The world was taught, generation after generation, that the emergency produces the man. The year 1914 and its six successors brought emergency to every country, such emergency as no country had ever known before. But the emergencies did not produce the political men. Only France produced the political man. Without him, German intrigue would have overrun the world, even after the Germans fled from France and Belgium and the East. We would have been smothered by words and machinations, as northern France and Belgium had been smothered by the Teutonic cloud-bursts. But there was Clémenceau,--Clémenceau who had appointed Foch. {140} These two men and the Allied commanders brought victory to civilisation. If the politicians do not destroy the work and plans, the "peace" they are making now will endure for a while. If the politicians, toying with their new doll, the League of Nations, keep their heads in the clouds, I believe they will come crashing to earth within ten years, frightened and amazed by a greater and longer war than has yet been known. They sowed its seeds in the Armistice and at Versailles. And later when, month after month, they changed their plans from day to day. It is sometimes unwise to avoid digressions. No apology is made, or considered necessary, for this one. I was speaking of Mr. Gladstone. It was my privilege to see him and hear him frequently during twenty years. Perhaps it was due to some defect of nature that I was never much influenced politically by him. His eloquence was anything you may choose to imagine it, and you would have admired it, if you could dissociate from it the involved phrases, the delicate adjustments, the hair-split meanings which might balance any interpretation that might be put upon them, the contradictions, the finely-spun arguments which, woven into the texture of his speeches, would enmesh the unwary,--you would have admired it hugely if you could have dissociated these things from it. His majorities probably did not make the effort. He had the magic of making them forget. He could be, and was, eloquent on any subject, {141} and, for that reason, he could and did unsettle many minds on many themes. He was a word-spinner of extraordinary skill and charm, and he made multitudes think they had opinions of their own when their opinions were what he had taught them. That is one of the gifts of leadership. And it was a special privilege of Mr. Gladstone's leadership of democracy that he remained an aristocrat by habit and inclination. Morley's "Life" of him contains this passage from a privately printed account of Ruskin at Hawarden: