General Staff advised that there was no possibility of saving Serbia. It also advised that the employment of troops at Salonika was a dissipation of our strength. In this, however, the Cabinet was over-persuaded by Lloyd George and by the urgent appeals of the French, and the decision to land at Salonika was taken.
Prime Minister
The Change of Office
On the death of Lord Kitchener in June 1916, Lloyd George became War Minister, though it was understood that Asquith made the appointment not without reluctance. There was already widespread dissatisfaction with Asquith’s Government. It is unnecessary to consider whether or not Lloyd George now deliberately planned to supplant Asquith as Prime Minister. He did not believe that Asquith possessed the vigour and vision necessary to win the war, whereas he was confident that he himself did; and he sincerely believed, not without justification, that he was the one man best able to push the war through to victory.
The breach between the two men arose out of negotiations for the formation of a War Committee of the Cabinet, the control of which Lloyd George already wished to keep out of Asquith’s hands. On December 4, 1916, The Times published an accurate account of these negotiations in a leading article. Asquith seems to have believed that the article was inspired by Lloyd George, though in fact its contents were quite familiar in the inner circle of politics. In any case he at once wrote a letter insisting that the Prime Minister, while not a member of the Committee, must have ‘supreme and effective control of war policy’, by supervising the agenda of the Committee and having all its conclusions subject to his approval or veto. Lloyd George repudiated this interpretation of what was afoot, and accepted Asquith’s construction of the arrangement, ‘subject to personnel’, a proviso inserted partly in the interests of Carson, who shared Lloyd George’s views on Balkan strategy. In spite of this letter, Asquith, having consulted his Liberal colleagues, wrote that evening insisting that the Prime Minister must be chairman. Lloyd George then resigned. Asquith followed suit, and with the active support of Bonar Law a new Government was constituted under Lloyd George as Prime Minister, and from then on his will was practically supreme in the conduct of the war. His energy, his own buoyant confidence and courage, and his ability to impart confidence and courage to others were of immense importance.
The end of the war left Lloyd George in a position of commanding, almost dictatorial power; and that position he proceeded at once to consolidate by getting a new mandate from the constituencies for the continuance of the Coalition. The same Government which had won the war, the people were told, was necessary to reconstruct the country and make sure that the new England was to be a fit land for heroes to live in.
Whatever may have been his intention, he allowed the General Election of 1918 to degenerate into an outburst of hysteria. He returned to power with the two potential embarrassments of extravagant promises and an immense majority. They caused him moments of annoyance from the very beginning, but it was fully three years before they seriously impaired a position of personal supremacy such as no British Prime Minister had ever before enjoyed. He dominated the Government of England at a moment when, probably, England’s power in the world was greater than it had ever been.
The Versailles Treaty
Meanwhile the Peace Conference assembled in Paris. This is not the place to examine the faults or the merits of the provisions of the Versailles Treaty, but it must be noted that the longer the conference continued the more did the world lose faith in Lloyd George. All observers paid tribute to his courage in debate, his versatility, his power to win over the other negotiators and to smooth out differences between them, his extraordinary nimbleness and dialectical skill; and all alike grew to disbelieve in the fixity of his convictions or the permanence of any position which he might take up. This impression, which incidents of the next few years did little to dispel, was no less unfortunate for the reputation of Great Britain and of British diplomacy than it was for Lloyd George himself.
At home, Lloyd George attacked the problems of peace in precisely the same spirit as he had attacked those of the war. In his letter to Bonar Law of November 2, 1918, inviting the cooperation of the Unionist Party in the continuation of the Coalition, he said that the problems of peace would be ‘hardly less pressing and will require hardly less drastic action’ than those of the war itself; and for that action the unity of the Coalition was as necessary as ever.
His speeches at this time reflected a mind filled with generous visions of the new and splendid world which was to be built up on the ruins of the war. But like most men of imagination he was inclined to be contemptuous of awkward facts.
Deepening Depression
Only slowly did it become evident how completely the fabric of all societies had been shattered. Lloyd George and his colleagues were not alone in dreaming of a world turning eagerly to the pursuits of peace, and (what was of the first importance for Great Britain’s prosperity) crying hungrily for all those manufactured goods which during the war they had been compelled to deny themselves. But as month after month and year after year the financial conditions of the world grew more chaotic, and the purchasing power of the peoples of the world smaller, commercial depression in England deepened until by 1922 there were normally from 1,250,000 persons unemployed, and the burden of unemployment insurance became heavy alike upon industry and upon the taxpayer.
The Government attempted to struggle on with its schemes of national regeneration and at the same time to parry the onset of economic depression. It showed the utmost fertility in devising palliatives, and there was no branch of public effort directed towards the encouragement of trade or the relief of unemployment during the years between the two wars which did not owe its inception to the Coalition Government. But some portions of the Government’s policy, such as the Agriculture Act and the Addison Housing Scheme, had to be abandoned. Others were allowed to wither, and the general impression was created that the Government was being forced into economy, which was indeed no solution whatsoever, rather than leading the nation towards it.
Dissatisfaction with the foreign policies of the Coalition was even deeper than with its conduct of affairs at home. The costly adventure into Mesopotamia was extremely unpopular. The early encouragement of the Greeks in their operations against Turkey and the half-hearted policy – neither entire abandonment nor a continuance of active help – after King Constantine’s return showed irresolution and lack of any guiding principle. Above all, our relations with France grew less and less friendly. Neither Lloyd George nor the Coalition was to blame for the withdrawal of the United States from the pact to guarantee the security of France or for the German recalcitrancy in the matter of reparation payments, any more than they were to blame for the worldwide unrest and disorganization which followed the war.
No Prime Minister and no Government could, probably, have kept the confidence of the country through these troubled years of disillusionment and distress. All Governments must bear the blame for many things which are beyond their control, and never were Lloyd George’s better qualities more conspicuously displayed. His courage, his versatility, his buoyancy of spirit, and, almost more than all, his amazing physical energy were the wonder of his enemies and the delight of his friends. He had largely superseded the established methods of diplomatic negotiation through the recognized channels by round-table discussions by the heads or plenipotentiary representatives of the various Governments. Over each of the conferences summoned in pursuance of this plan he established an extraordinary personal ascendancy which was something more than the respect necessarily paid to the man who stood for the might of Great Britain. The conferences never attained anything like the objects for which they had been called, but, making the most of what little achievement there was, Lloyd George succeeded in representing each as better than a failure and in keeping hope alive to the next; and at critical moments his speeches in the House of Commons were triumphs. Read in print, the speeches lose much of their magic. In his treatment of France, of Germany, of Russia, of Greece, of the League of Nations, of the Treaty of Versailles itself, Lloyd George was always ready to put everything aside in favour of his own inspiration of the moment.
The Irish Troubles; Discontent with Government
Among the various causes which contributed to the growing discontent with the Coalition Government were the troubles in Ireland. For some reason the Irish question seems never