“The finest eloquence is that which gets things
done; the worst is that which delays them.”—British Prime Minister David Lloyd
George, speech at the Paris Peace Conference, January 1919
David Lloyd George, born on this date 150 years ago, led Great Britain during World War I,
but his finest moments probably came before that bloody conflict, when, as the
Chancellor of the Exchequer under then-Prime Minister Herbert H. Asquith, he
crusaded for what represented the first inklings of his nation’s welfare state—a
program involving old-age pensions, labor exchanges and a children’s allowance
on income tax.
The “Welsh Wizard’s” proposal for raising the funds
for this “People’s Budget”—a tax on the superrich—led to an epic clash and
constitutional crisis with the House of Lords, the nation’s bastion of
hereditary privilege. He was finally able to push the legislation through, in
part because of the quality he mentioned at the conference to end WWI—eloquence
which “gets things done.”
(Image from
the United States Library of Congress's Prints and Photographs division.)
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