as to give France a far greater measure of enduring security than the mere restoration of Alsace-Lorraine could give her—in fact, as far as possible, the same security on the Continent as was now assured to insular England and her vast overseas Empire. To him the redistribution of European territory, released from the grip of the Germanic Empires, was therefore a matter of much more immediate concern than to Mr. Lloyd George. France was still to have Germany as her close neighbour, with a much larger and steadily growing population and immense resources, though within somewhat narrower boundaries and reduced for a time to military impotency.

France had hoped that with the downfall of the Hohenzollerns the Germany of Bismarck's blood and iron' creation would break up again and throw off Prussian hegemony. When that hope failed, she would have liked to hold, as a guarantee, the whole of the left bank of the Rhine from Alsace to the Dutch frontier, just as Germany had held Eastern France after the Treaty of Frankfort until its complete execution. The Allies would consent only to an occupation of that region by French, British and American forces for fixed periods. France laid all the more stress on building up a belt of new or enlarged States in Eastern Europe from the Baltic to the Danube, sufficiently powerful to form a barrier and reduce the danger of a future alliance between Germany and Russia. Mr. Lloyd George, on the contrary, was not concerned to strain for any such purpose his relations with President Wilson, to whose principle of selfdetermination any considerable transfer of German populations to non-German States was wholly repugnant.

To reassure France, Mr. Lloyd George and President Wilson conceived another alternative, and suggested a defensive treaty, by which Great Britain and the United States should jointly guarantee French territory for a term of years against German attack. The British Prime Minister, who had begun to recover from the brain-fever of the general elections, thereupon submitted to the Conference on March 25,1919, a long and eloquent plea for moderation and generosity in dealing with Germany. It brought him into line with American idealism, but it came too late to convert M. Clemenceau, who in his reply, whilst professing general sympathy with Mr. Lloyd George's admirable sentiments, submitted with scarcely disguised irony that such recommendations would serve the interests of the British Empire a great deal

more effectively than those of France. He reminded the Conference that Germany had gone to war not merely to subjugate the continent, but for world dominion, and then proceeded to compare the results of such a peace as Mr. Lloyd George had outlined-on the one hand definite and absolute guarantees against Germany's ambitions outside the Continent of Europe through the surrender of all her colonies, of all her fleet, and of a large part of her commercial navy; but on the other hand for the Continental Powers, which had suffered most severely during the war, only partial and temporary safeguards, such as shrunken frontiers for Poland and Bohemia, dubious provisions in regard to the Saar Basin, and a defensive treaty to protect French territory for a limited period. It was a sharp counterthrust. The American President, content to put his trust in the League of Nations as an infallible panacea, was impatient to get back to his own country and secure its acceptance there. Mr. Lloyd George did not return to the charge, for enough had leaked out through his own entourage as to the substance of his note to provoke, in the shape of a telegram from 370 of his Parliamentary supporters, a pointed reminder of his election speeches. The process of daily haggling and bargaining between the Big Three' was resumed. The thorny question of fixing the amount of reparations was got round by remitting it to a permanent Commission to be constituted under the Treaty. M. Clemenceau's objections to the inadequacy of the safeguards provided for France in the actual terms of the Treaty finally yielded to the definite promise of defensive Treaties of Alliance with Great Britain and the United States, and the German Treaty, handed on May 7 to the German delegation summoned for the purpose, was signed, after many futile protests from them and a few slight concessions, on June 28 at Versailles. But it was only signed after Great Britain and the United States had signed on the same morning the Treaties with France by which they engaged to stand by her in the event of any violation by Germany of certain essential clauses of the Treaty of Versailles, not for any definite term of years, but until the Council of the League of Nations should decide, on the motion of one of the parties to the treaties, that they could be safely renounced.

Mr. Lloyd George returned to London in a blaze of personal triumph, and delivered an impassioned panegyric of the Peace

Treaty to an enthusiastic House of Commons. Was he still unconscious of the quicksands on which he had built the Treaty ? He had built it largely and, it has been contended, quite reasonably, on an implicit belief in President Wilson's authority to commit his own country to it. But had he given no heed to the warning conveyed by the American elections in the autumn of 1918 that the President was already then rapidly losing ground in the United States? Had Mr. Lloyd George with his mastery of party politics at home failed entirely to realise the mortal offence which the President had given to the Republican Party by his refusal to associate any of its influential leaders with the conduct of the Paris negotiations? Within six months of the signature of the Treaty of Versailles its fate was sealed in the American Senate, and a heavy blow struck at the League of Nations itself by the secession of the very Power to which it had owed its conception.

