STRONG MEN OF SEVENTY

Evening Post, Volume CXV, Issue 15, 19 January 1933, Page 8

STRONG MEN OF SEVENTY

At seventy years of age Mr. Lloyd George says that he "enjoyed" his walk through life. There is nothing to quarrel with in this statement except the tense. Was not Lord Fisher over seventy when he was supreme sea lord of the greatest naval force the world has seen, in the | world's greatest, war? Someone has written that, far from being "too old at forty," man may safely be doing anything at over seventy. When Mr. ,Lloyd George says *'I have done with leadership," he should remember the advanced age of the greatest Liberal of his young days, the Right Hon. W. E. Gladstone, who, even when retired from Parliament, responded to the leadership -instinct by publishing an open letter rebuking lie Concert of Europe. v Writing "as one politically dead," the Grand Old Man was, yet live enough to talk to the Old, Europe, andVne could imagine Mr. Lloyd George being sufficiently vital to do something similar for the New' Europe, he helped to create at Versailles. "Ev'n in our ashes live our wonted fires," and Mr. Lloyd George is far from being ashes. Who would have dreamed that his work in the Coalition Government , would have been the coping-stone to an earlier life devoted to opposing Chamberlainism, condemning the Boer War, and creating sensations in Birmingham? Mr. Lloyd George's life has contained several surprises. Might there not be one surprise left?