I detect in him an increasing lethargy both of mind and body.  His passion for the platform, which was once more to him than anything else, has almost gone.  He enjoys well enough a fight when he is in it, but to get him into a fight is not now so easy as his hangers-on would wish.  The great man is tired, and, after all, evolution is not to be hurried.  He loves his arm-chair, and he loves talking.  Nothing pleases him for a longer spell than desultory conversation with someone who is content to listen, or with someone who brings news of electoral chances.  Of course he is a tired man, but his fatigue is not only physical.  He mounted up in youth with wings like an eagle, in manhood he was able to run without weariness, but the first years of age find him unable to walk without faintness—­the supreme test of character.  If he had been able to keep the wings of his youth I think he might have been almost the greatest man of British history.  But luxury has invaded, and cynicism; and now a cigar in the depths of an easy-chair, with Miss Megan Lloyd George on the arm, and a clever politician on the opposite side of the hearth, this is pleasanter than any poetic vapourings about the millennium.

If only he could rise from that destroying chair, if only he could fling off his vulgar friendships, if only he could trust himself to his vision, if only he could believe once again passionately in truth, and justice, and goodness, and the soul of the British people!

One wonders if the angels in heaven will ever forgive his silence at a time when the famished children of Austria, many of them born with no bones, were dying like flies at the shrivelled breasts of their starving mothers.  One wonders if the historian sixty years hence will be able to forgive him his rebuff to the first genuine democratic movement in Germany during the war.  His responsibility to God and to man is enormous beyond reckoning.  Only the future can decide his place here and hereafter.  It is a moral universe, and, sooner or later, the judgments of God manifest themselves to the eyes of men.

One seems to see in him an illustrious example both of the value and perils of emotionalism.  What power in the world is greater, controlled by moral principle?  What power so dangerous, when moral earnestness ceases to inspire the feelings?

Before the war he did much to quicken the social conscience throughout the world; at the outbreak of war he was the very voice of moral indignation; and during the war he was the spirit of victory; for all this, great is our debt to him.  But he took upon his shoulders a responsibility which was nothing less than the future of civilization, and here he trusted not to vision and conscience but to compromise, makeshift, patches, and the future of civilization is still dark indeed.

This I hope may be said on his behalf when he stands at the bar of history, that the cause of his failure to serve the world as he might have done, as Gladstone surely would have done, was due rather to a vulgarity of mind for which he was not wholly responsible than to any deliberate choice of a cynical partnership with the powers of darkness.