THE following extracts taken from a Character Sketch written by W. T. Stead in 1904, at the time of the Coercion Act, are of special interest at the moment, showing as they do the foundation on which has been built the great position Mr. Lloyd George holds to-day:

HIS UPBRINGING.

His

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upon whose preserves poachers made incessant raids at peril of life and liberty. Lloyd George, unlike Shakespeare, does not appear to have been a poacher in his youth.

His raids into the forbidden preserves were limited to forays for nuts and wild fruitwhich tasted all the sweeter because of the menacing presence of the lurking keeper.

A DILIGENT STUDENT. Life was a serious matter to young George, and he was a diligent student. Being seized with an ambition to learn French, his uncle, the Baptist shoemaker, set himself to learn the language with the aid of dictionary and grammar in order that he might help the boy to read French. Like many Welshmen, the uncle had a passion for education, and being unmarried, he devoted all his time and his means to bring up and educate his nephews and nieces. He did more than give them schooling. He implanted in their minds that love of reading good books which is one of the greatest blessings of life.

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A FORCING HOUSE OF RADICALISM. The shop was the hub of the village, the place where all the village folk met to discuss the affairs of this world and the next. As might be supposed, it was a forcing house of Radicalism. The countryside around was owned by game-preserving Tory squires,

BOOKS THAT INFLUENCED HIM.

The first book which inspired Lloyd George with interest was Rollin's Ancient History. But the book that influenced him most when in his early teens was Sartor

Resartus. The lad had, even at that early age, left his orthodox moorings and was all at sea, when, in a fortunate hour, Carlyle's spiritual epic in prose came into his hand. It was at once a revelation and an inspiration. A different enthusiasm was stirred within him by Macaulay's History of England. Novels played a subordinate part in the Nonconformist household in those days.

He passed the preliminary examination necessary before entering the legal profession when he was fourteen. At sixteen he left school and spent a year or two in reading at home, and he was then articled as clerk to a solicitor in Portmadoc. There he remained until he was twenty-one. When he had passed his final examination and become a full-fledged lawyer, his education and training had cost his uncle some £700 or £800.

IN PRACTICE.

In due course he began to practise as a solicitor in Portmadoc, and it was there that he had the good fortune to be the legal champion of the rioters for law and humanity at Llanfrothen.

It is the first step which counts, and for it Lloyd George had to thank a clergyman in a country parish in Wales. Some twenty or thirty years ago the Welsh country folk living in the parish of Llanfrothen raised a public subscription for building a wall round a piece of land which was used as the burying ground of the village. The money was subscribed largely by Nonconformists. The wall was built, and after some years, the clergyman of the parish had it conveyed to the Church-a piece of smart practice very familar to the people of the Principality who have built many schools and laid out many cemeteries at their own expense, only to discover that by some legal instrument all their interest in their institutions has been conveyed to the Church to which they do not belong. The only difference in the case of the Vicar of Llanfrothen was that with unusual negligence he had delayed several years in appropriating for the Church the proceeds of the subscriptions of his Nonconformist parishioners. Unfortunately for the Establishment, some of its clergy, swollen with insolence and pride, cannot content themselves with anything less than the infliction of pain and humiliation upon Dissenters whenever opportunity offers. His Reverence of Llanfrothen seems to have been one of these men, and that fact launched Lloyd George into the House of Commons.

THE QUARRYMAN AND HIS DEAD DAUGHTER.

The monopoly of the graveyard, so long defended with such passionate eagerness by the Anglican clergy, had been destroyed by the Burials Act passed at the initiative of Mr. Osborne Morgan. Under the new law, clergymen were compelled, on formal notice being given, to allow Nonconformists to bury their dead in the village churchyard. This slight concession to justice and humanity was bitterly resented by the clergy, and he of Llanfrothen took a characteristic method of expressing his sentiments. An old quarryman in the village with his expiring breath implored those who stood at his bedside to bury his body by the side of a daughter whom he had idolised during her life, and whose loss he had never ceased to lament. Nothing could be more natural than the old man's wish-nothing easier, it might be thought, than to comply with it. But the Vicar of Llanfrothen thought differently. He resented what he regarded as the outrage of being served with the legal notice under the Burials Act, and he took his revenge. He was unable to forbid burial in the graveyard, but he claimed the prerogative of deciding the precise spot where the poor old man should be buried.

There was one desolate and sinister plot of ground set aside by local custom for the burial of suicides. It was there where the vicar had the grave dug, and there the old quarryman was buried. Mother ChurchStepmother Church in Wales-had triumphed and the Vicar of Llanfrothen gloated over the way in which he had paid the Dissenters

out.

LLOYD GEORGE TO THE RESCUE.

