The talk always went back to the great war.  When I spoke of his speech at Bristol his face kindled and he said: 

“Have you stopped to realise that this war is not so much a war of human mass against human mass as it is a war of machine against machine?  It is a duel between the English and German workman.”

You cannot talk long with Lloyd George without touching on democracy.  This is his chosen ground.  I shall never forget the fervour with which he said: 

“The European struggle is a struggle for world liberty.  It will mean in the end a victory for all democracy in its fight for equality.”

When I asked him to write an inscription for a friend of mine and express the hope that lay closest to his heart, he took a card from his pocket, gazed for a moment at the rushing country now shot through with the first evening lights, and then wrote:  “Let Freedom win.”

A few days later Lloyd George made still another appearance in his now familiar role of England’s Deliverer.  The South Wales coal miners, 2,000,000 in number, went on strike at a time when Coal meant Life to the Empire.  There is no need of asking the name of the man who went to calm this storm.  Only one was eligible and he lost no time.

Lloyd George did not call a conference at Cardiff:  he went straight to Wales and spoke to the workers at the mouth of the pit.  What arbitration and conciliation had failed to do, his hypnotic oratory achieved.  The men went back to the mines with a cheer.

A week later at the London Opera House he made a notable speech to the Conference of Representatives of the Miners of Great Britain.  To have heard that speech was to get a liberal education in the art of phraseology and to carry always in memory the magic of the man’s voice.  In this speech he said: 

“In war and peace King Coal is the paramount industry.  Every pit is a trench:  every workshop a rampart:  every yard that can turn out munitions of war is a fortress....  Coal is the most terrible of enemies and the most potent of friends....  When you see the seas clear and the British flag flying with impunity from realm to realm and from shore to shore—­when you find the German flag banished from the face of the ocean, who had done it?  The British miner helping the British sailor.”

Small wonder that after this effort the miners of Wales should acclaim their gallant countryman as Industrial Messiah.

You would think that by this time England had made her final tax on the resource of her Ready Man.  But she had not.  There came the desolate day when the news flashed over England that the “Hampshire” had gone down and with it Kitchener.  Following the shock of this blow, greater than any that German arms could deliver, arose the faltering question, “Who is there to take his place?”