futile effort to settle the Irish question, of which Lloyd George so creditably was to acquit Great Britain eight years later, and Mr. Asquith had stepped close to the brink of ruin over the consequences in Ulster where Orangemen and British soldiers alike were in open defiance of his government's policy.

It has been charged that Germany chose this ticklish juncture to force the issue of war upon the continent, believing that England's Irish troubles would be a factor in keeping her out. It has been charged that had the then Sir Edward Grey, the British Foreign Secretary, spoken less equivocally, had he made it plain at Berlin that the violation of Belgian neutrality would bring Great Britain in, Germany would have held her hand and the war would have been avoided or at least localized in the Balkans, where they like war. Mrs. Asquith in her diary has but thinly veiled the charge that inability to get Lloyd George, the one-time pacifist of the Boer War, and second to the Prime Minister in rank only, to commit himself definitely for or against hostilities was responsible for a hesitation that was to prove costly beyond the nightmares of horror.

It seems probable that he did hesitate at this, his first responsible contact with weltpolitik, and all it implied in methods strange to him, in terms repugnant to his ideas of life. He has said of it himself,

"If we had had a conference under the new methods we would not now have ten provinces in France awaiting repair." However Lloyd George, Mr. Asquith or Lord Grey may have hesitated, Mr. Churchill has revealed that the British fleet was ready and at sea; others have shown how completely plans for the British Expeditionary Force long had been mapped out and co-ordinated with the plans of the French General Staff so far as plans and co-ordination could avail in the use of inadequate means to stem a tide of unforeseen sweep and power.

However costly Mr. Lloyd George's hesitation may have been there can be no gainsaying his contribution from the very moment the war began. In his greater achievements later on it is sometimes forgotten with what skill the Chancellor of the Exchequer of 1914 mobilized the Empire's greatest moneyed brains about him and made effective the first gigantic financing of the war. From that moment on he never wavered. More and more this great war called forth not the soldier and the sailor only, but every man, woman and child, every machine in the Empire, the whole mother nation and her brood. And more and more this popular policitian who had risen to power through his appeals for the sweating humanity he knew so well was called upon to handle that humanity in the mass. As the war became less and less a question of victory by

military or diplomatic skill and more and more a question of victory by national morale Lloyd George's

stature grew.

"All the money you need," had been his contribution from the Exchequer-and he had found the money. "Shells, shells, shells," he had cried as Minister of Munitions and he had gone up and down Britain cajoling, forcing, inspiring miners, machinists, labor leaders, capitalists, until Haig's growing hosts could answer drumfire with drumfire.

Hence it was to this Lloyd George who did things that Britain turned in the dark days of 1916 when it became apparent that the burden of years and the cloying of tradition had dulled the brilliant mind, slowed the deft hand and muffled the weighty voice that once was Asquith.

When Lloyd George became Prime Minister it was a dark time for the Allies. Every military calculation indicated a victory for the Central powers. Russia had collapsed and from the Suez Canal to the North Sea soldiers thrust here and there more with the thought of not quitting than of carrying out any hopeful plan to smash the long convex line behind which were massing the new legions released on the east and soon to be available for the final blow on the west. At sea the submarine warfare was rapidly coming onto even terms with the blockade. Propa

ganda began to countersap the Italian front. Wilson had been elected on the slogan "he kept us out of war" and was engaged in an apparently interminable exchange of notes with Germany until American indignation could be brought to the boiling point. Defeatism began to show its ugly head in France.

But not in England. Lloyd George had stripped the problem to this essential-he had sensed the basic fact that the war must be won on national nerve. He proceeded to function as that nerve. He proceeded to the development in the Allies of the quality that athletes call "guts," and to its destruction in his opponents. He visualized on a world scale the quality that keeps a man running when fatigue has deprived him of any sense of having legs. And when, on July 14, 1918, William of Hohenzollern climbed a great wooden tower north of the Champagne, as Edmond Rostand described it in one of his last poems, to see the fiery beginning of the blow his military experts told him would be the last, the victorious one, another expert, a little Welsh lawyer, an expert in the human heart and its functioning, had prepared the demonstration that so rapidly was to show which system was to prevail, the system of expert dispensation from above or the system of expert building up from below, the system of human ballistics or the system of human nature.

This, to my mind, is Lloyd George's great contribution to the war, his great contribution to history. He, pre-eminently, sensed the problem as it was. And not only did he sense it, but, with the experience of his struggle from the cobbler's shop of Llanystymdwy to Downing Street, he was master of the technique that solved it.

He was constantly in trouble with the technicians on his own side. Labor told him he would ruin the production of munitions if he took skilled men for cannon-food; but he took the men, and, putting women in their places, enlisted still more of the nation's heart and soul in the fight. The army told him its morale would be ruined were any but a Briton to command; he brought about the unity of command for lack of which so many gallant efforts had been wasted and for the first time gave the Allied peoples the great stimulus of a single central hero to worship, a Foch. The diplomats screamed discreetly to get him to hurry the entry of the United States into the war; yet under him Britain preserved just that attitude of disinterested interest in America that permitted anti-British prejudice to be wiped out in the tide of anti-German indignation.

In propaganda he was a marvel. With suave ferocity he distorted the black facts of the situation to just that psychic color that made masses of men