peoples whose destinies were bound up with the triumph of the Allies believed, with a singular unanimity of faith, that the British Prime Minister would prove no less inspired a leader in the restoration of real peace to a weary and exhausted world than in the achievement of overwhelming victory. He had a wonderfully clean slate to work upon. Not only had all the forces of military resistance been crushed in every enemy country, but the peoples themselves had risen against the rulers who had brought them to ruin. The Hohenzollerns and all the minor dynasties of the German Empire, together with the ancient Hapsburg dynasty, had fallen. The Tsar Ferdinand had fled from Bulgaria as ignominiously as the Envers and Talaats and all the other adventurers of the Turkish Committee of Union and Progress who had dragged the Ottoman Empire into war at the heels of the two Germanic Empires. The miracle of American participation in the war had made up for the defection of Russia in the throes of a catastrophic revolution. Unity of purpose and action had been, as seldom before in history, maintained between Allies in war, and promised to survive the often more trying ordeal of a great peace congress.

That was the picture at the end of 1918. What was the picture four years later? America withdrawn once more into her own shell, watchful and not unsuspicious; in Europe, disunion and bitter jealousy between the greater Allies; the Anglo-French understanding strained almost to the breaking point; the shadow of economic ruin spreading ever deeper and wider over the continent of Europe; Germany sinking, half defiant, half helpless, into a bottomless slough of financial despond; the lesser States of Europe perplexed and estranged by our apparent indifference to their distress; Bolshevist Russia still implacably intent on the propagation of her sinister gospel of sheer destruction; in close alliance with her a resurgent Turkey, flushed with her facile triumph over the unfortunate Greeks, whom we at first encouraged in an adventure far beyond their strength and then abandoned to their fate; anarchy rampant throughout Central Asia; the Middle East from Persia to Egypt seething with new and old discontents amidst the dangerous wreckage of our broken promises and conflicting policies.

Still staggering at home under the tremendous burdens of the Great War, the British people had been scarcely conscious of the

rate at which Mr. Lloyd George had squandered such a national asset as the confidence which British singleness of purpose had won for us abroad during the Great War, till they were rudely awakened on September 16 last by an hysterical S.O.S., styled a 'Declaration of Policy.' It sounded, in Mr. Asquith's apt phrase, 'the double note of provocation and of panic.' It shrieked to the people of the Dominions for help before even their Governments had been consulted. Then in that limelight flash the country saw how it had been allowed to drift to the very brink of another war against the Turk, whom we had held four years before in the hollow of our hand, and that the risk of war was going to be taken with no assurance of support from the Powers who were still nominally our Allies and with no other prospect than that of saving the mere shadow of the promise of a new era of freedom and peace in the East for which British blood and treasure had been lavishly poured out. The nation tasted all at once the Dead Sea fruit of Mr. Lloyd George's foreign policy, and found it intolerably bitter. Party politics may have played a decisive part in the Parliamentary revolt which drove him at last to resign, but his crushing defeat at the polls showed the vast majority of the electors to have at length realised that in the course of four years Great Britain had lapsed from a position of unquestioned leadership into one of almost complete isolation-not the proud and deliberate isolation in which Mr. Joseph Chamberlain exulted thirty years ago, but the inglorious isolation of deep and widespread distrust.

Of that distrust Mr. Lloyd George had become the occasion and the chief object abroad, because foreign countries, to whom at that juncture British foreign policy mattered so immensely, were quick to perceive that it was essentially Mr. Lloyd George's policy, and for its perplexing and alarming instability they learned, not without reason, to fasten responsibility upon him personally rather than upon the minister nominally in charge of the British Foreign Office. At home people had seen, and seen with approval, the Prime Minister's ubiquitous energy dominate almost every department during the war, and they only perceived how completely since the war he had eclipsed the department constitutionally entrusted with the conduct of foreign affairs when his failure there had become almost irretrievable.

In Lord Balfour, who accompanied him to Paris as titular head

of the Foreign Office, whilst Lord Curzon remained in London to transact its current business, Mr. Lloyd George had a colleague whose philosophic detachment was an antithesis but seldom a counterpoise to the Premier's mercurial temperament. Mr. Lloyd George's contempt for Lord Curzon, who succeeded Lord Balfour as Secretary of State, everyone knows, since he advertised it in one of his many choleric outbursts during the last elections. And it had already long been an open secret that important decisions were constantly taken in matters of foreign policy and instructions actually issued over Lord Curzon's head from the Prime Minister's office and the brand new Cabinet Secretariat in which he gathered together some brilliant and enthusiastic young men whom he knew how to magnetise, as well as a host of much less desirable familiars, to perform for him functions hitherto unknown to constitutional practice. It would be easy to multiply instances the notorious Egyptian Note of December 3, 1921, drafted on the opposite side of Downing Street and merely sent across to the Foreign Office for transmission to Cairo over Lord Curzon's reluctant signature; the Foreign Secretary's exclusion from not a few of Mr. Lloyd George's peripatetic conferences, specially marked last spring at Cannes; the secret communications that passed between the Prime Minister's office and Greek ministers, etc. The climax was reached when the 'Declaration ' of Policy' concerning the Near East was issued on September 16, 1922, without the knowledge of the Foreign Secretary or the Foreign Office, after Mr. Lloyd George had sanctioned the draft prepared by Mr. Churchill, often his closest and most dangerous confidant.

