If Mr Lloyd George had been able in August, 1914, to read the preface that he was to write in October, 1936, to the last volume of his memoirs even his courage might well have been daunted.
He would have been shocked to read of the death of ten million men and the mutilation of another twenty. He would have been concerned to read of fifty thousand millions of pounds spent on slaughter. He would have been staggered by the picture of the complete dislocation of the international trade of the world twenty years after the war had ceased.
But in all this gloomy picture, one sentence would perhaps have surprised him more than any other. It is the sentence in which Mr Lloyd George speaks of "the overthrow of free institutions over the greater part of Europe."
He would have assumed that such a disaster had followed on a complete and crushing German victory. He would have found it impossible to believe that it had followed on a complete and crushing victory for the Allies.
Mr Lloyd George concludes, after reciting the calamities that have followed the war, that war is much "too costly and barbarous a method of settling quarrels amongst the nations". That conclusion few will dispute, few in this country or in France.
But there is surely another conclusion to be drawn from these solemn facts. It is that the defence of free institutions is a much more difficult matter than it seemed to Mr Lloyd George in 1914 or to President Wilson in 1918. Neither of them appreciated the truth that free institutions do not thrive and do not often prevail in societies thrown into confusion, and instead of making heroic efforts at Paris to check the distress of the world they aggravated it both by what they did and by what they neglected to do.
Free institutions demand an atmosphere in which men and classes can allow for each other: an atmosphere in which absolute dogmas do not govern the mind of a society, spreading passion and terror. The Allies used their crushing victory to throw one society after another into the class war. In that atmosphere there is no room for toleration and free institutions. The ideas that seize and hold men's minds are the simple, uncompromising ideas that make good battle-cries.
In the conditions of Europe, as war and peace left it, the implacable formulas – those of Marx on one side and those of Mussolini and Hitler on the other – have become religious dogmas and Europe, after struggling through the Great War of the twentieth century, found herself thrown back into wars of the sixteenth.