One night during the South African War a Radical M.P., advocating the downtrodden brother Boer’s cause at a mass-meeting in Birmingham, received such a warm reception from the crowd that he had to flee for his life through a back-door, disguised as a policeman. His name was David Lloyd-George, whose present occupation is that of England’s man of the hour. He was Chancellor of the Exchequer when war broke out and introduced the initial war budgets, earning thereby encomiums from the financial community which for years before looked upon him as capital’s demagogic arch-foe. To-day, Minister of Munitions--the circumstances under which he became such are treated in a subsequent chapter--Lloyd-George comes far nearer being Britain’s national hero than any of his contemporaries. He is charged by his detractors with the design to make himself Dictator. England could have a worse one. If Lloyd-George were an American instead of a Welshman, he would have been President of the United States by this time, or at least as close to it as Bryan has ever been. There is in fact very little typically British about him. He is emotional, for example, and he has an imagination. His whole make-up is trans-atlantic, which is _Anglice_ for sensational. Picture, if you can, a strong solution of Booker Washington (I mean, of course, only his eloquence), of flamboyant and appealing Billy Sunday, of the Boy Orator of the Platte at his silver-tongued best, and of our inimitable T. R. in his most rampageous form, and you will have Lloyd-George in composite. It was because he is all this that he was chosen for the "shells portfolio" in the reconstructed Asquith cabinet. [Illustration: Lloyd-George.]