[47] “Address to the people of Wales,” January 17th, 1903.
[48] Cousin of Sir Frank Edwards, M.P., one of the most faithful of the Welsh Nationalists, but himself an Anglican.
[49] Carnarvonshire and Merionethshire.
CHAPTER XI
(1905-1908)
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.