From the gallery Mr. Glynn was invited to call upon the Prime Minister in his private office. Both men are orators, both good story tellers and both have much personal charm. First came tea, then cigars, long cigars; and then Mr. Lloyd George spoke the trouble that was in him. He wanted to know why Americans sent money to Ireland. He could not have asked a better man. Mr. Glynn, who is Irish of the third generation, told him of his own contributions and of the proportion of the employees of his newspaper who, whether Irish or not, were, of their own free will, having deductions made from their weekly pay to buy Irish bonds. He told him he believed his own plant a fair example of what was going on generally. Mr. Lloyd George believed him.

"If sensible fellows like you are contributing," he said, “and if as many other people as you say are contributing, it can't be stopped."

There followed some more conversation and then Mr. Lloyd George said,

"The one way to settle the Irish question is for the Irish leaders to get about the round table with us and thresh out our differences at close range. I will meet Mr. De Valera or any of the Irish chiefs without imposing conditions on my part and without exacting promises from them. You can tell that to your Irish friends you can tell it to De Valera."

Up to this time Mr. Lloyd George had always hedged his offers of negotiation either by demanding recognition of the Crown or barring from the conference certain Irish leaders on whose heads the British military had set a price. Mr. Glynn was called back to America the next day and it fell to my lot to carry this first unqualified invitation to De Valera. There followed months of haggling over the formula in which the public invitation would go forth in a manner not to weaken before hand the position of either side. The formula was arrived at through the busy brain and equally busy legs of Sir Alfred Cope, then an under secretary in Dublin Castle -about whom and about Mr. Lloyd George's American connections more later-and by autumn the round table conferences that produced the treaty between the two nations had begun.

One week the London press, inspired from Downing Street, heaped filth on the head of Michael Collins as "chief of the murder gang." The next week it was singing his praises as a cavalier genius. He was in conference with Lloyd George, with Winston Churchill, even with that Lord Birkenhead who as "Galloper Smith'' was one of the evil genii of Ulster in 1914. And in a matter of weeks the foundation for Irish understanding was well and truly laid.

It was laid along the lines of another great change

in the British constitution which will be ascribed to the consulship of Lloyd George, however large a part he had in its development, for he was the first of British Prime Ministers to give open and definite form to the new partnership of the dominions in the affairs of Empire.

The basic formula upon which the Irish peace was founded was the agreement of the representatives of the Irish people to come loyally into "the commonwealth of nations" known as the British Empire. It was Lloyd George who applied this doctrine explicitly to the other nations in that commonwealth when he said to the dominion prime ministers gathered at Downing Street for the Imperial Conference of 1921,

"It used to be said that Downing Street ran the Empire. Now I must in truth say to you that the Empire is running Downing Street."

And he paid for his belief in that doctrine with his political life. For when, in 1922, the crisis came with the Turks at Chanak, instead of déclaring war and summoning these dominions to the imperial standard, as, technically, he had the right to do, he issued his famous proclamation asking for the backing of the Empire in that crisis. The Empire did not see the crisis as sharply as he did. Some of the dominions hung back. Some openly disagreed with

him. And, instead of finding a united people behind him as he might have, had he put the Empire into war first, he himself was overthrown in the uncer

tainty.

Beyond doubt it was a tremendous fall. Without a country-wide party organization and with hardly more than one newspaper in Great Britain friendly to him, he came from the general election of 1922 poor indeed in political coin. He was cast back to the very early days of his career. He was financially embarrassed, and when he took to writing for the newspapers to recoup his bank balance he was successful in that respect alone. The bitterness of the hard loser glowered and flamed in every thing he wrote. At home his articles won him only a bored resentment. By the middle of 1923 only the Francophiles in Britain were listening to him and they with angry resentment against his constant castigation of M. Poincaré.

At this stage of the game Sir Alfred Cope came again into Mr. Lloyd George's career. This young man, half ascetic, half gay blade, but wholly enthusiast and sound and pure as gold within, had been so pleased at the Irish settlement that he gave up his assured career in the British Civil Service, a career leading to years of respectable service and a comfortable pension, to throw in his lot as a political

manager with the political fortunes of Mr. Lloyd George. He not only saw his own career vanishing, but he accused himself of being responsible for Lloyd George's misfortunes. He had forced the Irish settlement and the Irish settlement had alienated what support Lloyd George had among the real Tories of the Coalition. The real Tories were the instruments of vengeance at the meeting in the Carlton Club which broke the Coalition.

So Sir Alfred Cope set himself to find the road back, out of loyalty to his chief and out of intelligent self interest. Americans who had met Lloyd George always like him. His newspaper articles were keeping him favorably in the public eye in America as they were not doing at home. Mr. Lloyd George had long promised himself and his many American callers that some day he was coming to the great new land over the seas. Sir Alfred was the man who induced him to make the final decision to come and Sir Alfred was the man who came ahead of him and, in the hands of the American go-getter and Rotarian, let himself arrange a program that not only assured him of his chief's popularity in Canada and the United States, but actually terrified that chief with its rigors of handshaking and speechmaking to the point where his friendship with Cope was seriously bent, if not broken.