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MR. LLOYD GEORGE AS MINISTER OF A

DEMOCRACY.

SINCE the days when great crowds were wont to congregate at railway stations on the off chance that Mr. Gladstone, the great tribune of the Victorian era, in passing through from London to Midlothian, might give the people a few minutes' address, there has been no voice in British politics like that of Mr. Lloyd George to captivate the imagination and to hold the ear of the Democracy. We miss in his speeches the rounded, sonorous periods of Mr. Gladstone, but they appeal to the popular conceit as perhaps even the Grand Old Man seldom did. He is a stranger alike to the frigid impressiveness of Mr. Asquith and to the more heated but less convincing oratory which distinguishes Mr. Winston Churchill, but he is quicker than either to put himself in accord with the crowd. No speech of his, however carefully prepared, however elaborately studied, possesses the grace and finished polish of Mr. Balfour's most casual utterance; but it never fails to hold the multitude. You may disagree with his sentiments, reprobate his methods, even condemn the particular object he has in view, but you cannot help recognising the charm he undoubtedly possesses for the man in the street, and to which you find yourself unwillingly compelled to surrender-at least for the time. His speeches seldom read well in cold print, but coming hot from his lips they move you. You may call much of it patter, and Cheap Jack oratory at a country fair, but you must admit the yokels like it, and are carried away by it. It is for this reason that he has come to be pretty generally acclaimed as the most potent force in British politics to-day, regarded as the one man who can sway the Democracy, mould them to his will, lead them to see things through his glasses, induce them to do to-day things for which they may be sorry to-morrow.

This largely explains why, of all the members of the Coalition Cabinet, Mr. Lloyd George was selected for the portfolio of the Ministry of Munitions, the new department of State which, more than any other, has to do most directly and most intimately with the industrial community to which the State looked for salvation at the most critical period in the history of the Empire. It is true he possesses other and very essential qualifications for this, in a sense perhaps the most important and responsible position in the whole Ministry at the present juncture. His name in the late Liberal administration had come to be looked upon as a synonym for success. His record at the Board of Trade, the

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department which, before the creation of the Ministry of Munitions had most to do with the nation's industries, to put it at its lowest compared in practicalness with that of any of his predecessors in that office. The establishment of the census of production might almost be deemed to have been inspired by a prevision of the country's requirements in such a crisis as the present, the necessity to estimate its industrial resources, and to measure its capacity for producing at need any given classes of goods. The information stored in the pigeon-holes of that department of the Board of Trade provided data which must have been invaluable when the future activities of the Ministry of Munitions first came to be mapped out. He had the ear of the worker, the confidence of the employer, the power to charm both into beneficent co-operation--and combined with this a dynamic personality sufficiently potent to set the new machinery in motion and to keep it going at high speed.

But the war, great, grim, terrible beyond conception though it be, will pass, soon or late. And when it is over, when peace is once more established, what then? Mr. Lloyd George himself has declared that new problems will arise which will cause old Party shibboleths to be forgotten. Old landmarks will disappear, the middle wall of partition between Parties as we have known them in the past will in many cases have been broken down. Some, however, will still remain, behind which the stalwarts of old interests will again entrench themselves, and possibly raise new fortifications. One great fact is already emerging from the smoke and the turmoil of the battlefields of Europe, and that is that when the war is over the Democracy will demand to be heard and considered in all the lands now suffering from the ravages of war. It is inconceivable, for instance, that when the German armies are finally routed, as everybody in this country confidently believes they will be, the German people will once more place their necks under the yoke of Junkerism and submit themselves to the bondage of militarism. Of Russia, the other great Empire in which the will of the people has ever been subordinated to that of its Autocrat head, Mr. Lloyd George, with a spirit of prophecy descended upon him, declared that the tyranny of German militarism is actually freeing that great agglomeration of nationalities from the bondage of countless ages. Speaking at the Royal National Eisteddfod of Wales, at Bangor, August 5th, 1915, he said:

"I have no doubt that, however long victory may tarry, it will ultimately come. We may have to wait for the dawn. The Eastern sky is dark and lowering; the stars have been clouded over. I regard that stormy horizon with anxiety, but with no dread. To-day I can see the colour of a new hope beginning to empurple the sky. The enemy are unshackling Russia.

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With their monster artillery they are shattering the rusty bars that fettered the strength of the people of Russia. . . . Austria and Prussia are doing for Russia to-day what their military ancestors effected just as unwittingly for France. They are. freeing a great nation."

In fulfilment of that inspired prophecy the sheaf of the firstfruits of the coming harvest has already appeared in the effective protest of the Duma against its compulsory prorogation, and in its consequent reassembling in session at the now unquestioned will of the people. What is taking place in the Balkans as I write, the open flouting by King Ferdinand in Bulgaria and by King Constantine in Greece of the known wishes of the masses, can have but one conclusion. The will of the people there, as here, must ultimately prevail. So far as Britain is concerned, the gage of battle was taken up by us in defence of the rights of small nationalities-originally Belgium and Serbia. But the issue has widened immensely since then. It is no longer limited to the protection of small countries against the aggression of all-powerful neighbours, but involves the assertion of the right of the people in all countries to the exercise of their will in their own home government. The old political formula of the " "government of the people by the people for the people" is being given a wider application than it ever had before. In other words, the world war is opening to-day the door through which the Democracy of Europe will enter into its own to-morrow.

