Lloyd George began life in Wales where the national flower is the leek. He began life as a seamy radical to wind up as a polished bourgeois. Briand boasted that with his ear tuned to the Brittany patois he could understand Welsh. It was more true than the literal truth that these two men spoke the same language. It was Celt to Celt. With Poincare and Bonar Law it was Gael to Gaul, and they broke.

Briand fell first from power, outwardly because the moving pictures showed Mr. Lloyd George teaching him golf to the distress of all Frenchmen, inwardly because, out of the nature of conference, he had to concede something to his fellow in conference and Poincaré and his friends were able to raise the most potent of all political issues against him. They were able to charge that he was abandoning the rights of France to the foreigner.

About the same time Carpentier, the French boxing idol, was beaten by Jack Dempsey, the American heavyweight, and some of the lyrical French reporters of the battle declared that it was due to the hypnotic influence of Dempsey's fighting eye. With Briand ruined by golf and Carpentier by the hypnotic eye, M. Poincare took no chances. There never was a real conference between him and Mr. Lloyd George, and European affairs came to an obvious standstill, ex

cept that M. Poincare's friends shrewdly made trouble for Mr. Lloyd George with the Turks.

M. Poincare wouldn't come near enough to Mr. Lloyd George for talk and compromise; the Turk was coming so near to the little British line at Chanak that he thought no compromise was necessary; and Mr. Lloyd George was guilty of the second serious error of his career in his judgment of public opinion. The first was when he went against the Boer War. This second one was his belief that the Empire would respond to a war cry against the Turk in behalf of Britain's traditional task of protecting Christian minorities in the Near East. Headed by the powerful Rothermere press, the Empire responded with roars of protest that gave the party meeting of Tories in the Carlton Club the support necessary to break the coalition and send Mr. Lloyd George from office.

But before he fell he saw the achievement of another, his third great task for the British Empire. He concluded the signing of a treaty with the real leaders of the Irish people. During the seven hundred years of hateful interference between Ireland and England other settlements had been reached. But this treaty that Lloyd George signed was the first to which was brought the essential element of support by a substantial majority of the Irish people themselves. Its cosmic importance may be less than

his achievements in the World War and its imperial results may not be greater than the reform of the budget, but, for display of sheer political virtuosity, it is Lloyd George's masterpiece.

Never had the feeling between Ireland and England been so bitter. In the days of Strongbow, in the days of Cromwell, in the days of Castlereagh, or "bloody" Balfour, or in the more recent times of Carson and Redmond and Asquith there had been nothing like the hatred that blazed on both sides of the Irish Sea in 1920 and 1921. Irish turf still smoked with the blood of the Irish patriot martyrs of 1916 and Britain's deep wounds of war still smarted with the memory of Roger Casement. In England's weariness Ireland saw her chance and outrage and murder replied to murder and outrage, neither side willing or able to assume the healthier strain of open war. No British statesman was ever so heartily mistrusted in Ireland as was Lloyd George-and that is saying a very great deal indeed. Yet, persistently and as deviously as water seeking its own level through mountains of obstacles, this Cymric Celt sought contact with the minds of other Celts. No Anglo-Saxon mind could have coped with the Irish as did the Welsh Lloyd George.

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He struck in the underhanded and terrible warfare. in Ireland when he thought there was a psychological

need to strike-his responsibility for the horrors of the Black and Tans was direct and personal. Yet when the time came for conciliation he held out his hand, surreptitiously at first, openly in the end, but persistently, through rebuff and through insult.

It was America that finally determined him upon the ultimately successful policy of conciliation. De Valera had made his triumphal tour of the United States as President of the Irish Republic in 1919, and, with headquarters in the Waldorf Hotel in New York, he had organized a tremendously successful propaganda here. More important still he had organized a steady flow of cash. If this strange SpanishIrish-American is to have a place in history it will be for the success of his embassy to the United States. He had interested Americans of Irish blood to the second and third and fourth generation. His propaganda was one of calm statement and cool statistic. As its result, when De Valera was back in Ireland in 1921, the pay envelopes of America were sending weekly installments to Ireland that made it possible for him to keep up the murderous, skillful combat with the Black and Tans.

Lloyd George knew this. The British intelligence service was aware of the huge remittances coming across the Atlantic but was powerless to stop them as they came from a friendly nation and went to a part

of the Kingdom where warfare was never openly admitted. The Black and Tan policy had depended for its success on terrorization of the Irish guerillas supposedly short of arms, ammunition and food before the news of the British counter-atrocities could become notorious. The Irish were not without arms, ammunition and food; and the news of such things as the destruction of Balbriggan and the burning of Cork provided fertile stimulus for American contributors to the very funds that enabled the Irish to prolong their resistance further. Mr. Lloyd George had a bear by the tail.

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At this juncture, May, 1921, there came to London Martin H. Glynn of Albany, N. Y. He had been Governor of the State of New York and had nominated Woodrow Wilson for the Presidency in 1916. cause of a sincere personal admiration and affection for both men and without thought of political results, I had him to luncheon to meet Mr. Philip Kerr, the brilliant young Scotsman who was at that time Mr. Lloyd George's political secretary. Mr. Kerr invited Mr. Glynn to the gallery of the House of Commons next day, a special invitation being necessary because at the moment the public was excluded from the precincts of the House actually because of a well-founded fear that some Irishman might get in and commit an outrage.