them and to disclaim all responsibility. He could seldom bring himself to see what M. Venizelos clearly saw, when he warned his friends at Athens that, as soon as Greece had lost the support of the Allies, she was doomed to defeat. What practical support could he hope to give her? A war-weary people at home would not hear of it, and our Allies on the Continent had almost openly gone over to the other camp. M. Franklin Bouillon concluded an agreement—almost a Peace Treaty-with Angora which the French Government tried to minimise but never repudiated, though it contained provisions which palpably impaired our own position in Mesopotamia. The French troops evacuated Cilicia, which they had only occupied, be it remembered, when our troops were first withdrawn from it, and the re-entry of the Turks was followed by the usual massacre of the Christian population, many of whom were recent settlers, fugitives from other parts of Asia Minor during the war, whom we had ourselves persuaded to go there. But the excesses sometimes committed by the Greek forces in Asia Minor had come to be regarded as more than an offset to the systematic extermination of the subject races which Angora continued to pursue.

Moreover, Mr. Montagu at the India Office had viewed with unconcealed favour the growth of a pro-Turkish agitation amongst Indian Mohamedans, and the Government of India itself had been allowed to pass judgment on the Treaty of Sèvres, to which the Imperial Government was still formally pledged, by pressing for 'just terms of peace' for Turkey. Lord Curzon, who when Viceroy of India was often charged with undue partiality for the Mohamedans, has rightly described that agitation as, in its origin, largely factitious and fictitious.' Its first leaders are known to have been inspired rather by hatred of England than by love of Turkey. But their appeals to religious passion fell on the receptive ears of a backward and ignorant community and the movement rapidly acquired large and threatening proportions. All this may have made little impression upon Mr. Lloyd George himself, and Mr. Montagu has declared his own dismissal to have been due less to the reasons publicly alleged for it, than to the parliamentary situation which required the sacrifice of a minister who had incurred-but not at all for his pro-Turkish leaningsthe hatred of an influential section of the Prime Minister's supporters. Still less did Mr. Lloyd George grasp the reaction NO. 483.

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of a prolonged Turkish crisis upon the growing discontent fomented by Mr. Churchill's policies in Palestine, Mesopotamia and Egypt, and in regard to the treatment of Indians in the British colonies.

The crash came with the débâcle of the Greek armies at the end of August last. How far was Mr. Lloyd George responsible for the catastrophe? Grave statements, only just now made public, cannot be ignored. The Greek ministers who were shot in Athens relied chiefly for their defence on the advice received, they said, from Mr. Lloyd George to go ahead, even after the Allied Conference held in Paris last spring, at which it was agreed to recommend an Armistice to Greece and Turkey on the basis of Greek withdrawal from Asia Minor. In a letter written for publication in this country after the execution of M. Gounaris, his secretary asserts that the British Prime Minister conveyed, through Mr. Philip Kerr, to M. Gounaris, who was then in London, an intimation that the Conference proposals need not 'be taken too seriously and that an immediate Greek offensive 'would suit the British book admirably.' No attempt has been made by or on behalf of Mr. Lloyd George to meet this grave charge, which involves also one of bad faith towards our Allies, with whom we had just come to an agreement in Paris. It is certainly not met by the two documents which Lord Birkenhead disclosed in the House of Lords in order to shuffle off responsibility on to Lord Curzon. That boomerang has recoiled on to his own head and Mr. Lloyd George's. The Note from M. Gounaris to Lord Curzon setting forth the extremities to which Greece was reduced and the conditions upon which alone she could try to cope with the desperate military situation in Asia Minor, and Lord Curzon's reply expressing the hope that the position in Anatolia was less immediately critical' than M. Gounaris had conveyed, were both anterior to the Near East Conference in Paris.

If Lord Curzon seems to have deprecated a Greek withdrawal which would have weakened the Greek case in Paris, that may have been an error of judgment. A far more serious thing is the advice alleged to have been secretly given by Mr. Lloyd George after the Conference, and indeed glaringly at variance with the Conference decisions to which the British Government had been a party. Is it possible to believe that M. Crussachi's allegations

are devoid of all foundation when one reads the rhapsodical eulogy of Greece and of the incomparable virtues of the Greek soldier which Mr. Lloyd George delivered in Parliament as late as August 4th last? In Greece it was hailed with enthusiasm and published in Army Orders. At Angora it was read as a challenge. A few weeks later the Turkish offensive began and the Greek armies-demoralised by the repeated intimations that they would in no case be allowed to remain in Asia Minor, deprived for nearly a year of all necessary re-equipment and even of all pay by the financial distress of the Greek Treasury, with incompetent officers appointed in supersession of all those suspected of Venizelist sympathies gave way before the first impact of the Kemalist forces and fled helter-skelter to the coast. The Turks re-occupied an undefended Smyrna which a few days later was reduced to ashes with the significant exception of the Turkish quarter. Whilst hundreds of thousands of panic-stricken Greeks abandoned their homes in the interior and followed the flight of the Greek troops, the triumphant Turks moved rapidly down towards the Straits and Constantinople, threatening to sweep into Thrace across the so-called 'neutral' zones, still held almost exclusively by an attenuated British force and by the guns of the British ships as far as they could reach.

