PRESIDENT AND PREMIER

Levin Daily Chronicle, 5 October 1918, Page 4

PRESIDENT AND PREMIER

A WORD IN SEASON. (By Lovat Fraser.) J President- Wilson 'a noble address on ! Independence Day has stirred this country as deeply as it stirred the whole American Continent. "Why is it that we have never had from any of our own statesmen of highest position a declaration so clear, so moving, so absolutely firm and unqualified upon the main issue? I propose to endeavour to answer here this momentous question. President Wilson's' declaration waa commensurate in tone and substance with the vast and., unparalleled responsibility now laid upon him. In what lay the strength of his trumpet-call to the untold multitudes his words have reached? It was not only, or even mainly, in his compact and lucid exposition of the objects for which we are fighting, nor in his vision of a reign of law based on the consent of the governed land and "sustained by the organ- I ised opinion of mankind." These are to be the fruits of victory, but what I the common man in every Allied nation ; asks meanwhile is what sort of victory his leaders seek; It was there that the President spoke the word for which the world was waiting. The aim he put first was '' the destruction of every arbitrary power anywhere that can separately, secretly and of its single choice disturb the peace of the world." And just earlier he had said: The settlement must be final. There can -be n(. compromise. No half-way decision vv'nvld be tolerable. No halfway 'leeision is conceivable. Has any great English statesman ever said the same thing in the last four years with equal clearness and directness? Has any one among them ever had the vision to perceive, and the lofty courage to declare, as Mr Winston Churchill did last week, that: It is essential for the purpose of this war that there shall be noattempt at compromise. . . Germany must be beaten; Germany must know she is beaten; Germany must feel that she is beaten. The nation has more than one bono to pick with Mr Churchill, but therein he expressed the instinctive feeling of this country, of our working men, and of our brethern at the front; on sea and land. But Mr Churchill does not speak with authority. Not one of our leading Ministers has ever spoken thus. Mr Asquith got rather near it once in the early days of the war, but his sword was tin and his aTmour buckram. Mr Lloyd George has never, that I can discover, warned the Central Powers with the emphatic directness of President Wilson, to whose words he has given a belated ditto. Mr Lloyd George has stiil the support and the admiration of the majority of his countrymen. He has put Are and fore- into our share in the war. He has often seen with clearer vision than any around him. The trouble is that sometimes he has also seen with equal clearness the guns of opposition, of Old Gangs, of vested interests, and has delayed facing them. ■*-~ e greatest service he has rendered in the war has been the creation of unity of command, which the Allies owe to his iniative. But he wasted months in malting his conception effective because he could not bring himself to take steps with a man of more iron, determination. with the country at his back, would have settled in a day. The job is not complete even now. The reason why Mt Lloyd George s declarations about the victory we seek havo never had the intense clarity ox President Wilson's statement is that neither he nor any other British statesman has ever fully perceived that if mankind is to be saved far more than Prussian militarism must 'be" destroyed. Wo have to break the whole system upon which German aims are based, political as well as military. We have further to eliminate the Hohenzollerns and the Hapsburgs, root and branch, or to deprive them of the power again to destroy twelve million lives. Mr Lloyd George and those around him have not thought thus. Always at the back of the Prime Minister's mind there seems to have been some hazy dream of ultimately settling the war in the give and take way in which he used to settle coal and railway strikes. The most insidious internal danger ■which the Allies have now to fear is what I may call Political Westernism. Two great duties we imposed upon the Allies apart from their obligations on the western front. The first is the liberation of the subject races now in bondage with the old and Austrian Empires. The second is the absolute necessity of compelling the Central Powers to disgorge the immense belt of territory extending from the Arctic to the Caucasus, which our enemies have absorbed, and through which they are advancing into Persia. We have never yet had from any British Minister a recognition of the fact that the fate of Courland and the Ukraine and Eoumania is as vital to the future of the world as'the fate ox Belgium. They have tossed Eoumania, a few crumbs of sympathy. They have never vowed to release her from (xerman thraldom* The great error of Mr L»loyd GeoTge and his colleagues is that while President Wilson sees that the absolute destruction of the arbitrary power of Ger-, many and Austria must'precede a set-, tlemcnt, they-still seem inclined to half-fight and half-win on the basis ol bargaining. They all have their answer in these resonant words or President Wilson: "These great ends cannot be achieved by debating and seeking to reconcile and accommodate what statesmen may wish." The peoples must now decide, and with that simple discernment which sometimes makes the populace a truer judge • or great isues than the statesmen, the, peoples of the Allied nations hold out that as the rulers of Germany wantonly took up the sword, by the sword they must perish if the world is to be free. Had it been possible, I would like to have turned from these international issues and to have dealt at length with the more domestic aspects of Mr Lloyd George's position. Though the support he commands is still immense, and rightly so, yet he is losing- ground. The fault is entirely his own. In homo affairs as in the war, he is adopting the old methods of the coal strikes. He is becoming a shadowy replica of Mr Asquith, or a kind of mixture of Gladstone-and-water. When anything goes wrong, he appears in the House and tries to settle the whole difficulty with a speech, which was exactly the Asquitli-and-Gladstone method. His policy about Ireland, and especially about Irish conscription, has shocked and angered the bulk of the nation. It has certainly shattered my personal belief in the Government as at present constituted. Mr Lloyd George further suffers in repute bocause he is enmeshed in a vast and ever-etending network of bureaucracy. The German banks, Leverton Harris, the alien scandals, his own reluctance to purge his Administration of the German and Austrian

taint which is there, all tend to deepel the rapidly growing irritatoa against him.

What this country wants from Mr Lloyd George and his Government is strength and determination not about such minor things as coal and season tickets, but about the necessity for absolutely and Anally destroying, in the words of President Wilson, the '' arbitray power" of Germany and Austria, which has plunged hundreds of millions into woe. "We want him to declare once and for all, that th#re shall be no half-way bouse.