Prime ministers and presidents

Front matter

PRIME MINISTERS AND PRESIDENTS CHARLES HITCHCOCK SHERRILL

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Other Books by the Same Author

Contents

INTRODUCTION : . . . ° ° ° ° CHAPTER

I THE POST-WAR BRITISH EMPIRE . . . ° °

Il PRESENT DAY OFFICIAL FRANCE . . . .

CHAPTER I: THE POST-WAR BRITISH EMPIRE ap i CHAPTER I THE POST-WAR BRITISH EMPIRE

S Lloyd George a seer, a prophet, a deliverer, a super-statesman, or a mountebank, a gymnast, a trickster? He has been called all of these and better and worse, but no one has yet been able to discern the naked truth about him. The world is now watching Great Britain with him as engineer running on the tracks of the Great Democratic Railroad. The world wonders as it sees the myriad passengers get aboard loving, fearing or distrusting him;—qnite a number of them doubt if they will ever arrive sound of life and limb at their journey’s end!

But the English get aboard. They follow their engineer for two principal reasons. One is that as a nation of gamblers they like to take a chance on a horse race, a ring battle, a match at Lord’s, anything. And they trust and follow whomsoever they think is a winner,—Lloyd George is a winner!

The other reason for their docility is that they do not understand him, he is the “whirling dervish” of politics who diverts and hypnotises. Like children, too abashed to demand a reason from their schoolmaster, the “people’—and they compose Lloyd George’s background—simply accept his dictum, that is, his definition of the meaning and menace of the new problems of Europe.

I would like to bring Lloyd George within the scope of normal vision. But I should fail, as others have failed before me if I sought only the “naked truth.” For there is no naked truth. Try to separate a conception of that mystery, a man, from the details of himself, including the perfect and imperfect things in his character, and nothing remains. What admirers call the gold in him, and what the detractors call the base metal are not the person; the alloy may well be the man himself.

At 10:30 on the morning of June 29, 1921, Lloyd George received me on the narrow terrace of the famous dingy little house, 10 Downing street, heart of the vast British Empire. It was not an auspicious moment for this meeting I had sought, because the Premiers of the various dominions were already assembled within the house and were impatiently waiting for the chief. Under such conditions it seemed that the best I could hope for would be a most abbreviated interview, but it turned out more happily.

Fortunately Lloyd George dearly loves a chat, and the way Philip Kerr, the brilliant, intellectual nephew of Lord Lothian, and until recently the Premier’s political secretary, had spoken of me, had possibly piqued the Welshman’s curiosity. Ignoring the Premiers who from time to time appeared at the windows Lloyd George received me as if his time were unreservedly mine.

“You are making a collection of Prime Ministers?” asked he, “a queer notion. And how did you get the idea?”

My answer the reader may compile for himself from the pages of this book; it satisfied Lloyd George, who seemed not unwilling that [ should put him at the head of the list.

Neatly dressed, his short, well-filled figure with the famous crooked legs that are the joy of the caricaturists soon passed out of my vision and I saw the noble head with its thatch of too long hair, the large eyes that might be blue or brown, that are, in fact, blue in merriment and brown in deeper emotion. I should have lost sight, I say, of his diminutive stature had it not been for a mannerism, meant to hide it, that instead, constantly emphasises it. With his eye-glass occasionally thrust at me to make a verbal point he would step first towards me and then leaning far back he would step away and then back again, now advancing one shoulder and now the other—the in-and-out action of a trained boxer. The mannerism is that almost always the head leans away from you, just as Colonel Roosevelt’s was wont to do, to lend an impression of greater height, but Lloyd George’s head inclines generally to one side or the other, which Roosevelt’s did not. Roosevelt made his points by suddenly leaning towards his man and baring his teeth, but the Welshman makes his by leaning back and screwing up his eyes the better to observe how you take him.

Always there gleamed from between these narrowed lids a something, what was it? certainly not frankness. There ensued a pause as if he waited to see if he had made an impression, and if he had failed, instantly he chose another way to do so. : Then, having succeeded, open wide flew the eyes and the franker expression returned.

