A MINISTER
“If they take part in public life, the effect is never indifferent. They either appear like ministers of divine vengeance, and their course through the world is marked by desolation and oppression, by poverty and servitude, or they are the guardian angels of the country they inhabit, busy to avert even the most distant evil, and to maintain and procure peace, plenty, and the greatest of human blessings, liberty.”—Bolingbroke in The Patriot King on his “Chosen Men.”
The Department which fell to the control of Mr. Lloyd George on the formation of the 1905 Liberal Administration presented no easy or simple task. The Board of Trade stood at a moment which comes to every great office of State—a moment when it may either increase or decrease, gather power or lose it. Its official name gave little clue to the distracting combination of powers varying from complete control at one end to vague influence at the other. British Departments are like wild-flowers—they grow and spread without plan or scheme, just as the chance caprice of Parliament or some fugitive Ministry may decide. It is often just a throw of the dice as to what new powers or functions may be laid upon them.
The Board of Trade had withered under the shadow of the great fiscal deadlock of the previous three years (1903-6). Poised between two theories of commerce, it had lingered in the “doldrums,” like a ship waiting for a wind.
Thus there awaited in the pigeon-holes of the office a great number of untouched and unfinished projects, loose ends of legislation, belated steps towards giving method and authority to the powers of that great Department.
For the Board of Trade reflected in every branch of its administrative powers the spirit of the age in which it had grown up—the timid, tentative, apologetic touch of the nineteenth-century administrator. The scope of its powers, indeed, bulked vast and tremendous—extending from bankrupt firms at one end to shipping, railways, and labour at the other; but over all these branches of national life its sway was mild and illusive. The very Consuls who control our trade abroad were appointed and controlled by another Department.[[50]]
The Labour Department, founded in a spasm of progress, was still mainly advisory. British railways had to be supplicated rather than controlled. The great shipping interests had discovered new sea-ways through obsolete laws.
Mr. Lloyd George soon realised the opportunity that lay to his hand. The time had come to give to the Board of Trade a new grasp and stretch of authority. New laws must be passed. But also, and even more important, there must be a new spirit in the administration of the laws that existed.
He did not act in a hurry. He spent his first weeks in a thorough study of the work of the Board. He appeared little in Parliament. He took the sensible course of first learning from the able officials of the Board the general outlines of its functions and problems.
Then, after some months, he began to legislate; but, before bringing in his Bills, he developed what was then a new system of preparation and anticipation.
It had been too often the custom of Ministers in such Departments as the Board of Trade to frame Bills without consulting the interests concerned. Here was the truly “bureaucratic” spirit of the olden days—to assume that the Civil Service must of necessity know better than the public about their own business—to enforce on great private interests measures as to which they had never been asked their opinions, to wait for the inevitable complaints and grievances until it was too late to remedy them without public confessions of ignorance and folly. Such methods have been responsible for many bad laws and for many parliamentary disasters.
Mr. Lloyd George changed all that. Take the first question in which he decided to legislate—the control of merchant shipping. Here he found things in a very bad mess. The British merchant sailor was still far behind most British land-workers both in comfort and in wages. While fabulous fortunes were being made by shipowners, sailors were still badly fed, badly housed, irregularly paid, often cheated of their pay altogether. The result was that the more prosperous classes of British wage-earners were refusing to go to sea or leaving the sea as soon as possible. Our gigantic merchant fleet, the pride of the British Empire, was already half manned by foreign seamen, whose ignorance of the English language often put English ships and lives in grievous peril.
Many efforts had been made to remedy these things—one by Mr. Chamberlain, still remembered at the Board of Trade as the best administrator up to that time. Mr. Lloyd George proposed to carry Mr. Chamberlain’s efforts to completion.
What had defeated all efforts up to the present moment was the powerful resistance of the shipowners in the House of Commons, where the rights of the many too often escheat to the bold and flagrant championship of the few.
Mr. Lloyd George determined to call the shipowners together and to consult them before he introduced his Bill into the House. But, if he was to consult the shipowners, he must also consult the sailors. So he ended by consulting both interests outside the House; and this sensible method proved so successful in the case of shipping that it soon became his favourite method in preparing all his Bills, and has now been adopted by many Ministers as the obvious and necessary preliminary to legislation.
In the Merchant Shipping Act of 1906, indeed, he carried this process a step further. Not only did he, by agreement, establish for the British sailor a new charter of rights,[[51]] but he also effected a new load-waterline agreement with foreign Governments. Thereby he established a new precedent for international legislation.
