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THE PREMIER'S HEYDAY IT is no easy task to write the life of a living man or to criticise such a life when written. One shudders at the notion of the terrible hash Boswell would have made of his work, if he had written it in the knowledge that Dr. Johnson would live to read it and to speak his mind on it. The difficulty is especially great for the biographer of a modern politician. In days like these, when the political weather varies from day to day under the gusts of popular opinion, or of newspaper articles, when the foes of one day are the allies of the next, it is exceptionally difficult to see a great statesman "steadily and see him whole. Nor is the task easier for a biographer, who is himself a party politician connected by strict party ties to the statesman, and whose history henries to tell. Mr. Hugh Edwards, as the biographer of Mr. Lloyd George*, is somewhat in the position of a monk composing the life 'of a mediaeval saint. The writer of the saint's biography in the middle ages did not attempt to be an historian. What he sought was to turn out a book that would edify faithful Christians and bind them more closely to the Catholic Church. A member of the Imperial Parliament when he becomes a biographer of his political chief is in a very similar position. Party and the party system are to him what the Catholic Church was to the writers of the Acta Sanctorum. It is incumbent on him, if he is to escape the excommunication of his party Caucus and Whips, to see that nothing which he says weakens popular faith in his party or its leaders. At all costs, he must be rigidly and sternly orthodox. Nothing that he writes must excite the suspicions of the simple people whose votes the Caucus desires to secure. Awkward facts that might dim the lustre of the hero, or even shake the credit of the hero's followers must be suppressed. Like the mediaevalist of old, his duty is rather to edify the faithful than to proclaim the truth. It is necessary to realise these facts in reading such a book as the fourth volume of Mr. Hugh Edwards's life of the Prime Minister. The book is a book of edification for the faithful Georgite. It resembles very closely such a work as Thomas of Celanos' life of St. Francis of Assisi. As Thomas wrote with the eyes of the Inquisition upon him, so Mr. J. Hugh Edwards has been careful to say nothing which could possibly arouse the suspicions of Mr. Towyn Jones that the writer was a heretic after the manner of those terrible and intellectual free thinkers, Mr. Llewelyn Williams and Mr. E. T. John. And as we read the book, we realize how the development of Mr. Lloyd George's career has considerably upset what we may call the plot of the earlier volumes and spoilt the symmetry of the work. When Mr. Edwards began to write his hero's life, it will be remembered that he prefixed to it a short sketch of Welsh history. When the idea was to present Mr. George to his countrymen as the great national hero, one greater than Llewelyn the Great or Glyridwr, the sketch was The Life of David Uoyd George." Volume IV. By J. Hugh Edwards, M.P. Waverly Book Company, London. By J. Arthur Price. apposite; read in connection with the statesman's career as it develops injhe present volume, it has no more meaning than it would have if prefixed to the life of a Welsh politician of Victorian days, like Sir George Cornwall Lewis or Sir George Osborne Morgan. Such are thejimitations^under which^Mr. Hugh Edwards has necessarily written. Under these limitations, he has turned ^.out alvery interesting and useful volume, and everyone who cares to have at hand a readable and accurate account of some of Mr. Lloyd George's great deeds in the years in which he came before the world as the champion of social reform should possess it. The book is embellished by some very clever cartoons, happily rescued from the rubbish heap in which old newspapers that have escaped destruction are generally to be found. These illustrations will delight the children, and will help to keep them quiet on Sabbath evenings, when stormy weather ^makes it impossible to take them to chapel, much as the lurid prints in Foxe's Book of Martyrs entranced the young people of a past generation. At the same time my readers must remember that the book is a book about the Premier's great deeds, and not in the true sense a biography. Everything that could possibly rob the central figure of its heroic proportions is omitted. I take two examples. Except for one cartoon, one would never guess that during the greater part of the period of which the volume treats, Mr. Lloyd George was bitterly assaulted by the militant members of the Woman Suffrage Party. In fact, Mr. Edwards is absolutely silent on the whole of the woman suffrage agitation, though in any history of the period, it will probably fill a far larger space than matters like the education controversy. In omitting all mention of the subject, he does a grave in- justice to his hero. There can be no doubt that Mr. Lloyd George's action in insisting that the settlement of the suffrage question should be on democratic lines secured the enfranchisement of married women under the Reform Act of 1918. It is nearly certain that if Mr. George had, like Lord Grey and Lord Haldane, accepted the limited franchise for women proposed under the so called Con- ciliation Bill," the question would have eventually been settled on these lines, and the enfranchisement of the great bulk of married women would have been indefinitely postponed. But to have told the story of Mr. Lloyd George's connection with the Suffrage agitation would have been to reveal him occasionally in a very unheroic attitude. The omission of the subject has preserved the dignity of the hero at expense of an exceedingly interesting chapter in his career. Even more remarkable is the omission of all mention of the Marconi incident, a matter discussed at the time very widely, not only in Great Britain, but on the Continent. The omission is the less excusable as Mr. Edwards could have justly said that the report of a committee of the House of Commons, and the verdict of a British jury, exonerated his hero from the charges brought against him. But to have described the Marconi affair would have neces- sitated a discussion on secret party funds and political