted statesman. He is incessantly springing back into the news. His rivals are, by comparison, destitute alike of brilliance and resilience. True, he writes newspaper articles that the reader finds it hard to associate with the prime minister who for so long commanded the world's attention. But what of that? Statecraft is not journalism. Lloyd George, they will tell you, is astonishingly vital.

In Canada and the United States three years ago he looked equal to almost anything. He is frequently on the point of playing some heavy antagonist off the stage. Why then should he not come back?

There are times when this question seems too remote for discussion. There are other times when one feels driven into a cautious acquiescence in the answer that is implied. The other day I asked two editors of a famous Liberal journal whether they thought it possible for England to have another spell of Lloyd George government. The first replied that he had as good a chance of being prime minister as any other man in the field, including Ramsay MacDonald and Winston Churchill. His colleague retorted, "But I thought you were supporting him now because you were convinced that no conjunction of circumstances could bring him back?"

I offer at this point no solution of my own. my own. But I recall the fact that exactly ten years ago I contributed to THE CENTURY (October, 1916) a study of Lloyd George which con

Copyright, 1926, by THE CENTURY Co. All rights reserved.

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tained a forecast sufficiently precise. Prophecy at the time was not difficult for any English journalist writing in London. That was the annus mirabilis of this extraordinary career. Lloyd George was advancing toward the coup by means of which he seized the most powerful position in Europe. The curve was not difficult to draw in advance. I drew it, and the event justified the venture. If in 1926 there is any writer, English or American, who is confident enough to draw a curve for the evening of Lloyd George's life (he is sixty-three years of age), I do not know him.

Let us consider first what was happening to Lloyd George before he was driven, not into opposition merely, but into eclipse. His overthrow in 1922 was complete. After the election which registered his fall he was for a time almost a nonentity in Parliament. Nobody marked him. The House of Commons, which he had dominated for ten years and played with for many more, was indifferent to him. I do not think it was surprising that observers from across the Atlantic had little understanding of this turn of fortune, but there was no special mystery about it. The long and marvelous day of Lloyd George had ended in a crash. The country was tired of him.

He himself gives the simplest explanation of the event. He says that as head of the Coalition government he insisted upon the grant of home rule to Ireland, and for so doing he was deprived of the premiership. There was, however, much more in it than Tory resentment over the Irish treaty. Actu

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It has been evident to almost every one for several years past that Lloyd George's position at the close of the war was fundamentally false. At the moment of the armistice, when the world was exalted in feeling, he might have made, in the name of a united British commonwealth, a declaration that would have determined the nature of the peace and incidentally sealed his own immortality. His influence was then unbounded. But he was a man of divided mind. At the most critical stage of the war he had spoken with two voices. In one breath he had talked of the knock-out blow. In another, on the eve of the Fourteen Points, he had delivered a speech on war-aims by which he had seemed to be committed without reserve to the principles of the spacious settlement which Europe had learned to think of as the Wilson Peace. In November, 1918, the crucial question for the civilized world was involved in Lloyd George's decision: for or against Clemenceau, for Wilson or against him? The upshot was disclosed in his first political move after the roar of the guns had ceased. He called for an immediate general election, and he adopted for the campaign the slogans of revenge. Any attempt to form an estimate of the

later Lloyd George must, it seems to me, turn upon this most momentous of all his public acts.

He could not have lost the election. England was resolved to give him an overwhelming vote of thanks. His premiership was secure. No fact of the time is more easily demonstrable than that. Seldom in history can there have been a world occasion before which the choice has been more absolute. The angel of his better nature, as Lincoln might have said, was whispering to him:

"Choose well, your choice is
Brief, but yet endless!"

We do not know what it was that stopped his ears. But he preferred to appeal for the suffrages of the unthinking multitude-including most of the eight millions of women who had never voted before, instead of resting upon the support of that decent England which wanted above all else a peace of healing and of common sense. It is a very rare politician who can rise above political motives and memories. Lloyd George could not forgive his former friends, the Liberals. His tactics annihilated their party in that campaign, and his own great army of adherents, though described as a coalition, made up a solid weight of the Conservative Right.

What followed is now familiar matter of history. At the Peace Conference in Paris Lloyd George's activities fell into two clearly marked periods. In the first he was engaged, with Clemenceau, in pressing forward to its limit the policy of vengeance. In the second, with Woodrow Wilson sitting outraged and disillusioned at the table, he was

striving to correct the balance, while trimming his sails to the winds of fury and suspicion that were blowing across the Channel from London. No one has ever supposed that Lloyd George did not see with perfect clearness the consequences of the post-armistice election. He is never anything but a realist in the political game. "Why," a friend of mine asked him in that calamitous year, 1919, "why did you go to the country with those cries? You knew how absurd they were!" "Yes," he replied, "the cry They got up about making Germany pay every farthing of the cost of the war was very foolish!"

Look now for a moment at the sequence of events after the signing of the treaties. The continuous debates between the governments of the Allies were in those years dominated by two questions: how to get the reparations started upon a workable basis, and how to overcome the rigidity of the French and bring the Germans into the council-chamber. Within a year or so of Versailles Lloyd George was aiming at a business settlement. His direction was right. But at home he had to deal with a crowd of irritated half-supporters, while he was aware of a rapidly cohering body of Conservative politicians who chafed under his leadership and were resolved not to endure it for a day longer than was necessary. At one inter-allied conference after another Lloyd George was beaten by Clemenceau and Poincaré. Frustrated at Cannes, he was defeated at Genoa before the delegates assembled in the spring of 1922. When this conference ended the signs were unmistakable.

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