Personal incompatibilité d'humeur may have played some part in Mr. Lloyd George's attitude towards Lord Curzon. But it undoubtedly reflected also his attitude towards most public departments and notably towards the Foreign Office. He lavished parliamentary incense upon the large retinue of experts whom he took with him to Paris, but he instinctively disliked their traditions and their methods, based on knowledge and on facts, to which he preferred his erratic flashes of intuition, and he would throw them suddenly over at the last minute, as on the Danzig question, in favour of his own changing impressions, often gathered from conversations with casual visitors who ranked with him as great authorities as soon as they had said the things that he wanted to have said to him.

The difficulties of the task which he shouldered in assuming complete control of British foreign policy after the war were immense; but with his mandate just renewed by popular acclamation he had some excuse for believing that he alone could shoulder them and that as he had won the war,' so also could he win the peace. His boundless driving power directed to the immediate purpose of winning the war had stood him in lieu of statesmanship during the war, and perhaps represented in the circumstances the highest form of statesmanship. In the heat of the struggle which meant life or death for England there was no call for the qualities with which, as an observant writer lately remarked, neither his origin nor his education had been calculated to endow him: The reflectiveness that searches out what went 'before or what may follow after, still less the patience that ' unravels complexities.'

In Paris those were the very qualities essential for the solution of the most complex international problems with which statesmanship had ever been confronted. Mere driving power could not solve them, nor the arts of the politician which his unrivalled flexibility and great personal magnetism had known how to apply successfully in the earlier part of his career to the game of party politics in a rapidly changing England. He had, on the whole, seemed to rise above those arts during the war. But even before he went to Paris he stepped down from his war-time pinnacle and resumed, during the elections which he sprung on an overwrought nation, the habits of the pre-war demagogue who had talked down to the level of his Limehouse audience rather than miss the rapture of its cheers. Without stopping to think 'what was to follow after,' he swept the country by promising to hang the Kaiser and to make Germany pay. The former of those two gratuitously rash promises was from the very first a' dud,' though it was solemnly embalmed in the Versailles Treaty. William II had sought sanctuary on the neutral soil of Holland, and it was no more consonant with our traditions to press for his surrender than with the dignity of an independent State to grant it.

The second promise was a far graver matter. Other nations besides England heard it given and at once took note of it. Nowhere did it raise greater expectations than in France, where it gave the very lead to which her own far greater need of reparations only too eagerly responded. He was not the only

one in Paris to be blinded by the mirage of war-time finance and to imagine that the world could still go on juggling with fantastic billions. But he was responsible for the inclusion of warpensions in the German reparations, and on this he insisted because, having no claims to put forward that could rank with the French in respect to devastated territories, he had somehow to make good his own electioneering promises to the British people. The French agreed, for it was a proposition that committed England the more deeply to their policy; but President Wilson objected to it as straining the principle of reparation, and, though he waived his objection, this was one of the incidents that sank into the American mind and helped later on to harden American opinion against Great Britain.

The Conference, after starting with a 'Big Ten,' soon shrunk to a Big Four,' and later on to a Big Three' when Italy, sulking over Fiume, temporarily recalled M. Orlando. The three men with whom the settlement of the peace terms to be imposed upon Germany almost exclusively rested were Mr. Lloyd George, who had won the war' for England, M. Clemenceau, who had carried France through the darkest days on his robust shoulders, and President Wilson, who, after long hesitation and against the whole weight of American tradition, had brought his people into the war across 3,000 miles of ocean. As soon as the President had won his chief point, namely, that not merely the principle but an elaborate Covenant of the League should be drawn up and promulgated in the forefront of the German Treaty, he seldom claimed more than a right to exercise a restraining influence, whenever the terms of the Treaty seemed to him to depart too visibly from his' Four Objects' and ' Five Particulars' and final 'Fourteen Points.'

But from the beginning the treaty presented itself from two very different angles of vision to the British and French Prime Ministers. Mr. Lloyd George was quick to see in it an instrument for implementing the material gains already assured to England from the defeat of Germany. To M. Clemenceau, who himself had gone through the année terrible of 1870-71, and had seen the German armies once more in occupation for over four years, of a fifth, and industrially the most vital fifth, of French territory, the new treaty meant something very different. It was to be the first and biggest step towards remaking the map of Europe, so