he cheat has it: we find
it on the racecourse and at the card-table: education does not give
it, and reflection takes away from it.

When we consider what Mr. Lloyd George might have done with the fortunes
of humanity we are able to see how great is his distance from the
heights of moral grandeur.

He entered the war with genuine passion. He swept thousands of
hesitating minds into those dreadful furnaces by the force of that
passion. From the first no man in the world sounded so ringing a trumpet
note of moral indignation and moral aspiration. Examine his earlier
speeches and in all of them you will find that his passion to destroy
Prussian militarism was his passion to recreate civilization on the
foundations of morality and religion. He was Peace with a sword. Germany
had not so much attempted to drag mankind back to barbarism as opened a
gate through which mankind might march to the promised land. Lord Morley
was almost breaking his heart with despair, and to this day regards
Great Britain's entrance into the war as a mistake. Sir Edward Grey was
agonizing to avert war; but Mr. Lloyd George was among the first to see
this war as the opportunity of a nobler civilization. Destroy German
militarism, shatter the Prussian tradition, sweep away dynastic
autocracies, and what a world would result for labouring humanity!

This was 1914. But soon after the great struggle had begun the note
changed. Hatred of Germany and fear for our Allies' steadfastness
occupied the foremost place in his mind. Victory was the objective and
his definition of victory was borrowed from the prize-ring. A better
world had to wait. He became more and more reckless. There was a time
when his indignation against Lord Kitchener was almost uncontrollable.
For Mr. Asquith he never entertained this violent feeling, but gradually
lost patience with him, and only decided that he must go when
procrastination appeared to jeopardize "a knock-out blow."

Anyone who questioned the cost of the war was a timid soul. What did it
matter what the war cost so long as victory was won? Anyone who
questioned the utter recklessness which characterized the Ministry of
Munitions was a mere fault-finder. I spoke to him once of the unrest in
factories, where boys could earn L15 and L16 a week by merely watching a
machine they knew nothing about, while the skilled foremen, who alone
could put those machines right, and who actually invented new tools to
make th