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an industrial and commercial aristocracy has been rapidly assuming control in Britain, signalling their victory over the land-owning aristocracy as far back as the reform of the corn laws and consolidating it ever since by the political scheme that has made English towns into noxious powerful hives of industry and the fat English countryside into a pleasant and profit less park for the mighty.

Now this industrial and commercial aristocracy is being challenged in England as nowhere else in the world. The Labor Party is forthright in its demand. for a completely socialized state-this for England of today, the modern England whose greatness rests above all on commerce and industry. It was a commerce and industry developed on three points. of support: free trade, cheap coal and labor, and access to the markets of the world. Cheap coal and labor are no more; half the world's markets have been destroyed by the war; and, more and more, hard pressed manufacturers are questioning the wisdom of free trade. The Labor Party, seeing the industrial system of Great Britain stagger under these blows, proposes to wipe it out and develop through the socialized state the delicate business of finding work for and feeding forty million people on an island in the northern ocean who must import eighty percent of their sustenance.

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Here stands Lloyd George. He began life as an arrant radical; yet the last political act of his wartime Prime Ministership was to summon all parties to coalesce against socialism as they coalesced in the great war. Perhaps the greatest political speech he ever made was his famous denunciation of the dukes, the great land owners who through their ownership of mines and industrial freeholds were become also great industrialists. Yet one of the last pictures taken of him as Prime Minister showed him in Scotland at a shooting party on a great estate. He was riding a little white moor pony. The Duke of Athol led that pony by the bridle rein. Even Napoleon never aspired to a Duke at his bridal rein! So it is that one of those personal highlights that makes the dull processes of the world dramatic is the part Lloyd George will play in England's coming struggle.

There can be no doubt of his early radicalism. He had little chance to be anything else. Non-conformist, intelligent, imaginative, poor, a lawyer and a politician, his natural trend was to seek a remedy, through politics, for the ills and the suffering he saw about him. His detractors say he took up the radical cause as the quickest road to personal advancement. is interesting to speculate what his development would have been had he begun his career now, after the Russian revolution, instead of thirty-five years ago

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when trade unionism was the soul of the then radicalism and just beginning to show its strength.

At any rate his first political efforts were attacks on privilege and demands for the amelioration of the lot of the lower classes. He was against the Boer war because he was against sending working boys out to be killed and to kill the Boer farmer. He was so fiercely against it that he was mobbed one night in Manchester when he made a pacifist speech. He had to be smuggled out a back door, his short figure hidden in the middle of a group of six-foot policemen..

Then came the Limehouse speech and his great fights for the reform of the budget. His own utterances indicate that the winning of that fight represented the attainment of his ambitions so far as reform of England's economic structure at home is concerned. He was Chancellor of the Exchequer in Mr. Asquith's cabinet and his chief backed him up nobly in the fight. It was a bitter fight. It was an attack on all that was pleasant and happy and confortable in England and how pleasant and happy and comfortable things were in the great mansions of town and the stately homes amidst the hunting country!— on behalf of all that was drab and drudging and miserable and how drab and drudging and miserable were the industrial slums of London's East End and the textile towns and the black country! Lloyd

George fought it without gloves. He incurred the bitter enmity of all those who were rich and powerful and comfortable. It is an open secret that, in common with most of the gentle folk who dispensed charity out of their abundance, the present King, then Prince of Wales, regarded Lloyd George as deeply dangerous. He long cherished a bitter personal resentment against the tar-tongued upstart lawyer who said such nasty things about his amiable friends.

But Lloyd George won his fight. When he was through the burden of British taxation had been shifted to unproductive, inherited and ultraprofitable property and the great body of employees, small manufacturers, dealers and workpeople, the surplus mouths which it is always Britain's task to feed, were benefited by the old age pension and the national insurance schemes. To an American, from a land where there is always work for the fit, Lloyd George's own reforms may well seem socialistic. The fact remains that the vast bulk of British opinion, conservative as well as liberal, has come to accept them as a wise adjustment of a balance between the classes in England that had been allowed to swing woefully awry before he began his fight.

In 1914, then, he probably exceeded his chief, Mr. Asquith in popularity and in power. Mr. Asquith had forced the reform of the House of Lords in his

futile effort to settle the Irish question, of which Lloyd George so creditably was to acquit Great Britain eight years later, and Mr. Asquith had stepped close to the brink of ruin over the consequences in Ulster where Orangemen and British soldiers alike were in open defiance of his government's policy.

It has been charged that Germany chose this ticklish juncture to force the issue of war upon the continent, believing that England's Irish troubles would be a factor in keeping her out. It has been charged that had the then Sir Edward Grey, the British Foreign Secretary, spoken less equivocally, had he made. it plain at Berlin that the violation of Belgian neutrality would bring Great Britain in, Germany would have held her hand and the war would have been avoided or at least localized in the Balkans, where they like war. Mrs. Asquith in her diary has but thinly veiled the charge that inability to get Lloyd George, the one-time pacifist of the Boer War, and second to the Prime Minister in rank only, to commit himself definitely for or against hostilities was responsible for a hesitation that was to prove costly beyond the nightmares of horror.

It seems probable that he did hesitate at this, his first responsible contact with weltpolitik, and all it implied in methods strange to him, in terms repugnant to his ideas of life. He has said of it himself,