One must trespass upon the jealously guarded private life to discover the true cause of his bewildering collapse.  Mr. Asquith surrendered some years ago the rigid Puritanism of early years to a domestic circle which was fatal to the sources of his original power.  Anyone who compares the photographs of Mr. Asquith before and after the dawn of the twentieth century may see what I mean.  In the earlier photographs his face is keen, alert, powerful, austere; you will read in it the rigidity of his Nonconformist upbringing, the seriousness of his Puritan inheritance, all the moral earnestness of a nobly ambitious character.  In the later photographs one is struck by an increasing expression of festivity, not by any means that beautiful radiance of the human spirit which in another man was said to make his face at the age of seventy-two “a thanksgiving for his former life and a love-letter to all mankind,” but rather the expression of a mental chuckle, as though he had suddenly seen something to laugh at in the very character of the universe.  The face has plumped and reddened, the light-coloured eye has acquired a twinkle, the firm mouth has relaxed into a sportive smile.  You can imagine him now capping a “mot” or laughing deeply at a daring jest; but you cannot imagine him with profound and reverend anxiety striving like a giant to make right, reason, and the will of God prevail.

Like Mr. Lloyd George, his supplanter, he has lost the earnestness which brought him to the seats of power.  A domestic circle, brilliant with the modern spirit and much occupied in sharpening the wits with epigram and audacity, has proved too much for his original stoicism.  He has found recreation in the modern spirit.  After the day’s work there has been nothing so diverting for him as the society of young people; chatter rather than conversation has been as it were prescribed for him, and when he should have been thinking or sleeping he has been playing cards.

It is possible to argue that this complete change from the worries of the day’s work has been right and proper, and that his health has been the better for it; but physical well-being can be secured by other means, and no physical well-being is worth the loss of moral power.  There are some natures to whom easy-going means a descent.  There are some men, and those the strongest sons of nature, for whom the kindest commandment is, “Uphill all the way.”

Mr. Asquith, both by inheritance and temperament, was designed for a strenuous life, a strenuous moral life.  He was never intended for anything in the nature of a flaneur.  If he had followed his star, if he had rigorously pursued the path marked out for him by tradition and his own earliest propensities, he might have been an unpleasant person for a young ladies’ tea-party and an unsympathetic person to a gathering of decadent artists; he might indeed have become as heavy as Cromwell and as inhuman as Milton; but he would never have fallen from Olympus with the lightness of thistledown.