ll, either in execration or in praise.

The greatest Parliamentary fight of a generation began to take form in
the House of Commons. The Conservatives, led by Mr. Balfour, put up an
obstructive fight to every line and almost every word of the finance bill
which was founded on the Budget. Departmental duties all day, the onward
fight with his finance measure throughout the night and often the early
hours of the morning, became the routine of Lloyd George's life. I have
seen him at the table at the House of Commons at seven o'clock in the
morning, with ashen face and burning eyes, after a week of all-night
sittings, persuading, explaining, and arguing with determined opponents
of his measure. Often enough in these fatiguing morning hours there
would be sitting up behind the grille in the ladies' gallery an anxious,
but proud, woman watching the Welsh statesman at the table. It was Mrs.
George, the pretty Maggie Owen of years before whom the young Welsh
solicitor had taken from her father's farm.

In justice I ought to summarize in a few sentences written at the time
the attitude of the opponents of the Budget. "Why put forward these
extraordinary changes? Here was an unequaled nation, the richest and
greatest in existence, which by its character and energy had built up an
empire reaching across the globe, with Parliamentary institutions which
were the admiration of every state. The millions of our population were
welded in a common sentiment, unsurpassed since history began, making
unshakable the foundations of our nationality. We had fought our way to
modern conditions very slowly, and now, class for class, we were perhaps
the most contented and prosperous people on the face of the earth.
Admitted that we had vast crowds of silently enduring poor. (The poor we
have always with us, as has every great nation.) But the way to
ameliorate the evils among them was not to disturb the comfort,
convenience, or property of the rich, but to increase the prosperity of
rich and poor alike by putting a tax on foreigners' goods coming into
this country, thus providing revenue and increasing home manufactures at
one stroke. That was the course to pursue, not to disturb the elaborate
and happy system, the pride of the world, by sudden incursions into the
liberty of the individual and by depredations on the privileged in order
to benefit the unhappy. Property, whether obtained without effort or
built up by the hardest of labo