Do you realise what a fine part amateur sportsmen are playing in this war? I really doubt if there will be many great athletes left if things go on as they are doing. On the same day I read that Poulton-Palmer and R. A. Lloyd are gone. Only last year, I remember seeing those two as Captains of England and Ireland respectively, shaking hands with each other and with the King at the great Rugby Football match at Twickenham. I see news is to hand also of the death in action of A. F. Wilding, a great athlete who neither drank nor smoked. So in three days we have lost the most brilliant and versatile centre three-quarter in Poulton, the cleverest drop-kick in the world in Lloyd, and the world's champion tennis-player in Wilding! _June 6th, 1915._ Lloyd George in his two last speeches has said more than anyone else during the war. He is an extraordinary man, and at his greatest when rallying the workers. I see that the Tory Press is enthusiastic about him, and also about Winston Churchill's speech of yesterday. L. G.'s remark that "conscription is not undemocratic" has set a new train of thought stirring in this country. Up to now, in the view of the average Englishman, democracy and conscription had been set at opposite poles. Personally I am not exactly a democrat, an aristocrat, a monarchist, a socialist, or a constitutionalist, but a sort of combination of them all, and a firm believer in the Will to Power and in the Strong Man. But the point is that England certainly inclines to democracy--meaning by democracy _laissez-faire_. Hence what is needed in a crisis like this is to bring into operation a system which, while partaking of a democratic nature, and so not being repugnant to the national type (as developed by geography, circumstance and history) may yet bring into play the advantages of military training and national organisation. If you can persuade the stolid Englishman to adopt a sort of semi-voluntary military system, which is voluntary or appears so to him, yet puts him under discipline, well then you have an ideal system for England to win this war by. Of course, there is an alternative scheme, namely, for some man of outstanding personality to come along and say, "Look here, I am master, and by my force of character I will compel you to bow to a system which I know to be good for you and which will in the end benefit you." Lloyd George might be even such a man--a Caesar, a Charlemagne, a Cromwell, or a Napoleon.