t before any such bloodless antidote can be applied to International
Dispute, to quote Lloyd George again: "This war must be fought to a
finish."

These final words, snapped like a whip-lash and emphasised with a
fist-beat on the table, meant that England would see her Titan Task
through and if for no other reason because the man who drives the war
gods wills it so. What sort of man is this who goes from post to post
with inspired faith and unfailing execution? What are the qualities that
have lifted him from obscure provincial solicitor to be the Prop of a
People?

"Let George do it," has become the chronic plea of all Britain in her
time of trial. How does he do it?

To understand any man you must get at his beginnings. Thus to appreciate
Lloyd George you must first know that he is Welsh and this means that he
was cradled in revolt. He must have come into the world crying protest.
He was reared in a land of frowning crags and lovely dales, of mingled
snow and sunshine, of poetry and passion. About him love of liberty
clashed with vested tyranny. These conflicting things shaped his
character, entered into his very being and made him temperamentally a
creature of magnificent ironies.

But this conflict did not end with emotion. All his life Contrast,
sometimes grotesque but always dramatic, has marked him for its own. You
behold the Apostle of Peace who once espoused the Boer, translated into
the flaming Disciple and Maker of War through the Rape of Belgium. You
see the fiery Radical, jeered and despised by the Aristocracy, become
the Protector of Peers. No wonder he stands to-day as the most
picturesque, compelling and challenging figure of the English speaking
race. Only one other man--Theodore Roosevelt--vies with him for this
many-sided distinction.

The son of a village schoolmaster who died when he was scarcely three:
the ward of a shoe-maker who was also inspired lay-preacher: the
political protege of a Militant Nationalist whose heart bled at the
oppression of the Welsh, Lloyd George early looked out upon a life
smarting with grievance and clamouring to be free. Knowing this, you can
understand that the dominant characteristic of this man is to rebel
against established order. Swaddled in Democracy, he became its
Embodiment and its Voice.

The world knows about the Lloyd George childhood spent amidst poverty in
a Welsh village. The big-eyed boy ate, thought and dreamed in Welsh,
"the language that meant