In October 1922, Lloyd George’s government precipitously fell and a new Conservative government under Andrew Bonar Law took office in Britain. The incoming chancellor of the exchequer, Stanley Baldwin, was a practical and sensible businessman who believed strongly in settling one’s debts—he was so firm an advocate of this principle that in 1919 he had anonymously donated $700,000 of his own money, a fifth of his net worth, to the government as his contribution to paying off the national debt after the war.
