a speech he was to deliver in seemed incapable of indigna the City of London. Sir Edward Grey agreed, and Mr Lloyd George showed the world how Germany should be treated. "I would make great sacrifices to preserve peace," said Mr Lloyd George. "I conceive that nothing would justify a disturbance international good will except questions of the gravest national moment. But if a situation were to be forced upon us, in which peace could only be preserved by the surrender of the great and beneficent position Britain has won by centuries of heroism and achievement, by allowing Britain to be treated, where her interests were vitally affected, as if she were of no account in the Cabinet of nations, then I say emphatically that peace at that price would be a humiliation intolerable for a great country like ours to endure." It was a brave speech, and it prevented war. Sir Edward Grey could not have made it himself. It is to his credit that he permitted it to be made. If only there had been some one in 1914 to emulate Mr Lloyd George's moment of courage! When war came upon us in 1914, Sir Edward Grey did everything, save the one essential thing, to avert it. He Not tion. When it should have been obvious that BethmannHollweg and Jagow were attempting to throw dust in his eyes, he records the episode with the astonishing comment, "I really felt angry with von Bethmann - Hollweg and von Jagow," and refused to charge them with insincerity. even the dishonourable and dishonouring proposal of the German Chancellor that we should remain neutral while Germany, having promised not to aim at any territorial acquisitions in France, might despoil France of what colonies she chose, availed to shake him out of his silence. Though he saw the contempt with which the Germans treated him and England, he still refused to commit himself. He trusted neither the Cabinet-and there, perhaps, he was right-nor the country-and there he was absolutely wrong. Never for an hour did he show true leadership. To press the Cabinet for a pledge," said he, "would be fatal." Fatal to whom or to what? It would not have mattered if the Cabinet had gone to pieces. No man in the Cabinet was indispensable. And the country would have rallied to the call if only the call had been given, as Mr Lloyd George gave it in 1911. Or, better still, at one resolute word from a British Minister, Germany herself would have drawn back. Von Tirpitz said after the war that England should have given the same 66 sort of warning in 1914 as was given in 1911. We agree with von Tirpitz. Sir Edward Grey says that von Tirpitz knew nothing about us, and as Sir Edward Grey now pretends that up to the last moment we had no "steady intention of going to war with Germany," we can only ask, who shall understand the incomprehensible? Sir Edward Grey still refused to speak. He had painful interviews with M. Cambon. "The very existence of M. Cambon's country as a great nation was at stake," Sir Edward Grey confesses, "and it was vital to France to know what Britain would do." With an incredible callousness, Sir Edward Grey held his tongue. What did the existence of France matter? Had he not given a promise of benevolent neutrality? So he flourished his ancient compact in the very moment of death. And he never seems to have understood the attitude of M. Cambon. "Perhaps," says Sir Edward Grey, "he was sometimes impatient that we did not offer more." Impatient! The existence of his country was at stake it was vital that he should know what England would do. Sir Edward Grey kept silence, and thought M. Cambon impatient! And M. Cambon was silent, too, with better reason. "Though he never expressed criticism," confesses Sir Edward Grey ingenuously, "I sometimes felt that he was critical." over When we went to war, Sir Edward Grey, in his whelming desire to conciliate the United States, endured such action from that unfriendly country as almost put the victory in Germany's hands. The Declaration of London, which we had refused to ratify, was inflicted upon us by the amiable Mr Bryan. And by the nature of things Sir Edward Grey was forced to portion out among the allies cities and provinces which did not belong to him or to us. That we won the war was due to the soldiers and the sailors; and now, as we reflect upon the sad and conscientious career of Sir Edward Grey, we are reminded of some words of Edmund Burke, who said that it was not enough that statesmen should mean well, that it was necessary above all that they should do well. Printed in Great Britain by WILLIAM BLACKWOOD AND SONS. WE have had to wait a long time to learn the truth about Lawrence and his Hejaz expedition. The public edition of his 'Seven Pillars of Wisdom' is to appear in 1927; the private edition, limited to a hundred copies, some time next year. In the meanwhile the really zealous pilgrim may consult the original Oxford edition in the Bodleian, of which five copies exist, printed on a handpress. But he had better make haste, for the author's tyrannous and exacting literary conscience has condemned these volumes to an auto-da-fé. I am not sure if the Bodleian copy is to be destroyed with the other four. It is to be hoped not, since the limited edition, which is to appear Phoenix-like out of the ashes, is not going to be a complete resurrection. Some 20 per cent of the original text will be omitted. The revision is, I VOL. COXVIII.