Herbert Henry Asquith, Yorkshireman by birth and barrister by profession, has been Prime Minister for seven years, succeeding his late Liberal chieftain, Sir Henry Campbell-Bannerman, in 1908. Asquith, whom Bannerman used to call "the sledge-hammer," because of his lucidity of thought and expression, was sixty-three years old in September, 1915. Although not a Pitt, nor even a Disraeli or Palmerston, the statesman who looks like a Roman senator and is gifted with eloquence in keeping was considered in many respects a Heaven-sent blessing in the melting-pot era of British history, for as a purely steadying influence he is probably without a peer in contemporary politics. As a politician in the narrower sense of a party disciplinarian, manager and leader he will rank with the craftiest names in his country’s tortuous history. British Liberalism has skated on perilous ice following the reaction which swept the Conservative Party from power after the Boer War and throughout the era of Democratic radicalism in which Great Britain has meantime had its being. That Mr. Asquith’s party is enabled to celebrate ten years of sovereignty still strongly intrenched is by general consent due to the astute generalship of its commander-in-chief. Asquith is not commonly accused of imaginativeness. He is too typical a British statesman for that. His temperament is devoid of the adventurous, like that of the true intellectual, and he is pathologically fonder of harking to public opinion than boldly leading it. When he coined the "Wait and See" epigram during the Ulster crisis, he gave utterance to a phrase which accurately epitomizes the tentativeness so preponderant in his political career. British procrastination and vacillation at vital periods of the war were undoubtedly the reflex action of the Prime Minister’s own low-speed mental processes. Yet in the revolt of the Curragh Camp officers, that strange curtain-raiser of the impending Ulster crisis, which threatened to embroil these fair isles in another Cromwellian trial of strength between Parliament and the army, Mr. Asquith, by a courageous stroke of positive genius--his own assumption of the Secretaryship for War in succession to the compromised Colonel Seely--resolved into tranquillity and hope a situation more menacing to civil peace in England than living Britons had ever before lived through. Beneath Mr. Asquith’s polished exterior, unemotional mask and sweet reasonableness Germany, mistaking his for a peace-at-any-price nature, made one of the most egregious of her numerous and glaring miscalculations.