But like many a more exalted personage the vicar had reckoned without Mr. Lloyd George. The outraged villagers, the quarryman's neighbours, were furious at what the vicar had done. Lloyd George was then a rising country solicitor. The aggrieved villagers decided to consult him as to what 'they should do. He looked into the case, found that the graveyard had actually been purchased with the money of his clients, and that the wall which barred them out had been built out of their subscriptions. The Vicar had had them conveyed to the Church, but he had delayed so long in doing this, Lloyd George believed he had failed to establish his right to regard the burying place as Church property. Lloyd George, therefore, advised the villagers of Llanfrothen that they

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should assemble in force at the graveyard, demand admittance, in order that they might dig up the old quarryman from his dishonoured grave, and bury him beside his daughter. But if the vicar should refuse to open the gates?" "Then," said Lloyd George, "break down the wall, force your way into the churchyard, and bury the quarryman by his daughter."

VINDICATING LAW BY FORCE.

This spirited advice commended itself to his clients. They obeyed it to the letter. The vicar refused their demand. They broke their way through the wall, opened the daughter's grave, and buried the father by his daughter's side. Of course, legal proceedings were taken, and equally of course local justices imposed fines for trespass. Equally, of course, Lloyd George appealed, and the case came.before judge and jury at the County Court. The jury was a Welsh jury, and they returned a verdict of "Not Guilty." The judge was one of Lord Halsbury's appointments, and he refused to

plan of campaign, and had afterwards fought the legal battle through' to its triumphant close. Small wonder was it that after this Lloyd George became the hero of the Principality, and at the first by-election he was returned at the head of the poll for the Carnarvon Boroughs. The electors of Carnarvon sent him to the House of Commons, but his Grand Elector was the Vicar of Llanfrothen.

IN PARLIAMENT.

For a year or two he made little stir in the House. He spoke occasionally, but he was best known as an effective platform speaker in the Welsh language. He speaks well in English, but the silvery music of his eloquence in his native tongue enables him to wield at will the simple democracy of the Principality. His first speech in the House was a protest against the appointment of Welsh County Court Judges who could not speak Welsh; but he first distinguished himself in the House by his persistent obstruction of the Clergy Discipline Bill in 1892.

A BRAVE PRO-BOER.

It was not, however, until 1899 that Lloyd George became as famous throughout the United Kingdom as he had long been in Wales. When the Empire was jockeyed into the war with the Boers, the majority of the members of the Liberal party considered that, war having broken out, there was nothing to be done but support the Government which was responsible for the crime. Against this doctrine Lloyd George protested in the House and out of it. To him the war was unjust, unnecessary and criminal. He was sure of his ground. He knew the facts. He had a firm grip of his principles. He voted against supplies demanded to carry on an unjust war. He offered an uncompromising opposition to the war in all its stages, and soon attracted to himself the honour of being the most intensely hated pro-Boer in Parliament. Nothing daunted, he carried the war into the enemy's camp, and by his exposure of the connection between the Chamberlain family and Kynoch's firm for the manufacture of explosives, he struck a shrewd blow at the Jingo high priest. "The more the Empire expands, the more the Chamberlains contract,' was a saying which crystallised into an epigram the general result of his foray into the Birmingham contracts.

FELLED BY A JINGO BLUDGEON.

Notwithstanding this, perhaps partly on account of it, he was made victim of personal attack. An infuriated patriot meeting him in the streets of Bangor felled him to the ground by a blow on the head. The bludgeon was heavy and the pro-Boer was knocked senseless. It was a foul blow, but like everything else that is done to injure Lloyd George, it redounded to his advantage. When Parliament was dissolved on the lying pretence that the war was over, a dead set was made against Lloyd George's seat by the Jingoes. Before the khaki cry Liberals went down all over the land. The Tories. made sure that they would win back CarnarAnd so, perhaps, they would have done but for the felon blow that stretched Lloyd George flat in the street of his own town.

yon.

HIS VICTORY IN 1900.

Sympathy and indignation combined to rally popular enthusiasm in his behalf. Writing before the poll, Mr. Harold Spender said :

The devotion shown by these people to Mr. Lloyd George was pathetic in its intensity. At Bangor the whole meeting, crowding the chapel from floor to ceiling, rose to its feet as he entered, and met him with acclamation. I often hear Mr. Lloyd George in the House of Commons, but never do we see him there as he is before his own people, laughing with them, and then, in swift passage from laughter to tears, moving them to pathos and pity. He is among his own family; the laugh is the laugh of love, and their very eyes are full of affection as they watch him. And so he moves from Welsh to English, and English back to Welsh, just as the audience wishes.

When the poll was declared, and Mr. Lloyd George was once again--for the fourth time-victor, the scene of popular enthusiasm beggared description.

war.

HIS PARLIAMENTARY POSITION.

As might have been expected after such an endorsement, Lloyd George in no way abated the strenuousness of his opposition to the He became a parliamentary force of the first magnitude. At the close of the Session of 1901 a writer, signing himself" M," contributed to the Daily Mail a very brilliant, although not very sympathetic, sketch of Lloyd George as a twentieth-century man, and concluded his article with the following prophecy :

Will he a score of years hence be the tower of strength of the Imperial or Parochial Party? None can say now, but that he will by then be