His physical action in no way denoies that he is a golfer and yet it is a great passion with him. America is not the only country where it is politically wise to be a golf playmate of the Executive! One of Lloyd George’s most intimate friends (the owner and editor of The News of the World, a weekly with 3,000,000 circulation) was raised by him to the peerage as Lord Riddell of Walton Heath, for it was at the golf course of that name that they golfed together, and thither L. G. (as he is frequently called) repairs for his favourite sport whenever cares of office permit. His political wit is as alert as his bearing. It was reported to Lloyd George that in a public speech Sylvia Pankhurst had declared that if he were her husband she would give him poison. “If she were my wife,” retorted he, “I would gladly take the poison.”

Lloyd George on this fair June morning felt elated at having settled the coal strike. He introduced the topic and later that of the Irish question, thus treating me as he frequently treats parliament, to an appearance, at least, of utter openness. His joy in his success was very pleasant to see, nor did he conceal his pride.

How he settled this momentous strike and thereby crossed another crisis he explained saying that it was by making himself a partisan of one side and the other successively in order to get the heart of the matter out of either. In no other way, he said, could a decision be reached that would even temporarily heal their differences.

“All things to all men.” While listening, with every sense, as I thought, to his talk, at the same time, as if magically, the salient events in his career ran through my head—his yeoman service for the Liberal Party, paid for by a delayed salaried position, the Presidency of the Board of Trade, his reform of the Budget as Chancellor of the Exchequer, his break with the Liberal Party over the liberalisation of the British Constitution, his getting guns and munitions with a bludgeon when Minister of Munitions, his call to “Big Business” to fill the breach in the war, finally his ringing clarion, “The Empire is now running Downing Street and not Downing Street the Empire.” I say that while attending to Lloyd George’s fluent and engaging chat these things passed through my mind, called up, I verily believe, by his necromancy. I was falling under the spell of a magician.

His own voice broke the spell.

“Have you read the speech of your Ambassador?” (He referred to Colonel Harvey’s maiden speech in England which every one remembers.)

“Has it hurt him with your people?”

To hurt and to help politically,—are these the Prime Mainister’s guiding infinitives? Is this the way in which he constructs his table of values?

Lloyd George has not forgotten his law studies in a garret in Lincoln’s Inn for he is a trained crossexaminer. When he learned that I had recently - been in Berlin he asked: “Had I met Rathenau? What was Germany’s opinion of that statesman? Did he know that England’s purpose was to help Germany?”

Next came this question: “Did I believe that Wirth, the new German Prime Minister, would last?” “Yes,” I replied, “longer than the people who used him as a stop gap had thought possible.” I write seven months after the event and Wirth is still in power.

Beneath the ease and casual nature of his manner Lloyd George exhibited in this talk, so unimportant to him, a refreshing desire to make a favourable impression, to be liked. This, I feel sure, is with him a general consideration. ‘To the individual as to the mass his manner is not combative but conciliatory. He wears his armour nowhere save on the battle field. His wish to be understood is not keen, for to that I think he is indifferent, but the elemental emotion, purely Celtic, always functions at other times. It is a necessity of his nature to make his charm felt.

It is a very real charm, a mixture of the orator— and he is a wonderful orator—and the actor. As the latter he is unsurpassed. He gets under the skin of every character he assumes. It is not by change of costume merely that he parades now as Cromwell and now as Richard III, but by facial changes, by bodily differences, by, it may almost be said, a transformation of the very texture of his brain. If an auditor should exclaim that there is an attempt to deceive him, let him not forget that the political actor is at the same time deceiving himself, so heartily has he entered into the part.

How mistaken it is to call this man a political gymnast! How meaningless are the words, often applied in derogation of this player, that he deliberately deserts his principles! The truth is nearer arrived at by saying that he changes his réles and with each one assumes its principles. They are not necessarily his but they do belong to and fit the character.

“Shall you see Giolitti?” he inquired as, moved by the frequent return of the Premiers to the windows, I began to take my leave. “Shall you see Giolitti? I advise you to see Giolitti.”

