According to all the rules which are supposed to guide the rise of a
self-made man, Lloyd George should have been a master of routine, with
the orderly mind and undeviating habits without which we are sometimes
told no person of affairs can secure permanent success. It is much to
be regretted that Lloyd George lends no aid to the well-established
maxims. The teachers and preachers who seek to implant in the young
the principles of continuousness of purpose and of regularity and of
kindred qualities must turn their backs on Lloyd George. They will
find nothing from him to go into the text-books, for in the course of
his career the Welsh statesman has trampled on every sound rule for
securing success. That a man with so many contradictions in him should
have ever maintained his upward course is not encouraging to the
formalists, though it is very interesting to ordinary people.

There never was a man who could more quickly master the intricacies of
a business problem, and yet from his very early days he was quite
unbusiness-like in many things. He laughingly says that as a young
lawyer down in Wales he showed serious incapacity in his profession, at
least in one respect: "I never sent in any bill of costs. The result
was I never had any money." Later when his brother, three years
younger than himself, joined him in partnership matters improved. "The
firm did not then suffer from this serious professional drawback,"
explained Lloyd George. He is an adept at phrases, and yet all through
his life he has hated writing. There is a tradition among some of his
friends that even in his less busy periods, if you wanted to get a
reply from him on any topic you had to send him two postcards addressed
to yourself, on one of which was written, "Yes," and on the other,
"No." This, it was said, was the only way you could make sure of a
prompt response, or indeed of any response at all. He has been the
supreme business organizer of Britain during the war--in finance, in
industrial operations, and latterly in actual army work--and in each
direction he has sketched out and carried into effect an intensive
efficiency which it is not too much to describe as the admiration of
the world, yet all the time his office day-by-day arrangements would
certainly shock the ordinary merchant or banker. He makes contingent
appointments and forgets all about them. Some incidental scheme
adopted by him on a Saturday is on Monday thrust into l