reward more than the peerage which may have
been designed to chloroform an electric battery?

We are not told. Once during the second year of war he offered to raise
and equip and command a battalion from New Brunswick. His offer was not
accepted. He went to Sam Hughes. "Sam," he said, "I want a job in the
Canadian Army!"

He got it. Aitken's work as Eye Witness to the Canadian troops and the
publication of "Canada in Flanders" was the performance of a man who in
the great crisis of war had found a sudden and sincere interest in his
native land that he had never exhibited while he was a citizen of this
country. He showed a grasp of the human as well as the technical side of
war. A man who could so rediscover his own nation could surely do
something new in helping to co-ordinate the Empire. He has an
astonishing knowledge of great public men in all countries, a thorough
commercial knowledge of Europe and Asia, and--may we say a genius for a
sort of secret diplomacy? His war record demonstrates most of these
qualities. His Canadian War Memorials are a proof that he understands
how to make his own country useful to British artists.

What then did Beaverbrook expect as reward for his political services,
beyond a peerage and the sublime sense of having "done his duty" where he
saw it?

Governor-Generalship of Canada?

Ambassadorship to the United States?

Secretaryship of State for the "Colonies"?

Or the Chancellorship of the Exchequer?

There is really nothing else left for an ambition like this except the
Premiership of Great Britain. Brilliant, plotting, crafty and
phenomenal, this young man has still the spirit of the corsair. England
has not absorbed him. But there is a general election pending over
there. The Coalition is not on Gibraltar. Party cleavages are rife.
Labour, Liberals, Socialists, Syndicalists, Bolshevists and old-line
Unionists are all pitching camps about the Premier's Verdun. When the
battle really begins will Gen. Beaverbrook be in the citadel, or working
in a headquarters tent to merge any three of the common enemy into a
force that will haul down the Coalition flag?

"Why do you think Lloyd George will come back as powerfully as ever?" he
was asked here, after his admission that for the time being the Premier
was in the doldrums of unpopularity.

"Because--he always does!" was his cautious reply; in which one almost
detected the suspicion that he might not; and if so--w