ment appeared to be strongly supported, though much greater independence had been shown of late by the Ministerial majority in the House of Commons. The Labour party, though alternately upbraided and cajoled by the Independent Liberals, showed no disposition to enter into a political compact with them; and without such an arrangement it did not look as if Mr. Asquith and his friends could command anything approaching adequate support in the country to regain office. Many Liberals indeed had gone over to Labour; but the Labour party, whose programme demanded a continuance of heavy expenditure and therefore high taxation, were for the time out of accord with public sentiment.
Mr. Lloyd George, in spite of virulent abuse, partly political, partly personal, still remained throughout 1921 by far the greatest individual force in the country. He strengthened his position, indeed, from every point of view but one, by the course of events during the closing months of the year. The fact that, after general expectations of a break-down in the Irish negotiations, the conference which began in London in October between delegated representatives of Sinn Fein and the Government ended on Dec. 6 in a unanimously signed agreement for the setting-up of an Irish Free State, was a great personal triumph for his patient diplomacy. Though he was too much engaged in this matter to be able, as he had intended to do, to attend the Conference for the Limitation of Armament held in Washington, at which Mr. Balfour took his place, the Prime Minister could claim for his Government a very satisfactory issue from the Conference, to the initiation of which by President Harding and his Secretary of State, Mr. Hughes, Mr. Lloyd George himself had given the strongest encouragement earlier in the year. Incidentally, the question of a prolongation of the Anglo-Japanese alliance which had been a difficult point at the Imperial Conference in the summer was successfully removed by the substitution of the Four- Power Agreement adopted in Washington; and thus Mr. Lloyd George had the satisfaction of clearing away two important obstacles to the consolidation of the Anglo-American entente for which he was always striving in international affairs.
The only point of view from which Mr. Lloyd George's indispensability at this moment as Prime Minister could be said, therefore, to have been weakened was that of his success. Paradoxically enough, the mere fact that his long struggle to reconcile Irish national aspirations with inclusion within the British Empire had at last been rewarded might appear to leave him no longer l'homme nécessaire for that purpose. How far this possibility might react on the political situation, in the later regrouping of parties, had now to be shown. But individually Mr. Lloyd George, at the end of 1921, held the dominating place among political leaders. Mr. Asquith had lost his hold both over the country and over his old party. The Labour party, though practically certain of a large increase in Parliamentary representation whenever the country should be appealed to, had several prominent leaders but no really outstanding chief. The Conservatives, as such, were without any striking personality; Mr. Austen Chamberlain had shown no disposition to break away from the alliance with Mr. Lloyd George, and Mr. Bonar Law, though his health was restored, had ignored every suggestion so far that he should return to the political arena as an independent Conservative leader. Among the rest, the only men whose reputations had notably grown in 1921 were Lord Birkenhead and Mr. Churchill; and it was to them, either in rivalry or in combination, that current political talk usually pointed, should occasion arise for alternatives to a Lloyd George Ministry. As Lord Chancellor, Lord Birkenhead had won golden opinions on all sides, and he had never shown his capacity for statesmanship more prominently than during the past year, when he had put all his pre-war record as an aggressive sympathizer with Ulster aside in helping to secure an agreement with Sinn Fein. He and Mr. Churchill were still sufficiently young, as well as able and experienced, to make their political futures incalculable. (G. E. B.)
END OF THIRTIETH VOLUME
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