“But Giolitti is no longer in office, since he has just resigned.”

“He is old, he has worked hard, he is only taking a vacation; he can come back whenever he is ready. See Giolitti, he’s the best of us all.”

I have said that Lloyd George disdains prophecy, and rarely indulges in a forecast of the future. Sufficient unto the day is the evil thereof, and to-day is his. But this does not deprive him of the power of foreseeing what to-morrow will be like. He possesses this faculty, a kind of second sight, which gilds as it sustains his power.

During the Boer war Lloyd George loudly favoured a generous policy towards those doughty foes, declaiming that it afforded the only basis for amicable relations after victory. Indeed it is said that he had to escape disguised as a policeman from an angered public meeting in Manchester.

From this advanced pro-Boer attitude he reaped substantial reward. By the friendship thus formed with General Smuts, now Prime Minister of the Union of South Africa, Lloyd George was enabled to use the Boer chief as an intermediary between the Government and the Dail Eireann.

It is a secret de Polichinelle that when the governmental chiefs of the several dominions assembled in London in June, 1921, one of whose meetings I had just delayed, among their strongest recommendations was the adjustment of the Irish problem on the easiest terms. General Smuts and Mr. Meighen, the Canadian Premier, especially urged, first truce and then conciliation.

Both fell well within Lloyd George’s policy and to Smuts he entrusted the olive branch. General Smuts’ visit to Dublin was quickly followed by personal conferences in London with De Valera and other representatives of the Dail, conferences which the British Prime Minister had himself been unable to arrange.

Lloyd George did not waste the political bread he cast upon (or across) the waters during the Boer war, he seldom wastes anything,—and thanks to him the British Empire seems now to be near to healing a cancer centuries old.

A consideration of the personalities of these Premiers who met with Lloyd George in late June and early July of 1921 should carry along with it, by relating how they confronted great national problems, an approximate understanding of how the post-war British Empire means to carry on,

The Empire, “muddling through,’ has functioned well in the past and it has recently safely weathered its direst crisis, but the new conditions demand new methods.

In the case of Jan Smuts few statesmen’s photographs depict the man so fairly as that of the stocky Boer, a leader like our own Washington, resourceful both in war and peace. Born in 1870 in South Africa, he completed his education begun there by taking a Double First Law Tripos at Christ’s College, Cambridge. Knowing the English well, both as one who lived among them during impressionable student days and later as their foe in battle, he pays them the great compliment of trusting to their genius as an equitable Colonial power. Asa lover of his South Africa, he realises that imterdependence with so strong an entity as the British Empire is better for the fortune of a country needing unlimited capital than an unaided independence. In 1906, he wrote “our strength lies not in isolation but in union.” He has learned and typifies what it would be well for certain Philippine separatists, yearning to be lambs sent out alone into the forest, carefully to ponder. Those who have sat with him in council, friends and foes alike, testify that he is apt to wait until the views of all the others have been advanced, and the problem fully presented, before offering his own suggestions thereon—which suggestions are generally so simple and effective as greatly to clarify the issue if not to entirely meet it. In this regard he is much like our own Senator Root.

Two men could hardly be more unlike than Premiers Meighen of the vast Canadian provinces and Massey of New Zealand, smallest of the Dominions in population and the only one with restricted geographical limitations. Thin, wiry, active is the former, while Massey is burly—a real farmer.

Massey has been in power a far longer period than most Prime Ministers enjoy, over ten years, and has had a peculiarly well-rounded experience, serving as Minister of Lands and Labour, Agriculture, Industries, and Commerce. Born in Ireland in 1856, he went out to New Zealand in 1870 to join his parents who had emigrated a few years earlier with non-Conformist settlers.

Gaunt and slender is Premier Hughes of Australia, as hard of hearing as his opinions are hard to change.

However they may differ as men, as statesmen all are of one type—ministers responsible only to representative assemblies of their own people. This is what the British Prime Minister used to be before the war, when he had only the majority in his London parliament to consider. It is not so with Lloyd George to-day. His responsibility has broadened to include a stewardship over the farflung Empire, the late international war has developed his high office into a sort of Presidency of Greater Britain.

