Harold Spender

“ Unionist writers who are honest enough to admit the decay of Ireland between 1800-1900 attempt to trace it to any other cause than the Act of Union—to over-population, to the Catholic religion, to the Irish character, or even to the potato. But they labour in vain. If Ireland stood alone, they might succeed. But it does not stand alone. Precisely at the time when Ireland was decaying, all other Western nations were flourishing. ”

“ Lloyd George on the formation of the 1905 Liberal Administration presented no easy or simple task. The Board of Trade stood at a moment which comes to every great office of State—a moment when it may either increase or decrease, gather power or lose it. Its official name gave little clue to the distracting combination of powers varying from complete control at one end to vague influence at the other. British Departments are like wild-flowers—they grow and spread without plan or scheme, just as the chance caprice of Parliament or some fugitive Ministry may decide. ”

“ Look to the West, and note how, in the freest countries of the world—in the United States and Canada, where there is not even a shadow of an establishment for any form of religion—every kind of human faith lives together in simple human brotherhood, and draws from that brotherhood new food for the refreshment of mankind. In Ireland the one reason why the religious quarrel has been maintained is to be found in the absence of civil liberty. At every crisis of Ireland's fate the passion of religious hatred has been worked—then as now—in order to prolong civil and political despotism. ”

“ That is not his present reading of a statesman’s duty in these difficult days. His mind is rather filled with another vision—the vision of a State deliberately consenting to sink faction in the cause of a larger purpose—of a community which, with all its passion for the healthy strife of party, can tell when to forego that strife, and can scent the danger from afar. It is the old vision of a house not divided against itself, but working together all parties and all classes, for the common good. Is it to fade into the light of common day? ”

“ We must believe, as we have every right to believe, that liberty will bring to Ireland a new power over her resources, and a new skill in using them—that her magnificent harbours will no longer be silent, or her rivers empty; that her factories will hum once more with a new life and industry; that the grass will cease to grow in her streets and on her wharves, and that the rich and strong will cease to fly from her shores. ”

“ But gradually, as the days passed, the world woke to the fact that the Armistice was only the opening of a new phase in the crisis of change. The Armistice terms imposed on Germany by the Allies had left her prone and helpless. She could not resume the fighting. Both the Central Empires were beaten and broken. The Emperors and the Kings were in flight. But the world could not be left to live in a vacuum. Desolation is not peace. Europe was like a shattered puzzle which had to be pieced together again before humanity could resume its normal life. ”

“ One of the most remarkable events of the last few years has been the unexpected side-share of Ireland in the great social legislation of Great Britain. Even the Irish members themselves have scarcely foreseen how immensely Ireland, being the poorest partner in the United Kingdom, would benefit by a policy "tender to the poor." The most conspicuous example of that effect has been Old-age Pensions. Old-age Pensions have fallen on Ireland as a shower of gold. ”

“ How bring together human beings so divided? How bridge such a gulf?
Well, first he brought into the conferences those men who stood between the quarrelling parties—the railway managers. Here he found a remarkable body of Englishmen—alert, resourceful, self-made, unprejudiced.
How often he used to praise those railway managers! Ten years after, in a still greater emergency, his mind went back to those men; and in the gravest crisis of the Great War he called them in to aid the hard-pressed British lines in France.
What is it that has made Mr. Lloyd George so great a conciliator? ”

“ Because at the present moment two systems of government are existing in Ireland side by side—the old and the new. The old is for the most part an encumbrance and an impediment, but the new is required for doing the work of land purchase and agricultural development. Ireland is like a household into which a new staff of servants is being imported, while nobody dares to disturb the old. Could there be a more extravagant way of governing a country? ”

“ If he has erred in speech he will apologise. After the most vehement attack he will make friends with his victim. It is this combination of the slow qualities with the swift—of judgment with daring, of mercy with rigour, of slow reflection with swift attack, of the zeal of the Cambrian with the shrewdness of the Fleming—that marks him off from so many of his race. For it is not so much the emphasis of one quality as the combination of several contrasted qualities that goes to make human greatness.
Like all great stalkers and trappers, Mr. Lloyd George is very difficult to follow. ”

“ Fear rules the minds of men; and against fear courage alone prevails. This was always the moving faith at the back of all his great campaigns, whether of peace or of war. It was with this weapon that he has fought both Governments at home and Prussians abroad. It was the element of policy that underlay that frank directness of speech which offended the cultured classes of England so profoundly at the time of his Budget campaign.
For he convinced himself that modern public speakers had got into the habit of referring too politely to great national evils. ”

