s of this kind.

One of the secrets of Lloyd George's career was that he always made his
opponents too angry to appraise him correctly. They simply couldn't do
it. A little cold-blooded study of him and his past history would have
served them well. Because Lloyd George had a peculiarly bitter tongue
and a peculiarly stimulating one he was abused as a fluent demagogue
with nothing but unscrupulous and violent words to give him prominence.
This was not a mere pretense on the part of the upper classes. They
seriously believed it. As a result Lloyd George had a tremendous pull
over the whole lot of them. One secret of his power was that his real
strength lay not in words, but in his capacity for action. Because he
talked about things with recklessness and force it was assumed that he
could not do things. The hard fact was that he was more effective in
doing things and in getting them done than in talking about them. He
secured a wonderful advantage from all this. While hard names were
being showered on him, and even while he was replying to them, he was
at work quietly. I have often thought that as soon as his opponents
found him out they felt that this was not fair, that he ought to have
played the game and to have shown himself as exactly the kind of man
they had portrayed him to be. Yet, at the time, his enemies would
probably have been contemptuous of the suggestion that this ranting
person could possibly be a man who was specially gifted in carrying
plots and plans and big state projects into execution. They had to
learn to their cost that he was both resolute and stealthy.

Lloyd George had as his chief Mr. Asquith, a man of crystal intellect,
who had won high distinction, first at his university, than at the bar,
where he was a famous advocate, and latterly in the House of Commons,
where his mastery of Parliamentary arts was only equaled by that of the
rival leader, Mr. Balfour. His speeches were powerful, but they
appealed to the head rather than to the emotions. Unlike Lloyd George,
he was not by way of being a prophet. He could not by sheer intensity
sway the House of Commons. Mr. Asquith, moreover, was quite incapable
of stirring a public audience on the platform outside the House, and he
lacked that terrific energy which distinguished his principal
colleague. But he was, nevertheless, a first-rate partner. His
steady, cold brain would carry into effect with precision an intricate,
delicate, a