-NO. MCCCXXII. believe, regarded as an improvement from the technical point of view of unity and perspective, but I should be sorry to lose one of those hundred and forty chapters. The public edition will comprise a little more than a third of the Oxford text. Still, as it runs to 120,000 words, nobody will have any right to complain of short measure. In the original text there are many books, a history, an intimate human document, a book of travel, a war book much more exciting than a novel, a code of philosophy, a manual of irregular desert warfare which cannot escape being torn out of its context some day to be used as a text-book at the Staff College, and an immense Arabian canvas of people and scenes, all individual and unlike one another, and unlike portraits and landscapes by any one else, yet essentially true. 2 G It is remarkable that the heat waves in the air. It desert-dweller so often inherits looked horrible and felt horthe Semitic inspiration, that rible." the genuinely affiliated attain a gift of expression worthy of their attachment. Lawrence's style often reminds one of Doughty's. The ten books of the Seven Pillars' contain the most biblical passages I have met with in recent literature. Yet Lawrence can be modern. His descriptions of Azrak and Rum will live in anthologies of Arabian travel. Here is his picture of Jiddah as seen from the sea: 66 But when at last we anchored in the outer harbour off the white town, hung between the blazing sky and its reflection in the mirage which swept and rolled over the wide lagoon, then the heat of Arabia came out like a drawn sword and smote us speechless. It was mid-day, and the noon sun in the east, like moonlight, put to sleep all the colours. There were only lights and shadows, the white houses and the black gaps of streets dividing them in front the shimmering whiteness of the haze on the inner harbour; behind, the dazzle of league upon league of featureless sand, running up to an edge of low hills, dimly suggested in the distant mist of heat. Just north of Jiddah was a second group of blackwhite buildings, moving up and down like pistons in the mirage as the ship rolled to her anchor and the intermittent puffs of wind shifted the Which of the many books are going into the public edition I cannot say. Probably parts of the adventure book and the war book, and the inner history of the Arab movement; but there will not be room for all. I doubt if we find the real Lawrence in it as we have pieced him together from inferences and confidences in the quarto. He is a quietist, visionary, scholar, with a passion for the classics, a poet himself in his own medium, as any one may discover who takes the trouble to look up his book in the Bodleian. It is a pity that he has made it almost as difficult of access as his person. The truth is, Lawrence is ridden by a demon of self-criticism and self-distrust, and his 'Seven Pillars' falls short of his standard. He is as sensitive about his literary as his military achievement. He hates noise, and does not care a rush what people say or think of him so long as they leave him alone. One of the many legends about the liberator of the Hejaz I can vouch for as true, that for greater privacy and detachment of soul he quitted his fellowship at All Souls to become a private in the Air Force under an assumed name. He is a private still, and I think happier in this role than he could be in any other. In Arabia he sought the privacy of the desert; but in England, where there is no desert, he found a kind of inferior peace and refuge from distinction in the anonymous crowd. This sounds a trifle parodoxical and eccentric; but after all there is no interior life as private as a private's. For the complete philosopher it is a subtler intellectual seclusion than the Yogi's in his cave, or the lark's in the sky. Lawrence's flight from the limelight, his refusal of decorations and rewards, and general selfeffacement, has been attributed by people who do not understand his shyness, to vanity, a subtle sort of self-advertisement. Few people have been so much discussed or so little understood. The nonsense that has been written about him under such headings as "The Uncrowned King of Arabia " has had its natural reaction in disparagement, equally uninformed and nonsensical. I saw him described the other day by the editor of a reputable London journal as a very vain boy who loved to dress up in Arab clothes. The article speciously discounted his Arabian achievement. Lawrence has been so obstinate in not coming out to receive his ovation, and worse, in locking up his book, that he has made a number of people impatient, among them this groundling. There is also a a class of soldier, not Allenby and his staff, who have misunderstood him. As an amateur and an irregular he was suspect of the professional. He broke all the rules. In appearance he is academic and aloof, not a comfortable or clubbable person. I confess to certain misgivings on my own part when I first saw him among soldier men, caked with mud and sweat, in his stainless khaki staff uniform in Mesopotamia. He had come over from Egypt on some chimerical political errand, which, incidentally, he detested. detested. This was before his Hejaz campaign, and it never occurred to me that he could fight. And I doubt if it occurred to Lawrence. He was not born a man of action, but had to cast himself in this clay. His physical envelope was the index of his spirit, a sensitive nature shrinking from human, and even animal, contacts, more at home with objects than with persons, and happier with ideas than with objects: palpably a thinker rather than a doer, and, one suspected, more of a dreamer than a thinker; an idealist in fact. A poet, but he was to create more than dreams. Lawrence had first of all to change his nature. That he was able to put himself into the Arab mould seemed to all who were merely acquainted with him a miracle. Physically he had been condemned as unfit for active service, but his body was driven by his spirit, and he became as effici |