Of the visiting Colonial premiers none made so favourable an impression in “Our Old Home”’ as Mr. Meighen, which may or may not have been due to the reason he modestly assigned, that officialdom and the man in the street “had seen the other fellows before,” and he was a novelty. Though a turn of the political wheel has lately lost him the Premiership, there will long be remembered his yeoman service to his Dominion during the London conference.

Born in Anderson, Ontario, in 1874, and graduated with honours in mathematics from Toronto University in 1896, Meighen farmed, taught school, etc., for four years, when he turned to the law. In 1908, then 34 years old, he entered Parliament and _ proceeding upward through one political office after another, but always as a friend of Sir Robert Borden, became in 1920 Canadian Prime Minister and Secretary for Foreign Affairs. His face is thoughtful, and this appearance reflects itself in the happy selection of words for which his speeches are widely known. He asked straightforward, significant questions about American public opinion upon different points—how did they feel on the Irish question? etc. He showed that he knew far more than did the English of our general desire that some decent settlement be made of the Irish controversy. Indeed, the Canadian Premier commented later upon this very fact while giving hearty endorsement to Lloyd George’s earnest desire to be informed upon American public opinion—“they have the best of intentions toward America,” said he, “but London does not understand America’s point of view.”

Just as Meighen with Smuts led the demand for _an Irish settlement, so Meighen and Hughes are believed to have Jed that against the renewing of the Anglo-Japanese Alliance in any shape that might offend America. It is generally understood, however, that Meighen went much further than Hughes, and favoured dropping that alliance altogether. In this second matter, of course, General Smuts and his people are too far distant from the Pacific Ocean to feel the effect of Japanese economic penetration and cannot be expected to realise why Australia is perforce unanimous for the “White Australia” policy. Although Meighen is uncommunicative to a foreigner upon his official views regarding this purely Pacific question, he did not hesitate to ask if Americans did not think that America would have joined the Allies earlier in the Great War if there had been no Anglo-Japanese Alliance.

Hughes, not only a lawyer at home but also a member of Gray’s Inn, London, made a world-wide name for himself at the Versailles Peace Conference. He knew exactly what Australia had to have and also just what she meant to have omitted from the Conference’s decisions, and in both these regards he made himself not only heard, but in the end, listened to.

One day at the Paris Peace Conference Premier Hughes got into an argument with President Wilson about the mandate over New Guinea. The President had his doubts concerning the good faith of Australian imperialism. “Would Australia agree to forbid the sale of arms to the natives?” “Yes,” replied the suspected Australian. “And also the sale of alcohol?” “Yes, because alcohol is not good for cannibals,” said Hughes. “And would agree not to erect fortifications?” ‘Why, of course—what good are fortifications to cannibals?” was the reply. “And you would freely admit all missionaries?” “With pleasure,’ said Premier Hughes. “Our reports show that those particular cannibals haven’t been getting half enough to eat!”

If being born on the soil makes a difference, Mr. Hughes is even more Welsh than Lloyd George; he was born in Wales in 1864 and at 20 went out to Australia. Since 1915 he has been its Prime Minister. Many years of service in Parliament prepared him for that leadership, and for his recent successful representation of his country in Paris.

All these Dominion Premiers have been honoured not only by the English government and municipal bodies but also by honourary degrees from universities, of which Hughes has received five. Sometimes these distinctions prove hurtful at home by exciting local jealousies; all politicians are not so quick as was Sir George Reid, former Australian Prime Minister, who upon returning home after being made a K.C.M.G. (Knight Commander of St. Michael and St. George) replied when asked its meaning by an Opposition newspaper reporter, “It only means—keep calling me George.”

We are accustomed to speak of Prime Ministers as heads of representative governments but perhaps without realising how representative of their average constituents those dignitaries must perforce be. If these individuals were not of a type approved each by his own people they would not be where they are! For that reason we may safely say that a sight of their portraits and even so fleeting a glimpse as this of the personalities representing the different British Dominions can usefully enlighten us upon that important international question “Whither is the British Empire tending?”

