tical emergencies.

To find men at the head of so great a nation with no courage in the
heart, with no exaltation of captaincy in the soul, without even the
decency to make sacrifices for principle, made him bitterly
contemptuous. At first he could scarcely bridle his rage, but as years
went on he used to say that the politicians had deepened his faith in
Providence. God was surely looking after England or she would have
perished years agone. In his old age he ceaselessly quoted the lines of
William Watson:

"Time, and the Ocean, and some fostering star
In high cabal have made us what we are";

and damned the politician with all the vigour of the Old Testament
vernacular.

I have often listened to a minister's confidential gossip about Lord
Fisher; nothing in these interesting confidences struck me so much as
the self-satisfaction of the little minister in treating the man of
destiny as an amusing lunatic.

MR. ASQUITH

THE RT. HON. HERBERT HENRY ASQUITH

Born at Morley, Yorkshire, 1852. Educ.: City of London School;
Balliol College, Oxford; gained 1st class, Lit. Hum. 1874;
Barrister Lincoln's Inn, 1876; Q. C. 1890; Home Sec'y, 1892-95;
Ecclesiastical Commissioner, 1892-95; Chancellor of the Exchequer,
1905-8; Sec'y for War, 1914; 1st Lord of the Treasury and Prime
Minister, 1908-16; LL.D. Edinburgh, Glasgow, Cambridge, Leeds, St.
Andrews, and Bristol.

[Illustration: RT. HON. HERBERT HENRY ASQUITH]

CHAPTER IV

MR. ASQUITH

_"Not to mention loss of time, the tone of their feelings is
lowered: they become less in earnest about those of their opinions
respecting which they must remain silent in the society they
frequent: they come to look upon their most elevated objects as
unpractical, or at least too remote from realization to be more
than a vision or a theory: and if, more fortunate than most, they
retain their higher principles unimpaired, yet with respect to the
persons and affairs of their own day, they insensibly adopt the
modes of feeling and judgment in which they can hope for sympathy
from the company they keep."_--JOHN STUART MILL.

Nothing in Mr. Asquith's career is more striking than his fall from
power: it was as if a pin had dropped.

Great men do not at any time fall in so ignominious a fashion, much less
when the fate of a great empire is in the balance.

The truth is that Mr.