“ Ireland is so poor that each new Act for the relief of poverty increases the disproportion between the expenditure of Great Britain and Ireland. There is no way out of that vicious circle. If England were to increase Irish taxation she would simply increase the poverty which she has to relieve. During the last fifty years, in fact, the British Government has had to give back in some form of relief an equivalent for almost every increase of taxation enforced upon Ireland. If Ireland cannot pay, England must pay. ”

“ But India is the country of the poor man; and the poor man all over the world has heard in his speeches a new call of hope. To him Mr. Lloyd George seems a light in great darkness, the glimmering of a new dawn. Writing before the war, the Indian Patriot said:
“Of all the statesmen at the head of affairs in England to-day no one exercises the imagination of India so much as Mr. Lloyd George. He is not known as ‘Mr.’ here, but has gone over to the ranks of greatness, and is called simply ‘Lloyd George.’ His force and his earnestness always appeal to the imagination. ”

“ It is also that, on surveying the past, we find not merely that Home Rule has often saved Ireland, but that always the wider and the more generous the form of Home Rule the more it has helped Ireland. The wiser course of accepting Irish advice in Irish affairs has always turned the tide of disaster, and brought the hope of a new happiness for Ireland. Surely here we have a convincing proof that the logical consummation of this policy by the restoration of Home Rule is the only means of bringing back Ireland to a full and secure enjoyment of lasting well-being. ”

“ The war was not won alone; the peace could not be made alone. The armies had to combine for victory; the peace had to be combined too. No Great Power could have a peace entirely of its own, either in material gain or ideal aims.
The American aim, as shaped by their remarkable President and voiced in his splendid oratory, was for a peace of final world-conciliation. ”

“ They were the fit crusaders of a race that never contemplated defeat; and no man who had such a people behind him could vainly boast of his own single achievements.
Yet leadership counts for much, and vainly do the masses struggle if those at the top weaken and faint. There is no greater misfortune that can befall a race than failure of valour and resolution in high places. It was because Mr. Lloyd George kept, in the utmost stress of those events, his courage undimmed and his spirit unshaken, that he has rightly earned so large a part in the credit of victory. ”

“ It is fair also to say that Bulgaria’s refusal of a promise of neutrality was for Greece an ominous and formidable fact. It is inevitable that Greece should have been looking rather at her resentful neighbour than at those larger aims of European interest which filled the policies of the Western Powers; it was natural and human that their first and possessing fear should be lest the work of the war of 1913 should be undone. For in that terrible war the price of victory had been appallingly high for so small a nation. ”

“ Lloyd George aspired to bring into Welsh politics some of the strength and hope of this new national rebirth.
His definite aim, in the long series of great orations which he delivered on this subject between 1889 and 1896, was to bring patriotism to the help of Welsh politics in place of party—
“The spirit of patriotism has been like the genie of Arabian fable. It has burst asunder the prison doors and given freedom to them that were oppressed. It has transformed the wilderness into a garden and the hovel into a home.” [38]
It was his aim that the same spirit should transform Wales. ”

“ The sole and sufficient excuse for these grave restrictions of liberty was always the war, and the war alone. War is a terrible master; and wherever he raises his head, few escape his tyranny. All that can be said is that, with all their troubles, the sufferings of the men in the workshops were as grains in the balance against the sufferings of the men in the trenches.
But, even so, the work of the men alone was not enough to meet the need. Other sources of labour must be tapped. It was now necessary to call in the women to the aid of the men.
Mr. Lloyd George ventured on a bold appeal. ”

“ Lloyd George refused to found a separate party on the basis of his opposition to the Boer War. It was not merely his practical perception that the South African War was an issue that would pass: it was also that he was in no sense a “peace at any price” man. Although he found himself in the company of the pacifists, he never wholly belonged to that faith. He has always been conscious that the ultimate support of power and freedom must be force—force guided by right, but still force. ”

“ Lloyd George has continued to be for this country the central figure of hope and hate. He keeps his old faculty of commanding the interest of men. Now, as in the boyish scrimmages of his youth, his flying colours draw others on. For the moment (1920) he strives for peace and unity in civil endeavour. But that is not because his eye is dimmed or his combative strength abated. He is by nature a partisan leader, and it has cost him no small effort to continue in his present part. The defensive on two fronts is not his characteristic role. ”

“ I remember the saying of a great Welsh preacher: ‘Such disturbances of the world always mean some great movement in the realms above’—a reflection on earth of some heavenly strife. I believe that is true.” I did not attempt to argue with this mood; but this sympathy with unrest explains much in his career, and most of all his skill in riding through tempests and mastering storms. For it is at such moments that he is at his best. Nothing seems to frighten or appall him. When the hearts of others are dismayed he is touched with a new emotion. ”