In Paris one meets many people—some of them high up, who maintain that such an imperial conference as that of London can only mean the parting of the ways—that the Dominions are about to split off as did the Americans in 1776. Such people forget that the rulers of Great Britain to-day are not so narrow-minded as were Lord North and George III. No, it is not at a parting of the ways that these Premiers met under the Presidency of the British Prime Minister. The crossroads was passed when the Colonials rallied in men and money to the British front in Flanders and elsewhere. They are now well beyond, proceeding along a straight highway side by side. _ But at those crossroads, now passed, those very Colonials, by their gallant and brotherly conduct, ceased to be Colonials and became as full brothers in government as they had been in arms;—they shed their colonial citizenship to become partners in Empire. It was significant how their Premiers flared up when a certain London newspaper suggested that Winston

Churchill, Secretary of State for the Colonies, should preside at their conference! 'Those leaders, only Colonial Ministers before the War, have since then become real Prime Ministers. They demand recognition as such and the facts of the case call loudly to be heard on their behalf. Nor is the change come only to them. For he who before 1914 was Prime Minister of the British Empire, responsible only to a Parliament controlled by Londoners sitting in London, must now govern “by and with the advice and consent of” the Dominion partners, Just as an American President must realise that along with the Executive, our Constitution gives recognition to the Legislative and Judicial branches of our government.

One may safely conclude that one so alert-minded as Lloyd George appreciates this change, in fact it is indicated by his selection as private secretary of that gallant Guardsman Sir Edward Grigg, especially well informed upon colonial affairs, to succeed Philip Kerr, specialist in foreign affairs, upon the latter’s resignation in the spring of 1921. Britain has now time to devote to imperial adjustments necessarily neglected during the life and death war struggle that demanded intensive vigilance in external affairs. In passing, do not forget that Philip Kerr is one of the ablest men in English public life. At present he heads the editorial staff of the Morning Chronicle, bought by friends of Lloyd George. When Kerr decides to re-enter politics, he will go far—indeed it is the opinion of the writer that he will one day be Prime Minister.

If, as Lloyd George’s enemies allege, he is but a Celtic opportunist, there is to be urged on the other hand England’s good fortune in having her assembled Premiers meet under the presidency of one whose quick adaptability recognises better than most Britishers the changed conditions war has brought to the Empire, and how to meet them so that its Anglo-Saxon folk may best carry forward their great mission of helping to maintain that world peace upon which depends international amity and commerce.

Downing Street is about the shortest street in the world, but there is none that reaches further! It leads off the broad thoroughfare known as Whitehall. On the right as you enter it stands the modest official residence of the Prime Minister, and on the left, just opposite, the large Palladian pile of the Foreign Office—that is all, but what goes on in and goes forth from those two edifices would crowd an average avenue several miles long!

The Marquis of Curzon, now head of the Foreign Office, is a typical example of the so-called governing class, which has always played so great a part in modern English history. He is a man of unusual learning in foreign affairs, having studied them in all parts of the world, and thereby knows his subject at first hand. Also he is equipped with a splendid physique, embellished with “the Oxford manner” raised to the nth power, to which same his enemies love to allude. When the first American troops were being reviewed in London by high officials of the British government, it was noticed by a certain English writer that “while the King frequently waved his hand to the passing Yankees, and Balfour his handkerchief, Lord Curzon maintained a dignified posture, as though he were receiving a belated though adequate apology for the Declaration of Independence.”

One day while lunching at the French Foreign

Office, Briand expressed great surprise at how tall Lord Curzon seemed when sitting down. “It is really very strange,” said Bonomi, the Italian Prime Minister, himself a large man, “he never struck me as being of such very lofty stature.” Later on they learned that Lord Curzon possessed a highly prized leather portfolio, in which he carried his most important documents. Nothing in the world could persuade him to let it out of his own possession, so upon going in to luncheon, he put it on his chair to sit on, for all the world like the wool sack beneath the Lord Chancellor at Westminster, which everybody knows has the effect of greatly elevating any one seated thereon!