Equally disastrous was the effect upon our relations with France. No one knew better than Mr. Lloyd George that M. Clemenceau's misgivings in respect of a treaty which gave adequate security to Great Britain but, in his opinion, inadequate security to France, had been overcome only by the two defensive Treaties of Alliance. Technically the obligations entered into by Great Britain were contingent on their assumption also by the United States. But the considerations which Mr. Lloyd George must have had in his mind when he undertook them cannot have lost their weight with him as soon as the United States dropped out-least of all the considerations of honour. Nevertheless Mr. Lloyd George did not hesitate to let our treaty with France, which, of the two, was obviously from every material point of view the more valuable to France, go by the board on the ground that we were in the same boat with the United States. But was he himself really in the same boat with President Wilson? The American Treaty fell through because the President had no constitutional power to bind Congress by his signature, and Congress had, quite constitutionally, refused to endorse it. The British Parliament on the contrary had unreservedly approved the whole action of the British Prime Minister in Paris, and Mr. Lloyd George never even submitted to it the question whether it wished to take advantage of America's repudiation in order to refuse ratification of the Treaty which he himself had signed.

Had Mr. Lloyd George at once put that question frankly to

Parliament, and argued that our French Allies ought not to be made to suffer, or given an excuse for doubting British good faith, because of a sudden change in American policy which he himself had utterly failed to foresee, there can be no doubt as to what the answer would have been, and the history of Anglo-French relations would have been very different. Great Britain was however within the letter of her rights and official France could make no formal complaint. But M. Clemenceau was widely suspected of having trusted and yielded too much to Mr. Lloyd George. It cost him not a few votes when M. Deschanel defeated him by a narrow majority for the Presidency of the Republic in January 1920. The Tiger' went, and his successors, M. Millerand, M. Briand, M. Poincaré were all smaller men, upon whom an intransigent Chamber kept a much tighter hold. Mr. Lloyd George, whose ascendancy at home was still unshaken, was now the one survivor of the Big Three' and bulked larger than ever in the long procession of conferences held here, there, and everywhere to disentangle the complicated threads of inter-allied relations which not only the impracticable provisions of the Peace Treaty but the abandonment of the Defensive Treaties had almost hopelessly warped.

The tangle, indeed, grew steadily worse. When Germany's failure to carry out specific provisions of the Peace Treaty drove France to retaliate by occupying Frankfort without any preliminary agreement with us, British public opinion charged France with chauvinism. England was accused of selfish greed, when Mr. Lloyd George wrung from M. Millerand a settlement, very much to our pecuniary advantage, of the price at which German deliveries of coal were to be calculated at a time when French and Italian industries were in desperate need of coal. The meeting at Spa in July 1920, though officially credited with satisfactory results, failed to remove the growing soreness on all sides. The actual amount of reparation to be demanded from Germany was not even specifically determined until the conference held in London in May 1921, when it was fixed, Mr. Lloyd George agreeing, at £6,600,000,000-roughly a 40% reduction on the figure to which Mr. Lloyd George had also agreed in Paris some three months earlier. It was formally accepted by Germany under threats of heavy penalties. But the deadlock continued, for Germany could or would not pay. Whilst

France, who persisted in framing her budgets in the expectation of German payments, would consent to no further abatement, opinion in England, where far heavier taxation had been courageously imposed and endured, veered round steadily to the recognition that blood cannot be extracted from a stone, and French obduracy on the whole question of reparations began to be held largely responsible for the steady growth of unemployment in all the great centres of British industry after a short-lived postwar boom. But when Mr. Lloyd George, alarmed by the situation at home, put increasing pressure upon the French ministers, his counsels of moderation and generosity to Germany seemed to come as inappropriately as in his 1919 Note to the Conference from the lips of the same British Prime Minister who had told the world in December 1918 that he proposed to search German 'pockets' and 'to demand the whole cost of the war from Germany.'

However sincere the conviction with which he was now preaching common-sense, Mr. Lloyd George had himself hung the millstone round his neck which dragged Anglo-French relations down with him. How far he had dragged them down. was clearly seen in the reception which France gave last spring at Cannes to his belated attempt to conjure up the ghost of the still-born Defensive Treaty of 1919 in the shape of a 'Pact' to be unilaterally entered into by Great Britain. Mr. Lloyd George now charges France with having rejected his offer with disdain. M. Poincaré has retorted that the Pact was illusory in itself and coupled with unacceptable conditions on matters not cognate to its purpose. It certainly did no good at the time. Another cause of offence to the French was that, after every conference in which he succeeded in moving the French just enough to save the appearances of Anglo-French harmony, his henchmen in the press invariably represented him as having secured a personal triumph, instead of leaving some of the credit, even if he had got the best of the bargain, to our hyper-sensitive neighbours. Worse still was it when Lord Balfour's Note of August 1st conveyed a freezing intimation that, whilst Great Britain claimed no remission of her debt to America, she had no intention of remitting the debts of any of her Allies to herself, or of showing towards them, so long as America claimed and received her pound of flesh from the British Treasury, any of the magnanimity which Mr. Lloyd George was exhorting France to show to Germany.