WAR MEMOIRS OF DAVID LLOYD GEORGE 1917

148 WAR MEMOIRS OF DAVID LLOYD GEORGE
and ignored the fact that there comes a time when words
must be translated into action. Able to sway the Duma, the
Soviet or the crowd triumphantly with a speech, he relied on
his oratorical arts. The man who mattered — Lenin — was
not within the sound of his voice, and had he been, it would
have made no difference to that ruthless fanatic. He despised
the Kerensky type.
Lenin was also a great speaker. Orators are divided into
two classes. There is the orator for whom effective speech
is in itself the aim and also the end. The emotion he rouses
is the measure and attainment of his success. But there is
the other type for whom oratory means persuading and
stirring his hearers to definite action in which the orator
leads. The fact that Kerensky hovered and hesitated between
these two types, but that Lenin belonged to the latter
class, made the entire Bolshevik Revolution.
Fresh from the glow of that atmosphere of emotionalism
and exaltation which great revolutions excite, Mr. Henderson
was out of tune with the stern but rigid sense of responsibility
and self-control which was dominant here. When he
came back from Russia the fine steel of his character was
magnetised by his experiences. He was in an abnormal frame
of mind. He had more than a touch of the revolutionary
malaria. His temperature was high and his mood refractory.
The Executive of the British Labour Party offered to nominate
him, as its Secretary, to go along with its chairman,
Mr. Wardle, and its Treasurer, Mr. Ramsay MacDonald, as
their delegates to Paris with the Russian Soviet emissaries.
He accepted the nomination. It was a profound blunder. As
a Member of the British War Cabinet, he had no right to go
off to Paris without even consulting his colleagues in the
Cabinet, arm in arm with Ramsay MacDonald, who was
openly opposed to the War and to all measures for its effective
prosecution, and had been organising pacifist propa-