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And when it does, where will Britain stand? Is it conceivable that, when it returns home war-worn and blood-stained from this titanic struggle on behalf of the Democracy of Europe, what is left after the war of the flower of British manhood will be content with the old order of things which prevailed before it entered upon the fight?

Let us extend our field of vision to our Colonies and the British Dominions Beyond the Seas. How will the war affect them, and the mutual relations between these young and vigorous nations with each other, and between these growing British cubs and the old but still vigorous British lion? Let us not deceive ourselves; the position and the relations of the Oversea Dominions to the Mother Country can never be the same after the war as they have been supposed to be hitherto. With a spirit and an enthusiasm never before witnessed in the history of any people, these have, without a single exception, rivalled each other in devotion, emulated each other in sacrifice, and manifested a loyalty which has struck the foe with consternation and the friend with amaze.

But loyalty and devotion to what? Not so much to the King of England as to the Emperor of the British Dominions Beyond

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the Seas. Go among the Colonial troops, Canadian, South African, Australian, and you will find, to your edification if to your surprise, that it is not the traditional conventional love of the Mother Country which inspires them. To the great majority of them England is not their Mother Country. They are children of the Canadian prairies, of the South African veldt, of the Australian sheep-run. These are their motherlands, and to them their thoughts turn when thinking of home, and all that word signifies. Compliment them on their loyalty to "the old country," and the chances are they will tell you, in language more forceful than deferential, that they are inspired not by love, of England, but by regard for the fortunes and future of the British Empire. England to them is little more than a name, a nebula, an abstraction; the Empire a concrete reality which they have seen and felt, and with which the fortunes of the only motherland they know are indissolubly bound. It was because they saw the Empire imperilled, and their homelands endangered by German aggression, that they shouldered rifle and knapsack, and made equal cause with England against the common enemy. And when the war is over, think you these democratic sons of democratic peoples will return to their homes beyond the seas content to leave solely to the guidance 1 and determination of a country and an authority in which

they have no voice the future destinies of the Empire in whose continued existence their own home interests are bound, and for which they have fought so well and poured their blood so unstintedly? Will it not rather be the task of British statesmanship to devise means for drawing more closely the bonds of Empire, and for giving these scattered subjects of that Empire, the most democratic the world has ever seen, a new and more intimate interest in its maintenance?

At home we shall be faced by a greater industrial struggle than has ever yet been witnessed. All the elements that go to the making of a great and grave industrial dispute were in existence before the Continental War broke out. That war has neither banished nor dissipated them. Indeed, so far from allaying, it has rather served to emphasise the animosities which, unappeased, inevitably lead to conflict. One may even go a step further, and assert that the special war legislation adopted to meet the necessities of the situation has served actually to prepare the battleground. To employ military similes new gun emplacements have been constructed for offensive, and new protections have been raised for defensive purposes on both sides. Take the labour side of the question. The workman has been granted very substantial increases in his wages, not merely in

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the form of a war bonus, but, in certain great industries-mining, for instance-large advances in his ordinary earnings. Take the capitalist view. The employer has been granted powers and privileges undreamed of a few years ago. For the time being all the fortifications of Trade Unionism have been razed to the ground. Regulations relating to hours of work, the employment of non-Unionist labour or of unskilled workmen in the skilled trades-in a word, all the safeguards raised by the laborious efforts and enormous conflicts of Trade Unionism for a generation past, have now been swept away by the action of the Ministry of Munitions under special powers granted by the legislature. It is true that these are all alike labelled "temporary," that the advance in wages has been, in many cases, specifically granted to meet the increased cost of living, and that there has been given by the Minister of Munitions a solemn undertaking that no suspension for the time being of Trade Union regulations shall in any way prejudice the position of labour after the war. But to argue from these facts that capital and labour will automatically and voluntarily revert to the status quo ante bellum when peace is restored and home industries reassume a normal state, is to ignore every teaching of history, and to deny every tendency of perverted human nature. We have no more right to assume that every capitalist and every Trade Union in the land will respect the sacred inviolability of treaties than we have to believe, say, that it was a sense of honourable obligation alone which induced Germany, on the representation of President Wilson, to abandon her submarine piracy, or that the Kaiser will voluntarily surrender his territorial gains in France and Belgium. Indeed, those who in the past have been by courtesy regarded as the founts of honour on the Continent, have so depreciated the value of solemn engagements that an unbalanced labour organisation on the one hand, and a ring of capitalists thirsting for profits on the other, can, however unjustifiably, still quite conceivably, endeavour by any and every means within their power to retain, when the war is over, all the benefits and advantages which the war temporarily gave them. There are not lacking already indications of this, signs that both capital and labour are preparing to resume the struggle at the earliest opportunity, and that on a scale unprecedented in industrial history. The President of the Miners' Association of Great Britain has frankly avowed such an intention on the part of an organisation which has contributed a quarter of a million men to our new army; the Secretary of the Railwaymen's Association declared from his place in the House of Commons that, in quite conceivable circumstances, every railway in the

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