The Mirrors of Downing Street: Some Political Reflections by a Gentleman with a Duster — John Shaqi
The Mirrors of Downing Street: Some Political Reflections by a Gentleman with a DusterBegbie, Harold
History
The Mirrors of Downing Street: Some Political Reflections by a Gentleman with a Duster
Begbie, Harold
Great Britain -- Politics and government -- 1910-1936; Statesmen -- Great Britain
His intuitions are amazing. He astonished great soldiers in the war by
his premonstrations. Lord Milner, a cool critic, would sit by the sofa
of the dying Dr. Jameson telling how Mr. Lloyd George was right again
and again when all the soldiers were wrong. Lord Rhondda, who disliked
him greatly and rather despised him, told me how often Mr. Lloyd George
put heart into a Cabinet that was really trembling on the edge of
despair. It seems true that he never once doubted ultimate victory,
and, what is much more remarkable, never once failed to read the
German's mind.
I think that the doom that has fallen upon him comes in some measure
from the amusement he takes in his mental quickness, and the reliance he
is sometimes apt to place upon it. A quick mind may easily be a
disorderly mind. Moreover quickness is not one of the great qualities.
It is indeed seldom a partner with virtue. Morality appears on the whole
to get along better without it. According to Landor, it is the talent
most open to suspicion:
Quickness is among the least of the mind's properties, and belongs
to her in almost her lowest state: nay, it doth not abandon her
when she is driven from her home, when she is wandering and insane.
The mad often retain it; the liar has it; the cheat has it: we find
it on the racecourse and at the card-table: education does not give
it, and reflection takes away from it.
When we consider what Mr. Lloyd George might have done with the fortunes
of humanity we are able to see how great is his distance from the
heights of moral grandeur.
He entered the war with genuine passion. He swept thousands of
hesitating minds into those dreadful furnaces by the force of that
passion. From the first no man in the world sounded so ringing a trumpet
note of moral indignation and moral aspiration. Examine his earlier
speeches and in all of them you will find that his passion to destroy
Prussian militarism was his passion to recreate civilization on the
foundations of morality and religion. He was Peace with a sword. Germany
had not so much attempted to drag mankind back to barbarism as opened a
gate through which mankind might march to the promised land. Lord Morley
was almost breaking his heart with despair, and to this day regards
Great Britain's entrance into the war as a mistake. Sir Edward Grey was
agonizing to avert war; but Mr. Lloyd George was among the first to see
this war as the opportunity of a nobler civilization. Destroy German
militarism, shatter the Prussian tradition, sweep away dynastic
autocracies, and what a world would result for labouring humanity!
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