The working of the famous “Load-line”—so dramatically secured by that fervent and determined man, Mr. Samuel Plimsoll, a generation before—had undoubtedly saved thousands of innocent lives. It had given the seamen a new guarantee of security. There was always the fact that a ship could not be weighted down below a certain depth. But meanwhile a new evil had arisen. Foreign ships, without the British “Load-line,” were using British ports to snatch British trade. Deeply laden “foreigners” could afford to carry goods at lower freights; and Great Britain was penalised for her humanity.
Mr. Lloyd George determined to stop this. He compromised the “Load-line”—raising it slightly for British ships, but enforcing this modified line on all ships that came to British ports. There were protests from foreign Powers. Mr. Lloyd George proceeded to negotiate. He bargained with the right of entry to British ports, and finally he came to an agreement with most of the great seafaring nations which enforced the new “Load-line” on all ships trading to Great Britain.
Such was the first of the new measures which came from the Board of Trade under his presidency and passed through the House of Commons in October of 1906. Now for the first time piloting his own measures from the Treasury Bench, Mr. Lloyd George showed new parliamentary powers that astonished the critics. The wiseacres had shaken their heads. “Too much of a rebel to govern!” they had said. “So accustomed to obstruction, that he will obstruct himself!” said others, scoffing. But they were wrong. He developed new powers of adroit persuasiveness that surprised lookers-on. He was patient and conciliatory. He could be firm when necessary; but at other times he seemed all open-mindedness. He had won his way very often just when every one else thought that he had lost it. He knew when to sacrifice details in order to win principles.
Now that the Board of Trade found that they had secured a good law-maker, the progressive officials who distinguish that Department pressed on him other tasks. There was, for instance, the question of the law of patents, crying for consolidation and amendment. There, too, legislation was long overdue.
Consolidation was easy. But, in looking into the state of the law, Mr. Lloyd George soon discovered that there was one glaring British grievance which no Minister had yet dared to touch. Mr. Lloyd George refused to be paralysed by the terrorism of the Protection controversy. He has never admitted the view that Free Trade means discrimination against your own country.
And yet that was how the existing patent law worked.
For he found that a custom had grown up by which foreign firms would employ a British citizen to take out a British patent with the deliberate intention to work it abroad. In that case it could not be worked in Great Britain. For there was actually nothing in British law to prevent this British privilege from becoming a direct cause of loss to British trade.
This seemed to him intolerable. Accordingly, he introduced into the Patents Bill which he brought into the House in 1907 the following clause:[[52]]
“At any time, not less than four years after the date of a patent, and not less than one year after the passing of this Act, any person may apply to the Comptroller for the revocation of the patent on the ground that the patented article or process is manufactured or carried on exclusively or mainly outside the United Kingdom.”
Looking back on this clause now, with all the excellent results that have flowed from it,[[53]] it is clear that it represented the merest justice to the British trader. The Tariff Reformers congratulated Mr. Lloyd George on conversion; the Free Traders reproached him for desertion. Neither had any leg to stand on. The mere fact of granting patents is, in a sense, a form of protection for the patentee. But to ask that a nation should grant so great a privilege in order that it should be used against its own citizens is surely the very ecstasy of “freedom.”
Then, just before leaving the Board of Trade, he finally settled up the Port of London by buying out the Dock Companies. There again he arranged the terms of purchase by bargaining before he brought in his Bill.
One company stood out. He went straight on without that company. It was awkward; but it would have been fatal to show weakness. He was just about to move the Second Reading of the Bill, leaving that company out, when the announcement of its agreement to his terms was brought to him in his room at the House of Commons before he went in to the Committee. Thus a problem was settled which had defied several Governments and paralysed London as a port.
“Not an ideal way of legislating,” it will be said. Certainly not. Nor was then our Parliament an ideal legislative machine.
In a speech made at Liverpool on May 24th, 1906, Mr. Lloyd George described how the menace of the Lords then threw its shadow over all Liberal policy. He told how, in framing every Bill, the Cabinet, even before the Bill was drafted, had to take the attitude of the Upper Chamber into consideration.
This was, in fact, still his own governing consideration in these Board of Trade measures. He was soon to show that he was quite ready to fight the Lords when it seemed to him a necessary stroke of high policy. But he did not believe in half-defiances. So he modelled these Board of Trade Bills to pass by agreement.
