ic Nonconformist or the patriotic Welshman shows that Lloyd
George's nature would have cleaved its way like a sword through any
obstacle in any cause. He simply could not have helped it. Destiny
had set a mark on him from birth.

He was only seventeen when on a visit to London he went for the first
time to the House of Commons to listen to the proceedings from the
gallery and here is an abstract from his diary at that period: "Went to
Houses of Parliament. Very much disappointed with them. . . . I will
not say I eyed the assembly in the spirit in which William the
Conqueror eyed England on his visit to Edward the Confessor--as the
region of his future domain. O Vanity!" A country youth without
money, without prospects, sitting in the exclusive Parliament House of
the most exclusive nation of the world, watched the assembly before him
and there occurred to him the thought of conquering it single-handed.
That is what it came to. Of course his reference is in the nature of a
joke. It could hardly be otherwise. But it was a joke which has
proved to be a prophecy.

Before he was seventeen Lloyd George had already dived deep into
controversy. His school of debating consisted of the cobbler's
workshop and the village smithy at Llanystumdwy, where in the evenings
young men and old men and a sprinkling of boys used to assemble to
discuss in a haphazard way questions of ethics, the politics of the
day, and most of all the rights and wrongs of the religious sects to
which they respectively belonged. Richard Lloyd, on the one hand, and
the old blacksmith, on the other, would stir the discussion now and
again with a sagacious word. It is easy to imagine the ripple of
musical Welsh which sometimes drowned the tap-tap of the cobbler's
hammer, or was submerged beneath the clang of the anvil. The bright
eyes and excited faces of these Celts partly illumined by the oil-lamp
or by the sudden glow of the blacksmith's furnace must have provided
pictures worth record for themselves, quite apart from the personal
interest they would now possess.

In the midst of the discussions young David would plunge with a wit and
understanding beyond his years, and he stood up to his seniors with
both gravity and audacity. "Do you know," said the gray-haired
blacksmith to Richard Lloyd one day, "I really had to turn my serious
attention to David last evening or he would have got the best of me."

If any of those who read this narrative a