“The English ministerial crisis is just a conflict, at an acute stage, of two principles and methods of government. One represents the normal maintenance of traditions, or rather of conventions, which have stood the proof of long administration—the ordinary march of the governmental machine. According to this view, that machine can give us its full value, if only all its wheels are strengthened without being modified. The other view holds that there must be new simplifications of the machinery. The driving power must be organised and concentrated in one control—and that a control of energy. The time of good intentions has passed. This is no longer an affair of ‘Wait and see.’ Mr. Lloyd George takes his stand clearly and simply on the side of decisive action.” The _Temps_ was not alone. Philippe Millet, writing in _L’Œuvre_ on the same day, showed that he had a glimpse of the same issue: “It is necessary to look beyond the conflict of persons. Then one discovers a practically unanimous desire to constitute at last a true War Government. What England has in her mind is the formation of a sort of Committee of Public Safety.” England, he perceived, had become more revolutionary than France. “Conscription had made a greater change in England because it was in itself a revolution. Beginning later than ourselves, the English have taken on the habit of changing their political organisation at great speed and as fast as the war compels them; and their acquired pace is probably in this stage superior to ours. It is in England rather than in France that one sees at this moment the spirit of Carnot reviving.” Here surely was a very profound political observation. With the same keenness of insight M. Clemenceau, writing on July 1st, 1917, in _L’Homme Enchaîné_, saw in Mr. Lloyd George a great political experimentalist adapting his course always to the actual events of the war: “The English Prime Minister is, above all things, a man of action—one of those who, under the active impulse of living thought, apply themselves to one task only—and that is to bring order and method into the plans and resolves which come to them from a rigorous scrutiny of realities.” Other French journalists, still seeing these incidents more clearly from across the water, rejoiced at the change on the broadest possible lines. “The state of war,” wrote M. Gustave Téry, “demands that all deliberations should be brief and decisions prompt. Now how can they possibly be so, if all power is exercised by two dozen Ministers who pass half their time in discussion and the other half in deploring their impotence?” Gustave Hervé was even more outspoken in _La Victoire_ (December 7th, 1916):