longer spell than desultory conversation with someone who is content to
listen, or with someone who brings news of electoral chances. Of course
he is a tired man, but his fatigue is not only physical. He mounted up
in youth with wings like an eagle, in manhood he was able to run without
weariness, but the first years of age find him unable to walk without
faintness--the supreme test of character. If he had been able to keep
the wings of his youth I think he might have been almost the greatest
man of British history. But luxury has invaded, and cynicism; and now a
cigar in the depths of an easy-chair, with Miss Megan Lloyd George on
the arm, and a clever politician on the opposite side of the hearth,
this is pleasanter than any poetic vapourings about the millennium.

If only he could rise from that destroying chair, if only he could fling
off his vulgar friendships, if only he could trust himself to his
vision, if only he could believe once again passionately in truth, and
justice, and goodness, and the soul of the British people!

One wonders if the angels in heaven will ever forgive his silence at a
time when the famished children of Austria, many of them born with no
bones, were dying like flies at the shrivelled breasts of their starving
mothers. One wonders if the historian sixty years hence will be able to
forgive him his rebuff to the first genuine democratic movement in
Germany during the war. His responsibility to God and to man is enormous
beyond reckoning. Only the future can decide his place here and
hereafter. It is a moral universe, and, sooner or later, the judgments
of God manifest themselves to the eyes of men.

One seems to see in him an illustrious example both of the value and
perils of emotionalism. What power in the world is greater, controlled
by moral principle? What power so dangerous, when moral earnestness