“Roughly the veils are torn aside in all the allied countries; and from Petrograd to Paris, from London to Rome, the whole world turns anxiously towards their Governments, crying, ‘We want leaders!’ “Lloyd George has been the first in our great countries of the West to hear the cry of the people.” M. Fitzmaurice, in the _Figaro_, foresaw how the crisis would end: “Perhaps he will not have the support of all his colleagues of to-day, some of whom are precisely those whose delays and decisions he was arraigning, and from whose hands he wished to take the War Council; but he will have with him all the men of action of all the parties who recognise in him a true leader because they have seen him at work and they know that they can count on him. He will have with him all the English people and all the Allies.” The _Matin_ on the same day (December 7th) analysed the position as follows: “In reality the conflict which divides the English political world is nothing new in the history of peoples. In moments of great gravity, even of less gravity than the present time, there has often been felt this imperious necessity to trust the management of affairs to men of energy. Even revolutions have arisen, in England itself, and several times, from the discontent created by Ministers who were excellent in moments of calm but feeble in serious crises.” The _Journal_ wrote thus: “One element dominates the situation. It Is the preponderating position of Mr. Lloyd George. No Prime Minister could govern to-day without asking not so much for his collaboration as for his directions. Lloyd George is the soul of England at war, and the principal combative arm of Great Britain. Why keep him then in the second political place? The brain that conceives ought also to be the will that directs.” It is, indeed, a remarkable proof of the interest taken by Frenchmen to-day in the personality of Mr. Lloyd George that perhaps the best of all the shorter sketches of his career has been written by M. Paul Louis Hervier and published by that enterprising magazine, _Je Sais Tout_, in its issue of April 15th, 1917. To-day, indeed, it is scarcely too much to say that in France Mr. Lloyd George is the best known and loved of all European statesmen—not even excluding the statesmen of France itself. Or turn to another splendid European Ally—Italy. There, too, Mr. Lloyd George is well appreciated as a leader in the Entente Alliance. Here is a passage from the _Secolo_ in December, 1916: