George's character it made plain, what they had long suspected, that he was the best disciple Mr Micawber ever had; that his policy was opportunism sustained by optimism, his state of mind a continuous, agreeable expectation that something would turn up.

The vacillation of the Prime Minister's Russian policy was, if possible, surpassed by his dealings with Ireland. Whilst the grant of Dominion-status still enjoyed the conditions of success and was, in fact, being urgently pressed upon the Government by men of the calibre of Sir Horace Plunkett, Mr George would have none of it. His Carnavon speech in the autumn of 1920 breathed fire and sword against the Irish Nationalists, and for a time the 'black and tan' auxiliary police were let loose to work their will upon the island of unrest. He was, indeed, so sure of the efficacy of this method that he went so far as to declare he had got murder by the throat. Murder, however, got away from his grip; and he then turned round with great celerity and began to make terms with the alleged assassins. As the same thing had happened in regard to Russia, some people supposed that rebels and revolutionaries exercised a peculiar fascination over his mind. But the facts can be as easily accounted for by supposing that he tried opposing policies in turn, and generally had the ill-luck to hit upon the wrong one first. Few will now be found to doubt that, in a world controlled, as he was at pains to point out, by the doctrines of Mazzini, Irish Home Rule had become a necessary measure. But all things have their times and seasons; and it was pretty clear from what ensued that the settlement, coming as it did after, and not before a savage campaign of assassination, had missed its proper tide. Even, if the end proved to be peace, it was bound to be such a peace as solitudes are made of.

These many mistakes of policy and judgment might have ruined a greater minister than Mr George. He survived them by his power of putting things plausibly to a House of Commons not remarkable for astuteness; by his almost infinite capacity for extricating himself from tight corners; by a belief, very assiduously inculcated and widely entertained, that he was the only man equal to the burden of his office; and, above all, by the continued political existence of Mr Asquith, whose return to power

the country was at all costs resolved to prevent. These were the main reasons for his long continuance in power, but there were others. He had to a remarkable degree the faculty of bewitching his colleagues; and this was the more astonishing in that he severed old associations without any apparent emotion, as was shown more particularly in the case of his old friend, Dr Addison, whom he sacrificed to clamour and permitted himself to taunt with clinging to office for the sake of its emoluments. Very honourable men, however, like Lord Balfour and Mr Fisher, paid tributes to his worth, which the historian will regard with the more attention that he had induced the one to countenance Irish Home Rule and the other Irish coercion. His instability of mind was not, therefore, without its place in the management of an ill-assorted Coalition. His colleagues could hardly hope to be all of one mind, but each might reasonably expect to enjoy possession from time to time of the Prime Minister's manifold understanding.

It was a harder task to satisfy or suppress the party differences of the rank and file. Mr George saw that old things had passed away, but it required a deeper originality than his own to induce Conservatives and Liberals to make common cause; and this, though both had let slip the most part of their dogmas. His failure to consolidate his following caused people to speculate freely to which side he would eventually attach himself; and the opposition of their comments is the measure of his complexity. Man is a political animal, but Mr George defied classification. He seemed a creature of infinite variety, a being of moods and metamorphoses, a leopard that might change his spots, an Ethiopian that could whiten his skin, a political nothing-at-all. No one could even affirm with confidence whether he was of the school of the cynics or the idealists; and it was quaintly said of him by one who perceived his finer impulses and the strange means he took to satisfy them, that he had solved the problem of serving both God and Mammon. He secured the assistance of the romantic young knights of the modern Round Table, yet his relations with other less chivalrous organs of the Press were more subtle and intimate than those of any Prime Minister before him. His distribution of appointments was cautious,

but of honours lavish. He would hesitate to select an unpopular man for a deanery, but he was quick to perceive the peer lying latent in the press-man or the profiteer-so quick, indeed, that some men were deceived into supposing that a peerage was rather a branch of trade than a badge of nobility. For art, for literature, for philosophy, for the things that make music in the prisons of civilisation, he did less than an Empire needs, though the perorations in which he extolled the beauty of Welsh mountains became familiar, and he was understood to be instigating the production of an anthology of hymns and hymn-tunes.