Then, and not till then, did Mr. Lloyd George enable the British people and the British Empire to measure the extent of the danger with which his Eastern policy had suddenly brought them face to face. The one redeeming point of his flamboyant manifesto of September 16th was that it announced the prompt despatch of sufficient British naval and military reinforcements to give the Turks pause. It secured a respite for Constantinople and Thrace, but it could not-and did not-avert the ultimate surrender of all our most legitimate war aims in the East. Mr. Lloyd George was still in office when that surrender was embodied in the Mudania Convention on October 11th, which wiped out the Treaty of Sèvres and re-instated in Europe as well as in Asia Minor a resurgent Turkey relieved of almost all the penalties which she had brought upon herself by her entry into the Great War and her crimes against her subject races. Turkey, who had been on her knees to us four years ago, was resuscitated in a blaze of military glory, which, however cheaply earned, sufficed to vindicate in the eyes of the East her claim to be

regarded as the invincible sword of Islam and the spear-head of the Asian revolt against the West. It is impossible to avoid the conclusion that Mr. Lloyd George had gambled recklessly, if perhaps not consciously, on Greece and lost, and though we are paying, and shall have to pay, our own heavy penalties, the first and heaviest have been paid by Greece-not merely by the small Hellenic Kingdom, itself by no means blameless, but by a million homeless and starving refugees driven forth from their Anatolian homes in the wake of the Greek armies.

Look where we will, British foreign policy during these four years can only be credited with one substantial success, and that was achieved at Washington at the one Conference which Mr. Lloyd George was unable to attend. Lord Balfour was the chief British representative there, dispassionate, patient, tactful, in fact everything that Mr. Lloyd George has rarely been, and he had a very free hand. The questions of the Japanese Alliance and the Far East, and even that of naval disarmaments, chiefly interested Mr. Lloyd George in their bearing on Anglo-American relations. To these Lord Balfour's Mission succeeded in restoring some real cordiality, though at the cost of surrendering the old supremacy of our naval power. Yet scarcely had he returned to the atmosphere of Downing Street than, under its influence, he drafted the Note on inter-Allied Debts of which the whole reasoning, if a masterpiece of cold logic, deeply offended American opinion, whilst its substance helped to block once more the solution of the reparations question, so closely linked up with that of inter-Allied debts.

In the domain of foreign affairs the inheritance which Mr. Lloyd George has bequeathed to his successors is more than in any other a damnosa hereditas. For if he is to go down to history as the man whose great qualities did at any rate very much to 'win the war,' he will also go down to history as the man whose great defects went far to lose the peace.'

VALENTINE CHIROL

P.S. Upon those great defects much penetrating if unedifying light has just been shed by the disclosures as to Mr. Lloyd George's business dealings with American publishers and newspaper proprietors, and by his choice of the Hearst press, the most virulent Anti-British press in the United States as the suitable recipient of a British ex-Prime Minister's confidences.

V.C.

EUROPEAN FINANCES

HE year that has just ended has seen a steady, though slow, improvement in the economic conditions of Europe; but it has done little to clear away the accumulation of financial difficulties which the war left. The statesmen of Europe have been faced, on every hand, by problems urgently calling for bold treatment and clean-cut solutions; but though sometimes one leader and sometimes another has taken a tentative step forward, the courage required for a combined push has never been forthcoming. A collection of statesmen always tends to be worseor, at least, less courageous-than any single individual amongst them would be, and such isolated efforts as have been made to tackle the difficulties have invariably encountered general procrastination, if not open opposition, and have ended in admitted failure. Personal difficulties between rival leaders have contributed to this result, perhaps, as much as the real differences of policy which separated them; but whatever be the cause, the positive co-operation between the European States required for the restoration of their common welfare has been lamentably lacking. The Conferences of Cannes, of Genoa and of London have each in turn opened with widespread hopes for the reintegration of a concrete and conjoint programme of reconstruction; but each time they have resulted either in the adoption of compromise formulæ which signified nothing or in open and avowed disagreement. It would almost appear that Europe is as bankrupt of statesmanship as of cash, and with such a record of failure, it is small wonder that she has succeeded gradually in alienating almost completely the warm sympathy which America at one time was prepared to lavish upon her, and has forced the United States, even more rigidly, to keep to its own path and pursue its own interests, averting its eyes in despair from the sickening spectacle of internecine strife which Europe presents.

The war seems to have left a sort of moral degeneration in European finances. The raising of money by internal borrowing, or, in the last resort, by inflation, was a justifiable, or at least inevitable expedient for meeting the huge disbursements required