If it failed, there was always time for a reckoning. The British Government of August, 1914, entered upon the war clothed with a mandate as sweeping in its powers as formal conferment of a Dictatorship could have been--a woof of national confidence amounting to little short of _carte blanche_. John Bright once said that a British Government is always annihilated by the war which it is called upon to wage. But Englishmen wished Mr. Asquith’s Cabinet Godspeed, and by their unquestioning support of every measure it proposed showed that their loyalty and trust were real and sincere. Although the British Government (by which is meant only the Premier’s Administration) consists of twenty-one ministers of Cabinet rank, the war régime, it was manifest from the start, would be confined to five outstanding men combining the motive forces of the entire organization. These five were the Prime Minister himself, the Foreign Secretary (Sir Edward Grey), the Chancellor of the Exchequer (Mr. Lloyd-George), the First Lord of the Admiralty (Mr. Winston Churchill), and the Secretary for War (Lord Kitchener). Although the highest-salaried member of the Cabinet, the Lord High Chancellor (Lord Haldane) drew ten thousand pounds a year, and there were half-a-dozen others like the Home Secretary, the Colonial Secretary, the Secretary for India and the Presidents of the Board of Trade and Local Government Board whose financial status (five thousand pounds a year), outranked the four thousand five hundred pounds which Mr. Churchill received, the quintette named, by reason of their posts and personalities, was the logical inner Government to deal with the war. That brilliant English essayist and biographer, Mr. A. G. Gardiner, even further delimited the numerical dimensions of the _real_ War Government when he said that "if Mr. Asquith is the brain of the Cabinet, Sir Edward Grey is its character and Mr. Lloyd-George is its inspiration." [Illustration: Herbert Henry Asquith.]