The Prime Minister

EVERY school-child is familiar with that striking shape taken by North Wales on the map of Britain, so like to a human being pointing with outstretched arm down St. George’s Cha...

“Ye Presences of Nature in the sky And on the earth! Ye visions of the hills And Souls of lonely places! can I think A vulgar hope was yours when ye employed Such ministry?” WOR...

PORTMADOC is a little provincial business town lying on the coast some five miles to the west of Criccieth in the very heart of Cardigan Bay. It stands at the mouth of the Glasl...

DURING these years of the early eighties (1880-4) that great Government of Mr. Gladstone’s which opened so triumphantly in 1880 was rapidly drawing towards its downfall. Checked...

CUT off from Parliament for the moment (1886) David Lloyd George spent no time in vain regrets. He resumed that life of combined public and private activity which was rapidly be...

NOW (1888) happily married and well started on his legal career, Mr. Lloyd George was able to return to his larger ambition of sitting in Parliament. From this time forward he d...

“And now, Out of that land where Snowdon night by night Receives the confidences of lonely stars, And where Carnarvon’s ruthless battlements Magnificently oppress the daunted ti...

DAVID LLOYD GEORGE had gone to Parliament as a Welsh Nationalist; and, as the months passed, it became clear that the task of moulding and defending the new national cause in Wa...

WHEN the South African War broke out in early October, 1899, Mr. Lloyd George was touring in Western Canada. The mutterings of the coming storm had already reached him in the di...

MR. LLOYD GEORGE was not to remain idle long. In 1902 the Conservative wing of the Unionist combination once again asserted itself. The war was over. The Unionists found themsel...

“If they take part in public life, the effect is never indifferent. They either appear like ministers of divine vengeance, and their course through the world is marked by desola...

“In small, truckling States, a timely compromise with power has often been the means, and the only means, of drawling out their puny existence: but a great State is too much env...

“It gives me a serious concern to see such a Spirit of Dissention in the Country; not only as it destroys Virtue and Common Sense, and renders us in a manner Barbarians towards...

FROM the moment that war was declared (August 4th, 1914), Mr. Lloyd George put aside all his doubts and hesitations. The perplexities of the previous week passed away like so ma...

IT is characteristic of Mr. Lloyd George that, when his mind once seizes hold of an idea, he is wholly possessed with it until either he can bring it to accomplishment or he is...

The opening of 1915 was a season of hope in Great Britain. The great effort to force the Dardanelles filled the public mind with visions. That attempt was then most lyrically ap...

“Like a rickety, clumsy machine, with a pin loose here, and a tooth broken there, and a makeshift somewhere else, in which the force of Hercules may be exhausted in a needless f...

“Now all the youth of England is on fire, And silken dalliance in the wardrobe lies; Now thrive the armourers, and honour’s thought Reigns solely in the breast of every man.” _H...

There were some things that could not be retrieved—Serbia, Bulgaria, Kut. On the Western fields of war there was a steady stiffening, and the 1915 peril of collapse gradually pa...

AT the opening of the year 1917 the general situation of the World-war in Europe offered fair promise for the cause of the Entente Allies. On the Western front the immense laten...

“Besides, he says, there are two councils held; And that may be determined at the one Which may make him and you to rue at the other.” SHAKESPEARE’S _Richard III_, Act III, Sc. ii.

THE last year of the Great War was undoubtedly the most critical and momentous year in the modern history of these islands. By an amazing combination of events, Western Europe w...

THE colossal strain of the last year of the Great War left both Ministers and peoples of the conquering Allies in a state of profound exhaustion. So near had been the peril of d...

“With malice towards none, with charity for all, with firmness in the right, as God gives us to see the right, let us strive on to finish the work we are in: to bind up the nati...

That serenity is never more conspicuous than in seasons of hurricane. Like some ships, he rides steadiest in rough seas. When people around him are most disturbed, he is often t...

“Jog, jog on, the foot-path way, And merrily hent the stile-a: A merry heart goes all the day, Your sad tires in a mile-a.” Autolycus in SHAKESPEARE’S _The Winter’s Tale_, Act I...

TRAVELLING about the world before the Great War, no one could fail to notice that the name of Mr. Lloyd George had already become an ensign. Men had begun to apply it to that pa...