“Dogged does it” ought to be added to “Dieu et mon droit” and other
devices of England. On a day when I was lunching with Mr. Lloyd George
in the dining-room at 10 Downing Street that looks out over the Horse
Guards' Parade, the present premier, with a characteristic gesture,
flung out his hand toward the portrait of a young man in the panel over
the mantel. It was of the younger Pitt, who had taken his meals and
drunk his port in this very room in that other great war a hundred years
ago. The news of Austerlitz, brought to him during his illness, is said
to have killed him. But England, undismayed, fought on for a decade,
and won. Mr. Lloyd George, in spite of burdens even heavier than
Pitt's, happily retains his health; and his is the indomitable spirit
characteristic of the new Britain as well as of the old. For it is a new
Britain one sees. Mr. Lloyd George is prime minister of a transformed
Britain, a Britain modernized and democratized. Like the Englishman who,
when he first witnessed a performance of “Uncle Tom's Cabin,” cried
out, “How very unlike the home life of our dear Queen!” the American who
lunches in Downing Street is inclined to exclaim: “How different from
Lord North and Palmerston!” We have, I fear, been too long accustomed
to interpret Britain in terms of these two ministers and of what they
represented to us of the rule of a George the Third or of an inimical
aristocracy. Three out of the five men who form the war cabinet of an
empire are of what would once have been termed an “humble origin.”
One was, if I am not mistaken, born in Nova Scotia. General Smuts,
unofficially associated with this council, not many years ago was in
arms against Britain in South Africa, and the prime minister himself
is the son of a Welsh tailor. A situation that should mollify the most
exacting and implacable of our anti-British democrats!
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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