for one knows very well that he is
far more at his ease with these third-rate people than with people of a
higher and more intellectual order. For culture he has not the very
least of predilections; and the passion of morality becomes more and
more one of the pious memories of his immaturity.

Dr. Clifford would be gladly, even beautifully, welcomed; but after an
hour an interruption by Sir William Sutherland would be a delightful
relief.

M. Clemenceau exclaimed of him, lifting up amazed hands, "I have never
met so ignorant a man as Lloyd George!" A greater wit said of him, "I
believe Mr. Lloyd George _can_ read, but I am perfectly certain he never
does."

I detect in him an increasing lethargy both of mind and body. His
passion for the platform, which was once more to him than anything else,
has almost gone. He enjoys well enough a fight when he is in it, but to
get him into a fight is not now so easy as his hangers-on would wish.
The great man is tired, and, after all, evolution is not to be hurried.
He loves his arm-chair, and he loves talking. Nothing pleases him for a
longer spell than desultory conversation with someone who is content to
listen, or with someone who brings news of electoral chances. Of course
he is a tired man, but his fatigue is not only physical. He mounted up
in youth with wings like an eagle, in manhood he was able to run without
weariness, but the first years of age find him unable to walk without
faintness--the supreme test of character. If he had been able to keep
the wings of his youth I think he might have been almost the greatest
man of British history. But luxury has invaded, and cynicism; and now a
cigar in the depths of an easy-chair, with Miss Megan Lloyd George on
the arm, and a clever politician on the opposite side of the hearth,
this is pleasanter than any poetic vapourings about the millennium.

If only he could rise from that destroying chair, if only he could fling
off his vulgar friendships, if only he could trust himself to his
vision, if only he could believe once again passionately in truth, and
justice, and goodness, and the soul of the British people!

One wonders if the angels in heaven will ever forgive his silence at a
time when the famished children of Austria, many of them born with no
bones, were dying like flies at the shrivelled breasts of their starving
mothers. One wonders if the historian sixty years hence will be able to
forgive him his rebuff to the fi