MR. LLOYD GEORGE ON THE COALITION GOVERNMENT.

LIBERALS AND HOME RULE.

The first number of “The Lloyd George Liberal Magazine: a Monthly Record of Practical Politics,” will make its appearance tomorrow; and of its sixty pages ten will be found devoted to a special interview with the Prime Minister by Mr. Harold Spender. It takes the form of replies by Mr. Lloyd George to a series of questions put to him by Mr. Spender “as a life-time Liberal” who follows the Coalition because he believes that “that is the best Government for this Empire in the present time.”

Plunging at once into a “broad and emphatic defence of his Coalition policy,” Mr. Lloyd George went straight back to the time of the Armistice. “There were three alternatives for me to pursue,” he said. “One was the Coalition. What were the others? I might have bowed my Unionist colleagues out of the Cabinet and governed through the existing Liberal majority, always supposing that the Liberals behind Mr. Asquith would have joined me. What, then, would have happened? We should have had to fight our bills in the old party fashion, and they would have been opposed in the old party fashion. If we had resumed the pursuit of our party interests, why, then, the Unionists would have been perfectly justified in resuming the pursuit of their party interests. They would have been compelled to do so. So that all the measures which we have since passed would have had to run the gauntlet of all the old methods of party opposition. Do you really imagine that we could have passed as many effective measures as we have passed by Coalition methods?”

As an instance of the power which a Unionist Opposition would have had to delay and weaken legislation, the Prime Minister referred to the land-tax proposals in the Budget of 1909, which, he said, “emerged with practically no value for revenue purposes.” Asked if that was his defence for repealing those land-taxes in the Budget of this year, he said: “That is not only my defence, but my actual reason for repealing them. It was useless to keep up those taxes any longer for revenue purposes. I stuck to them because of their value for valuation. In that way they produced real revenue through the estate duties. But now that the gross valuation of property is practically completed that purpose is achieved.”