an unofficial committee of inquiry which Mr. Lloyd George de- sired to institute in order to investigate rural grievances. The first essential condition of every social reform, Mr. Lloyd George said at Aberdeen in Nov. 1012, was change in the land system, which was still in its essence feudal. The first purpose of the land, he said, should be the provision of sustenance and shelter for the cultivator. The movement attracted a considerable amount of public support ; and he found it a convenient subject to which to direct public attention after the shock to confidence produced in the spring of 1913 by the Marconi revelations, which showed, in the general estimation, a reprehensible carelessness in the private financial operations of the Chancellor of the Ex- chequer (see ENGLISH HISTORY). He advised purists to recall the manner in which landlord parliaments had bartered away the common land. The Liberals, he said at Sutton-in-Ashfield in Aug., were about to march against the central position where land monopoly was entrenched. During the autumn he made many eloquent speeches in different districts of England and Wales in support of his movement, denouncing agricultural con- ditions, bad wages, atrocious housing, damage to crops by game, insufficient prospect of small holdings; and also promising relief to harassed leaseholders in towns. At Swindon on Oct. 22 he detailed a ministerial scheme, which should recast the whole conditions of land monopoly. The main provision was the es- tablishment of a Ministry of Lands, with comprehensive powers for the supervision of everything connected with land, and with a number of roving or local commissioners by whom in a general way these powers would be exercised. The Unionists scoffed at the idea of these hordes of despotic officials; and the course of events in 1914 prevented the scheme from ever seeing the light as a Government bill. But the spirit in which Mr. Lloyd George pursued his campaign was shown in a speech at Pwllheli in December. The landlord, he said then, was no more necessary to agriculture than a gold chain to a watch ; a breath of liberty must be brought into the villages.
To realize the promises of these social campaigns Mr. Lloyd George required ever-increasing millions from the national purse. Indeed he may fairly be charged with having turned the Treasury from a department to control and limit expenditure into a spend- ing department. Between the time when he took- over the Ex- chequer in 1908 from Mr. Asquith and his last budget before the war, that of 1914, the national revenue and expenditure increased by about 55,000,000, reaching in 1914 nearly 210,000,000 in all. Besides the social expenditure, the other main item of increase was, of course, the navy estimates; and Mr. Lloyd George, in an interview published on the first day of 191 4, declared that Liberal- ism would be false to its trust if it did not seize the opportunity of what he asserted to be the improvement in Anglo-German re- lations to diminish expenditure on armaments. Happily, though many Liberal associates responded, the common sense of the Cabinet and of the public prevented any such suicidal operation, and the navy estimates laid before the House were the highest on record. To meet the increased expenditure Mr. Lloyd George, who had been content to mark time in his budget for 1913, made, in 1914, new proposals which carried to a further pitch the prin- ciples of the budget of 1909. He had to meet a deficit of 5,330,- ooo, which he increased to 9,800,000 by further larger grants for social purposes, such as education, health and insurance. To procure this heavy additional sum he took 1,000,000 from the Sinking Fund and then fell back once more on income tax, super- tax and death duties. There were to be increases of the higher grades of income tax, which was to rise to is. 4d.; supertax was to begin with incomes of 3,000, rising to the same maximum of is. 4d. ; and the rates of death duties were to be raised from all estates over 60,000, rising to a maximum of 20% for a million. There was also to be a national system of valuation for local taxation, including the taxation of site values. An outcry fr6m Liberals no less than Conservatives caused him to abandon the extra penny on the income tax, so that the maximum would be only is. 3d., and therefore to postpone many of the grants for social purposes for a year. But, with some modifications, the rest .of the budget passed, not without difficulty, into law.
With all these schemes of social betterment in his head he was eager for short-cuts in the matter of Irish Home Rule. At Hud- dersfield on March 21 he violently attacked the House of Lords and the province of Ulster, denounced the doctrine of " optional obedience," and dwelt on the necessity of settling the Home Rule controversy in order to open the way to deliverance from social wretchedness. At the Mansion House in July he insisted that in view of the threatened war between capital and labour at home and between Nationalist and Orangeman in Ireland, it was the duty of responsible men of all parties to work for peace; and he himself took part in the abortive Buckingham Palace Conference, and impressed his opponents with the sincerity of his desire for an agreed settlement.
The sudden approach of the World War threatened an even more complete end to his social Utopias. Accordingly, in spite of the fact that he had made in 1911, at the time of the Agadir incident, a spirited declaration that Great Britain was deter- mined at all hazards to maintain her place among the Great Powers, he was slow to realize her peril and her duty in the last days of July, and clung, down to a late hour, to the policy of neutrality. When once, however, he was convinced, by the Ger- man violation of Belgium, that honour and justice and human liberty demanded British intervention in arms, he reverted to his position of 1911, and was from the beginning to the end the most resolute of all British ministers to prosecute the war to a triumphant conclusion.
As Chancellor of the Exchequer it was his duty to provide at once against a financial collapse. Ever since the budget of 1909 there had been a coldness between him and the natural friends of the Exchequer, the bankers and merchants of the City of London; but he and they buried the hatchet at once, and he had their ad- vice and aid in the measures which were promptly taken. He availed himself liberally of the assistance of his friend, Lord Read- ing, in this connexion, with excellent results. On Nov. 17 1914 he introduced the first war budget. He had to meet a deficit of nearly 340,000,000; and he determined to follow the precedents set by Pitt and Gladstone and to raise a considerable portion by taxation. Accordingly he doubled the income tax and supertax; added an extra jd. a half-pint on beer; and raised the tax on tea by 3d. a pound. He calculated that in a full year his new taxation would provide over 65,000,000, and for the current year he raised 2,750,000 by a partial suspension of the Sinking Fund. To meet the remainder of the deficit he announced a War Loan of 350,000,000 at 35% issued at 95. Moreover, in order to further the recruiting campaign he made eloquent appeals this autumn to those sections of the people with whom he was peculiarly associated, to Welshmen at the Queen's Hall in London and at Criccieth, and to the Nonconformists at the City Temple. He dwelt on his own record as a man of peace; but insisted that peace could not have been had this August without national dis- honour. If treaties could be disregarded as " scraps of paper," why should any regard be paid to bank-notes and bills of ex- change? He appealed to the great principles of Duty, Patriot- ism, Sacrifice. Peace at any price was not a Christian principle. The only way to establish peace on earth was by making the way of the peace-breaker too hard for rulers to tread.
Early in the next year, 1915, Mr. Lloyd George attended a conference of finance ministers in Paris, where it was agreed that each of the Allies should bring to the common cause that which they were most competent to supply, without reference to any principle of equal sharing by all. This was one of the first of those services to the cause of more intimate cooperation among the Allies which he was to make peculiarly his own in subsequent years. There was no change of taxation in his budget this spring. He bent his whole energies this year to the increase of munitions of war, wherein British supplies were lamentably deficient. He first sounded the note on March 9 in introducing a new and dras- tic Defence of the Realm bill, whose object was the mobilization of industrial resources, and which gave Government wide powers of commandeering factories capable of turning out munitions. He called a conference of trade-union representatives on March 17 with a view to preventing strikes and stoppage of work and