So much for the way in which the business of governing the British Empire has been and is now being conducted, and now for another factor without which the picture is far from complete. It is the fashion for British public speakers the world over to speak of the Crown as the golden thread that binds the Empire together. But is it not something both more and less than that? Let us follow the trend of public thought nowadays and apply the touchstone of metaphysics to the Crown’s influence. More and more are we coming to realise the difference between things material and those purely spiritual. While the Crown retains the outward pomp of matter it has lost the material power; —that has passed back to the people and is wielded by their elected and selected representatives. But the Crown’s hold on the spirit of the people is as strong as ever it was, and of late years it has more than once demonstrated its power of service to the country.

Particularly has the charming’ personality of the Prince of Wales, through his widely won popularity, demonstrated this. The combination of his frank youth and simple directness of manner has proved irresistible. He has won the confidence of his people on the home islands and around. the seven seas, and his wellwishers are not all compatriots. How will he use this great asset?—in what direction will the Crown develop ?—time alone will show. But, since it is already the fashion to say that in many respects he is very like his grandfather, King Edward VII, it is useful to consider what sort of a sovereign the latter proved himself. The time has come to recognise that he was one of the great Kings of English history. Long kept in the background by his royal mother, that positive

Central Bible College Library Springfield, Missouri queen, Victoria, and coming to the throne at the advanced age of sixty, he soon showed that he had not been wasting his years of preparation. Strachey in his remarkable life of Queen Victoria makes it clear that Prince Albert Edward was considered somewhat of a trial to his parents, differing so entirely from his meticulously industrious German father; to whom, by the way, America owes the remoulding by Queen Victoria of the Mason- Slidell message, which in its original draft so seriously threatened an Anglo-American conflict. When the Prince of Wales came to the throne in January, 1901, he found Anglo-French relations in a state best indicated by saying that the French press carried as many comments of “perfide Albion” as did the English comic columns upon Johnny Crapaud, the landlubber across the channel. Realising far in advance of his contemporaries the control that the Prussian military clique was fastening upon Germany and its inevitable result, he set his wise heart upon an Anglo-French alliance as the only practical defence against the rapidly developing policy of Deutschland wtber Alles. Notwithstanding the unpopularity of his plan (be- [52]

cause its need was not understood) he brought to pass the new international alliance, which success of his diplomacy is, in the light of subsequent events, seen to be one of the most notable contributions by an English king to his people’s welfare.

Without that Anglo-French alliance, the German militarists must have conquered. All hail Edward the Seventh!—and in this acclaim all the countries allied and associated in the World War should heartily join.

Lately, but a few months since, George V and Queen Mary went to Ireland and opened the Ulster Parliament against the advice of wise councillors who knew they risked their lives thereby. Indeed, so general was the belief in the danger they insisted upon running that even the Sinn Fein Irish of the south admired their courage, for you can always trust an Irishman to recognise pluck. With such parents and such a grandfather, the young Prince of Wales is shown to be after all only carrying on the tradition of service by the Crown to the British people, without which its government would not from the standpoint of a metaphysician be complete. The new adjustment reached by the conference of Dominion Premiers under the presidency of the British Prime Minister will materially govern the Empire, whilst the Crown, with its hold upon the spirit of the people, will do its part in holding them together.

Chapter Ii: Present Day Official France Chapter It Present Day Official France

MERICANS who have not studied them at home are apt to hold false notions about the French people. Considering them an erratic, unsteady folk, they judge their governmental methods by the same standard, alleging instability in the French system of conditioning government control upon the retention of a majority in parliament. The fact is that the conduct of the different government departments in France goes uninterruptedly forward, regardless of shifting Ministries, and with less change than in Washington, where cabinet officers are apt to alter the conduct of the departments committed to their care. French Prime Ministers change more frequently than do our presidents, but in type they differ less than did McKinley from Roosevelt, or Cleveland from Wilson. In order to learn of French politics, let us study some of their public men, not forgetting the national limitations subject to which they must function, and certainly not overlooking sundry leaders of the press, so influential in their public life.