But, after all, it was not in law-making so much as in administration that he was destined to make his highest reputation at the Board of Trade. It was not only that he sent into every tentacle of the great organism a new vigour and intensity of purpose; it was also that he showed in a very high degree a genius for conciliation in great labour disputes.
It was in the late autumn of 1907 that there came to him the great test of the threatened Railway Strike. He had just achieved in October a very surprising triumph of peace-making at the Welsh Convention summoned at Cardiff to denounce him for some supposed weakening on Welsh Disestablishment. They were just preparing to sacrifice him with his own borrowed weapons when he appeared in the midst of them, claimed to speak, and won them over to spare him.
But all Englishmen always took it for granted that Mr. Lloyd George could manage Welshmen. English railwaymen and English railway directors seemed a very different affair. For both parties seemed very resolute; and the powers of the Board of Trade seemed remarkably weak.
But the crisis was too grave to consider legal powers. The country was faced with a paralysis of transport. Such an event might prove a national danger.
Mr. Lloyd George swiftly acted for the nation. With no power to enforce his summons, he boldly called directors and men to the Board of Trade to discuss the situation. There he held them for days, prolonging the discussion by every resource of persuasion until the moods of both parties were cooled to a more reasonable temperature. Then he made his proposal—the famous Conciliation Boards—and he won both parties to agreement.
Those who, like myself, saw much of him from day to day during that struggle could not but be amazed at his resourcefulness and persistence. He appeared never to contemplate the possibility of a breakdown. He seemed one of that rare band of whom the Roman poet said—“They can because they think they can.” It was impossible to dream of failure in his presence. Infected by his magic faith, weak men grew strong and sceptics radiated with faith. He appeared one of those of whom, in a famous poem, a great English singer has said[[54]]—
“Languor is not in your heart,
Weakness is not in your word,
Weariness not on your brow.
Ye alight in our van! at your voice,
Panic, despair, flee away.”
Here was a tangle of time-worn hatreds: the men were suspicious and resentful, the directors dogged and prejudiced. How bring together human beings so divided? How bridge such a gulf?
Well, first he brought into the conferences those men who stood between the quarrelling parties—the railway managers. Here he found a remarkable body of Englishmen—alert, resourceful, self-made, unprejudiced.
How often he used to praise those railway managers! Ten years after, in a still greater emergency, his mind went back to those men; and in the gravest crisis of the Great War he called them in to aid the hard-pressed British lines in France.
What is it that has made Mr. Lloyd George so great a conciliator?
It is not merely his power of using speech for purposes of persuasion. “Speakers attack too much,” he often used to say. “They ought to aim at persuasion.” That has always been his own central aim in the use of speech.
There is also in him an even greater power—the power of making two conflicting parties see one another’s point of view. That is partly because they learn to see it through his eyes. It is like some arrangement of looking-glasses in which men see one another’s faces at a new and more attractive angle. There, again, he works on a theory. “Men quarrel too much,” I have heard him say. “They become slaves to words and phrases. They miss the reality.”
It was such beliefs and perceptions that have so often made him persevere in peace-making when all others have given up hope.
In this case of the Railway Strike of 1907 it earned him the universal applause of the nation, voiced by King Edward, who always entertained a keen and subtle admiration for good peace-making. For a few brief months Mr. Lloyd George was the hero of the nation. He seemed almost a case for the warning—“Beware when all men speak well of thee!”
But in the career of this man of storm it is always fated that no peaceful interval lasts long. On November 6th he settled the railway strike; on November 30th he lost his eldest daughter Mair, the apple of his eye. While still bowed with that bitter grief, in December he was called to stop a threatened strike in the cotton trade. He is wont to say that it was the only thing that saved him. But there was clearly to be no peace for him.
Then, four months later, in April 1908, Sir Henry Campbell-Bannerman, broken by work and domestic sorrow, resigned the Premiership, and Mr. Asquith stepped into his place. Mr. John (now Lord) Morley was offered the Chancellorship of the Exchequer, but he refused it, and that high post was now allotted to Mr. Lloyd George.
[50] The Foreign Office, which still (1920) appoints them.
[51] A fixed standard of food and ship accommodation, a certificated cook on board ship, a guarantee that distressed seamen should be looked after and abandoned seamen paid, a restriction on the scandalous practices of overloading and under-manning, and on the employment of foreign sailors.
[52] Clause 27, Patents Act of 1907.
[53] Many patents are now being worked in England which were previously worked abroad.
[54] Matthew Arnold in “Rugby Chapel.”