Another incident of which the public knows nothing, helps one, I think, to answer this question.  Early in the struggle to get munitions for our soldiers a meeting of all the principal manufacturers of armaments was held in Whitehall with the object of persuading them to pool their trade secrets.  For a long time this meeting was nothing more than a succession of blunt speeches on the part of provincial manufacturers, showing with an unanswerable commercial logic that the suggestion of revealing these secrets on which their fortunes depended was beyond the bounds of reason.  All the interjected arguments of the military and official gentlemen representing the Government were easily proved by these hard-headed manufacturers, responsible to their workpeople and shareholders for the prosperity of their competing undertakings, to be impracticable if not preposterous.

At a moment when the proposal of the Government seemed lost, Mr. Lloyd George leant forward in his chair, very pale, very quiet, and very earnest.  “Gentlemen,” he said in a voice which produced an extraordinary hush, “have you forgotten that your sons, at this very moment, are being killed—­killed in hundreds and thousands?  They are being killed by German guns for want of British guns.  Your sons, your brothers—­boys at the dawn of manhood!—­they are being wiped out of life in thousands!  Gentlemen, give me guns.  Don’t think of your trade secrets.  Think of your children.  Help them!  Give me those guns.”

This was no stage acting.  His voice broke, his eyes filled with tears, and his hand, holding a piece of notepaper before him, shook like a leaf.  There was not a man who heard him whose heart was not touched, and whose humanity was not quickened.  The trade secrets were pooled.  The supply of munitions was hastened.

This is the secret of his power.  No man of our period, when he is profoundly moved, and when he permits his genuine emotion to carry him away, can utter an appeal to conscience with anything like so compelling a simplicity.  His failure lies in a growing tendency to discard an instinctive emotionalism for a calculated astuteness which too often attempts to hide its cunning under the garb of honest sentiment.  His intuitions are unrivalled:  his reasoning powers inconsiderable.

When Mr. Lloyd George first came to London he shared not only a room in Gray’s Inn, but the one bed that garret contained with a fellow-countryman.  They were both inconveniently poor, but Mr. Lloyd George the poorer in this, that as a member of Parliament his expenses were greater.  The fellow-lodger, who afterwards became private secretary to one of Mr. Lloyd George’s rivals, has told me that no public speech of Mr. Lloyd George ever equalled in pathos and power the speeches which the young member of Parliament would often make in those hungry days, seated on the edge of the bed, or pacing to and fro in the room, speeches lit by one passion and directed to one great object, lit by the passion of justice, directed to the liberation of all peoples oppressed by every form of tyranny.