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By Root 814 0

is not quite true. In fact, he had always taken great pride in the empire, but he had never thought it was being run properly. It was folly to try to manage everything from London and, he argued, an expensive folly at that. What would keep the empire strong was to allow as much local self-government as possible and to have an imperial policy only on the important issues, such as defense and a common foreign policy. With home rule—he was thinking of Scotland, his own Wales and the perennially troublesome Ireland as well—parts of the empire would willingly take on the costs of looking after themselves. (“Home Rule for Hell,” cried a heckler at one of his speeches. “Quite right,” retorted Lloyd George, “let every man speak up for his own country.”) The dominions—Australia, Canada, New Zealand, Newfoundland and South Africa—were already partly self-governing. Even India was moving slowly to self-government; but with its mix of races, which included only the merest handful of Europeans, and its many religions and languages, Lloyd George doubted it would ever be able to manage on its own. (He never visited India and knew very little about it but, in the offhand way of his times, he considered Indians, along with other brown-skinned peoples, to be inferior.20)

In 1916, shortly after he became prime minister, Lloyd George told the House of Commons that the time had come to consult formally with the dominions and India about the best way to win the war. He intended, therefore, to create an Imperial War Cabinet. It was a wonderful gesture. It was also necessary. The dominions and India were keeping the British war effort going with their raw materials, their munitions, their loans, above all with their manpower—some 1,250,000 soldiers from India and another million from the dominions. Australia, as Billy Hughes, its prime minister, never tired of reminding everyone, had lost more soldiers by 1918 than the United States. 21

By 1916 the dominions, which had once tiptoed reverentially around the mother country, were growing up. They and their generals had seen too much of what Sir Robert Borden, the Canadian prime minister, called “incompetence and blundering stupidity of the whiskey and soda British H.Q. Staff.” The dominions knew how important their contribution was, what they had spent in blood. In return, they now expected to be consulted, both on the war and the peace to follow. They found a receptive audience in Britain, where what had been in prewar days a patronizing contempt for the crudeness of colonials had turned into enthusiasm for their vigor. Billy Hughes became something of a fad when he visited London in 1916; women marched with signs saying “We Want Hughes Back,” and a popular cartoon showed the Billiwog: “No War Is Complete Without One.” And then there was Jan Smuts, South Africa’s foreign minister, soldier, statesman and, to some, seer, who spent much of the later part of the war in London. Smuts had fought against the British fifteen years previously; now he was one of their most trusted advisers, sitting on the small committee of the British cabinet which Lloyd George set up to run the war. He was widely admired: “Of his practical contribution to our counsels during these trying years,” said Lloyd George, “it is difficult to speak too highly.”22

In the last days of the war Hughes and Borden were infuriated to discover that the British War Cabinet had authorized Lloyd George and Balfour to go to the Supreme War Council in Paris to settle the German armistice terms with the Allies without bothering to inform the dominions. Hughes also strongly objected to Wilson’s Fourteen Points being accepted as the basis for peace negotiations—“a painful and serious breach of faith.” The dominion leaders were even more indignant when they discovered that the British had assumed they would tag along to the Peace Conference as part of the British delegation. Lloyd George attempted to mollify them by suggesting that a dominion prime minister could be one of the five British plenipotentiaries. But which one? As Hankey said, “The