I saw Lord Leverhulme on several occasions at the end of the war.  He spoke to me with great freedom of his ideas in the hope that I might carry them with effect to the Prime Minister.  He proved to me that it was the nonsense of a schoolboy to talk of making Germany pay for the war, and suggested that the Prime Minister’s main appeal to the nation at the General Election of 1918 should be a moral appeal for unity in the industrial world.  He had one master word for that great moment in our history.  It was the word “Production.”

I found this word unpopular in Downing Street.  Mr. Lloyd George was more mindful of Lord Northcliffe than of one “who cannot work with other men.”  And so the word went forth to the British peoples:  Germany must pay for the war and the Kaiser must be tried.  At the eleventh hour before the election there was no equivocation.  Germany should pay for the war.  The Kaiser should be tried.  Instead of a great moral appeal, which might have prevented all the disastrous conflicts in industry, and might have preserved the spirit of loyalty which had united the people during the war, the Prime Minister put himself at the head of a disreputable mob calling for revenge.

“One disadvantage of the democratic system,” says Mr. Birrell, “is that a Prime Minister no longer feels himself responsible for good government.  He awaits a ‘mandate’ from a mob who are watching a football match.”

We have only to compare this order of mind with a mind like Lord Leverhulme’s to perceive how it is that politics in our country tend more and more in the American direction.  The big men are outside.  Politics are little more than a platform for a pugilistic kind of rhetoric.  He who can talk glibly and with occasional touches of such sentimentalism as one finds in a Penny Reciter is assured of the ear of the House of Commons, and may fairly count on one day becoming a Minister of State.  But the field for the constructive, imaginative, and creative minds is the field of commerce.

The danger of the State from this condition of things is, unhappily, not only the loss of creative statesmanship at the head of the nation—­serious as that is.  The danger is greater.  Small men are more likely to fall into dishonest ways than big men.  There lies, I think, our greatest danger.  It seems to me, observing our public life with some degree of intimacy, that there is a growing tendency for the gentleman to fall out of the political ranks and for his place to be filled by the professional politician, who in many cases appears to be almost entirely without moral principle.  What can become of such a movement save eventual corruption?  At present our politics are stupid but fairly honest.  There are still representatives of the old school in the House of Commons.  But the conquering advance is from the ranks of professionalism.

I would not have the reader to suppose that I consider Lord Leverhulme a heaven-sent genius of statesmanship.  The British constitution is twelve men in a box, and the very spirit of that arrangement is distrust of the expert.  Moreover, there is wisdom in the Eastern legend which says that in making genius the fairies left out one essential gift—­the knowledge of when to stop.