e not on
the market: that he had sold 1000 shares each to Lloyd George and
Elibank, and had sold some on their behalf, but not that these two
had had further buyings and sellings on their own. It was stated for
Sir Rufus and reiterated by him that he had lost money on the
deal--the reason being that while he had gained on the shares sold,
the shares he still held had slumped. (It is difficult to see why
Rufus Isaacs and later Lloyd George made such a point of the loss on
their Marconi transactions. They can hardly have bought the shares in
order to lose money on them, and their initial sellings showed a very
large profit. Indeed Rufus Isaacs' loss depended on his having paid
his brother L2 for the shares, and again upon the 7000 shares he sold
on the opening day being only partly on his own behalf, and there is
only his own word for these two statements. If Rufus lost, he lost to
his brother, who had been willing to sell at cost price, with whom he
had a pooling arrangement, and who made an enormous profit. If Rufus
lost, the loss remained in the family.)

A week after the hearing of the _Matin_ case, Rufus Isaacs appeared
for the first time before the Parliamentary Committee, almost five
months after its formation. His problem was not so much to explain
his dealings in American Marconis, as to account for his silence in
the House of Commons. His one desire that day in Parliament, it
seems, had been to answer the "foul lies" being uttered against him,
which he was "quite unable to find any foundation for, quite unable
to trace the source of, quite unable to understand how they were
started": obviously his dealings in American Marconis could have no
possible bearing on these rumours, so he did not mention them: "I
confined my speech entirely . . . to dealing with the four specific
charges _which I formulated."_*

[* Italics mine.]

The Chairman, Sir Albert Spicer, suggested that one way to scotch the
rumours would have been to mention his investment in American
Marconis, "because both being Marconis you could easily understand
one might get confused with the other." This question always drove
Rufus Isaacs into a rage and indeed he met all difficult questions
with rages which to this day, across the gulf of thirty years, seem
simulated, and not convincingly.

Why had he not earlier asked the Committee to hear the story of the
American shares? "I took the view . . . that I had no right to claim
any preferential posit