It remains to ask whether England was anyway the better for his example. Every student of the Apology remembers the passage where Socrates, in defending his own abstention from Athenian politics, declares that they had grown so debased as to compel just men to avoid them. The heaviest charge against Mr George is that public life became more difficult and more despised under his administration, that the esteem in which politicians were held grew less, that the power of the caucus was augmented, that independence lost its value and chivalry its reward. Such allegations do not admit of exact proof; and politicians have been too long the quarry of moralists to make it easy to suppose that they grow either much better or much worse. Yet it was possible to detect in the attitude of Mr George's more judicious defenders, a peculiar absence of respect. They did not pretend that he contributed anything to the dignity, the purity, or the distinction of public life. They excused their preference for him; they stinted their praise of him; they had no wish to be like him themselves. If love is blind and faith is ardent, no trace of either hung about their eulogies. They held him useful, and they held him cheap.

The incontestable fact remains that England, democratically organised, found no other man at hand to shape its destinies in the latest and perhaps the greatest hour of its history, Some men, we may think, would have done better; many perhaps might have done as well; Mr George, like Palmerston in the crisis of the Crimean War, was the man who actually dared and did. Whenever the story of the Great War is told, his name Vol. 238.-No. 473.

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will be remembered; and, as the centuries pass and the poets work their will upon them, a legendary glory may not impossibly surround his head. But in the schools of History students will be more cautious. They will see at a glance that he was a politician of a very high order, supple, alert, dexterous both in averting and returning a blow, a man who could smite his enemies hip and thigh, and who for his own immediate, though not perhaps selfish ends mastered and moulded anew the genius of the constitution. But they will examine his claims to statesmanship with more suspicion. For statesmanship in its highest conception is the pursuit of justice without partiality and without hypocrisy, and even on its lower planes requires a right judgment, if not in all things, at least in many things. But in his work we find too constantly accident where there should have been design, drift where there should have been purpose, a muddle where there was occasion for foresight and address. So that Punch' was not in fact far out with its cartoon of the good-fairy Georgina' who for all her casting of benignant spells and evocation of earthly paradises, can conjure up nothing but shapes of horror and spectres of distress. An incident that is recorded of him makes it, indeed, probable enough that, like other votaries of the magic arts, he lacked comprehension of the meaning of true science. Standing in Downing Street-so a friend reports t-before the portraits of Pitt and Wellington, of Nelson, Fox, and Burke, he questioned whether any of these was very great, though Burke, as he reckoned, was the greatest of the lot. Perhaps in his heart of hearts he thought Robin Hood a match for them all-Robin Hood exalted, as we might say, from the maladministration of a wood to the misgovernment of an Empire. If it was so, we might find in the circumstance the thread of unity in a career otherwise baffling in its tergiversations. For the putting down of the mighty from their seat, whether that seat is a manorial chair or an imperial throne, is in itself a large homogeneous operation, though one that does not unfortunately as a rule result in any exaltation of the

humble and meek. And in this destructive work he undoubtedly achieved a fair measure of success both at home and abroad. But, tracking his career as we have done along the path of circumstance and opportunity, we can hardly fail to be struck by the fact that, though no man with so great a position and so long a lease of power could have avoided doing wise and useful things, his schemes were, for the most part, ill-timed, ill-matured, ill-executed, and attended by ill-success. His character no less than his judgment had been unequal to the occasion. Though he had been given a second chance in life, he had not lived down, but up to his past. Thus his portrait, as it appears on the page of history, arouses no such emotion as the portraits of those whose supreme greatness he was not himself great enough to perceive. Men do not turn to him to learn the passionate love of England that they find in Pitt; the disinterested, chivalrous discharge of public duty that the names of Wellington and Nelson immediately evoke; the wisdom that is Burke's; nor even to experience the charm of a generous, human soul in political high places that all Fox's vices could not hide. Such high inspirations were never his to give; and he plays, morally speaking, but a small and dubious part in an era staged beyond all question for the acting of the noblest of the children of men.

'The life of Francis Bacon,' said a very good man of a very great one, 'is . a pain to write or to read.' And of lesser occupants of great place than Francis Bacon the same thing has sometimes, in justice, to be said. In them, too, there is sometimes to be detected, vitiating their nobler impulses, and corrupting their better nature, 'that subtle fault,' as the Dean calls it, 'noted and named both by philosophy and religion in the aρεσкоs of Aristotle, the ȧv0ρwπáρεσкоs of St Paul

which, if it becomes dominant in a character, is ruinous to truth and power'-the fault of eye-service, the ambition to become pleasers of men.