removing all restrictions on output ; and announced that Govern- ment would limit the profits of employers. He pointed to drink as one of the great drawbacks to increased output. " We are fighting," he said, " Germany, Austria and drink; and as far as I can see the greatest of these three deadly foes is drink." The regulation of drink was relegated to a Board of Control with wide powers. But, in the face of a minimizing speech from Mr. Asquith at Newcastle, Mr. Lloyd George enlarged in the House of Commons on the absolute necessity of an enormously increased output of munitions, and of munitions of a different kind. Pub- lic opinion strongly supported him, with the result that, in the Coalition Ministry which Mr. Asquith formed in May, a new department of munitions was created, with Mr. Lloyd George as Minister of Munitions.
He flung himself with ardour into this new work; appealed for and obtained the cooperation of eminent men of business and experts, divided up the country into 10 munition areas, went in person to the great centres of trade and manufacture, Manches- ter, Liverpool, Cardiff, Glasgow, and urged the imperious neces- sity of setting to work as one man, of removing all limiting restrictions, of planting the flag on the workshops. He was inde- fatigable in conferences with the unions to persuade men to con- sent to abrogate the Eight Hours' Act and to consent to labour dilution, and to suspend all hampering rules, promising that all should be restored in their integr'ty after the war. He had a considerable measure of success, owing largely no doubt to the' confidence felt by the working-men in a min'ster who had devoted himself so whole-heartedly to social betterment. He took special powers in the various Munitions Acts to deal summarily with labour difficulties in the factories. Meanwhile, all over the country, shops that had previously turned out utensils of peace were converted into factories of munitions; new factories were rising, sometimes in the most secluded and unlikely spots, and volunteers, men and women, were pressed into the service. The heartening orations which Mr. Lloyd George had made since the war broke out were collected into a shilling volume in the autumn under the title " Through Terror to Triumph." In this winter and in the spring of 1916 there were troubles on the Clyde, where the very small leaven of revolutionary feeling was concentrated; but the strong measures, including the arrest of six ringleaders, which Mr. Lloyd George and his Munitions Ministry took, brought appeasement before long.
His absorption in his new and engrossing work did not leave Mr. Lloyd George much leisure for dealing with other aspects of the critical situation; but he made a strong speech in May in favour of the second and comprehensive Military Service bill of 1916, in which he said that he would rather be driven out of the Liberal party and indeed out of public life than have on his con- science that he opposed a bill calculated to supply the men who, in the opinion of the military authorities, would make all the dif- ference between defeat and victory. No country, he maintained, had saved itself from great military peril without resort to com- pulsory service. A call was also made by his ministerial col- leagues on his powers as a peacemaker after the Dublin rebellion had convinced Mr. Asquith that the system of Irish government had broken down and that there was a unique opportunity for a new departure. He was authorized to put himself in communica- tion with all Irish parties and endeavour to promote a settlement. Accordingly in June be came to a preliminary arrangement with both Nationalists and Ulstermen, on the basis of bringing the Home Rule Act into immediate operation, and of introducing an Amending bill to cover only the period of the war and a short interval after it, during which the Irish members were to remain at Westminster and the six Ulster counties to continue under the Imperial Government. Neither southern Irish Unionists nor English ministers were happy about these proposals; and some small changes made to conciliate them were taken by Mr. Red- mond as a ground for abandoning the negotiations, though Mr. Lloyd George maintained that the arrangement was still one that might well be accepted.
Meanwhile Mr. Lloyd George's relations to the war had be- come still more intimate and responsible. On the sudden death
of Lord Kitchener, it was felt necessary to instal in the War Office a statesman on whose determination and energy both the nation and the Allies could rely; and Mr. Lloyd George had now come to fill so large a space in the civilian administration of the war that no other choice would be acceptable. He took Lord Derby, the hero of the voluntary recruiting campaign, as his Under- secretary. The spirit in which -he proposed to administer his office was shown in an interview which he granted in Sept. to an American journalist. Britain, he said, had only begun to fight. The British Empire had invested thousands of its best lives to purchase future immunity for civilization. After all these sacri- fices " the fight must be to a finish to a knock-out " a view which, when it was challenged, the House of Commons warmly supported. Desiring to promote the war in this spirit, he showed justifiable anxiety both about the number of exemptions allowed under the Military Service Acts and about the unsatisfactory results of recruiting in Ireland. But what gave him the keenest anxiety was the defective constitution and limited authority of (he War Committee of the Cabinet. It was too large, it did not meet sufficiently often, it was subject to the over-ruling of the Cabinet, and its chairman, Mr. Asquith, was overburdened with other duties, including the leadership of the House of Commons, and had hardly the temperament of a resourceful and enterpris- ing controller of war. Public opinion, in the press and in the
, Parliamentary War Committees, was becoming mobilized in this sense. Accordingly, on Dec. i Mr. Lloyd George wrote to Mr. Asquith demanding, on threat of resignation, that the conduct of the war should be placed in the absolute control of a small com- mittee of four, sitting day by day, including himself but not including Mr. Asquith. In the negotiations which followed. and in which Mr. Lloyd George made some concessions in order to . win Mr. Asquith if possible, it became clear that the result would be to transfer the main conduct of the war from Mr. As- quith to Mr. Lloyd George. This was eventually effected by the formation of a Ministry under Mr. Lloyd George, with Mr. Bonar Law as his partner, and with the support not only of the Ministry but of the Labour party, and a large contingent of the Liberals, while Mr. Asquith and his immediate friends remained outside but did not oppose.
Mr. Lloyd George's advent to supreme power was well received, as his reputation as a War Minister had steadily augmented from Aug. 1914 onwards; and by constituting a War Cabinet of four persons in permanent session with full powers, and trans- ferring the leadership of the House of Commons to Mr. Law in order to devote himself to the conduct of the war, he strength- ened the good impression of the public. They welcomed also the,- evidence of determination given by the creation of new depart- ments Food, Labour, Shipping, Pensions, National Service; by the assumption by Government of control over shipping and mines, and by the appointment of business men and experts to some of the more important posts. They welcomed too his firm reply to the German Chancellor's peace overture: "We shall put our trust in an unbroken army rather than in a broken faith " ; and his decision to summon the Prime Ministers of the Dominions to a series of special meetings of the War Cabinet. His popularity
i was increased by the discovery in Jan. 1917 of a conspiracy in a Derby family of anarchists to murder him and Mr. Henderson, his Labour colleague in the War Cabinet. Three of the family were found guilty at the Centra! Criminal Court and sentenced to substantial terms of penal servitude. Sympathy was again roused later in the year when it was suggested by a portion of the press that he one of the most courageous of men had left Lon- don to avoid an air-raid. The offenders apologized and with- drew, agreeing to indemnify the Prime Minister for his costs.
The successive measures taken by the Government in the next two years and a half to carry out its policy of subordinating every- thing to the prosecution of the war to a victorious conclusion, and of marshalling the whole of the resources of the nation for that one purpose, are detailed in the article on ENGLISH HISTORY. So far as the work was done in Parliament it was carried through mainly by Mr. Bonar Law. Mr. Lloyd George adhered closely to his programme of concentrating his own energies on the day-
