300 Dillon on Various Personages [ T 9 10 



General Election put off till January, on the ground that it will be most 

 unpopular, and an immense expense, which it certainly would be. 

 Dillon has no great confidence in Asquith's keeping his promise of 

 resigning at once when the King refuses to give the assurances, but 

 says it will not matter, as they will always be able to turn him out over 

 the Budget of 1910, and will do so if he tries to shirk. Nor does he 

 trust much in the possibility of abolishing the House of Lords, but ex- 

 pects to get Home Rule from the Tories. He would sooner have these 

 in office with a weak majority than the Whigs. I asked him his opinion 

 of the relative merits of Churchill and Lloyd George. He said they 

 were both men of genius and extraordinary eloquence. Lloyd George 

 was a Celt, entirely in sympathy with Ireland and all the causes Irish- 

 men care for. He knows him well, better than Churchill, who as an 

 Englishman is less one of themselves, but he admires and believes in 

 both. As speakers there are only two in the House who can compare 

 with them, Balfour and Asquith. Balfour is not great intellectually, 

 but he is a great Parliamentary speaker, far the best at present ; the 

 Tory party are quite unable to do without him, and had to take him back 

 as their leader after the elections of 1906, although he had made every 

 conceivable mistake in office and he did not agree with them on tariff 

 reform. Asquith, too, was a great speaker, with a power of stating a 

 case clearly and powerfully in a few words such as was possessed by 

 nobody else. His influence, however, is gone. He had been ruined 

 by his second marriage to one who was a Tory at heart, and was always 

 advising him to stand out against Lloyd George and Churchill and the 

 mass of the Radical party. Asquith was quite demoralized. Dillon 

 does not trust him. Before his second marriage Asquith was quite 

 different. He was so unused to Society that when Lady Mathew, 

 Dillon's mother-in-law, asked him to dinner, he did not know how to 

 behave according to the usages of the world, and used to give his arm 

 to his first wife to take her in to dinner. He had no pretension then 

 to being anything but what he was, a Nonconformist of the middle- 

 class ; now he had adopted all the failings of the aristocracy. Dillon is 

 off now to Ireland for a month, but will be back for the Veto." [The 

 conversations recorded in the present chapter with Dillon and Redmond 

 about their parliamentary affairs have been very much curtailed by 

 me in putting them in print, though nothing of importance is omitted, 

 but a full transcript would take up too much space, and the subject 

 has become unimportant and would weary all but close parliamentary 

 readers.] 



" Called on Lady C. Knollys has been lately with her, and she 

 laughed to scorn the idea of the King creating five hundred peers ; he 

 was no such fool. Of Lloyd George she spoke with contempt, as a 

 wretched little lawyer, doubtless reflecting the opinion of the Court 



