FROM 1901 TO THE OUTBREAK OF WAR The period opens, however, with very little indication of a new stirring of national life. The death of Queen Victoria (Jan. 22, 1901), the end of that long reign, coincident as it had been with the rise of a new England in a new Europe, and the accession to the throne of a genial man of the world with wide interests and a zest for life, might suggest the passing of a dead-weight of tradi tion. But in social and artistic matters the tradition had for some time been weakening; and in national affairs, once the excitement of these events was over, the old seemed to be depressingly present, and the cry for the new depressingly unanswered.
The recovery of the British armies in South Africa during 1900 had not ended the war. The Conservative Government, renewing its mandate by the "khaki election" of 190o, had not renewed its strength. Burdened with the blame for the disasters of the early months of the Boer War, and then for the tedious weariness of a long struggle with the elusive mobile commandos of the Boers. the Government appeared to be a rather lackadaisical survival of 19th century Conservatism. And the Opposition appeared to be an equally ineffective survival; there were Liberals who applied to the war the old Cobdenite-Gladstonian tradition, and condemned it as a deplorable piece of provocative imperialism; there were others who, wish Lord Rosebery, felt that a Liberalism thus set ting itself against the national pride had no future before it.
In such circumstances politics became little more than a mass of inchoate animosities and recriminations. The session was barren. An education bill designed to meet the awkward situation produced by the Cockerton judgment, which had imperilled the whole pro vision of higher education at the public expense, was hotly criti cized, and eventually replaced by a temporary measure permitting education authorities to "carry on" for a year. W. St. J. F. Brod rick (see MIDLETON, VISCOUNT) produced a scheme of military reorganization, with a system of army corps and decentralized commands; but as his corps were admittedly to a great extent "skeleton" formations, he was bidden to learn some more practi cal lesson from British failures in South Africa, and pay attention to the better education and war training of officers and men. In the latter part of the year the Liberals who were attacking the conduct of the war found a new theme. Lord Kitchener, who was now in command in South Africa (Lord Roberts having re turned in January to be the last great public man to be received by Queen Victoria and to take from her hands the Order of the Garter) was meeting guerilla warfare with a new strategy of cordons of troops operating from lines of blockhouses to clear whole districts, emptying, and on occasion burning, the farms to which the Boers retired, hiding their arms. Concentration camps, for the reception of women and children removed from the cleared districts, had inevitably the flaws of an emergency pro vision; and reports of ill-health, loss of infant life, and insanitary conditions gave material for Liberal agitation, bitterly resented by those who could, quite justifiably, represent the camps as an almost quixotic piece of humaneness in warfare, rendered partly ineffective by the Boers' own insanitary habits. The whole sub ject bringing to such a definite point the irreconcilable difference of opinion between those who felt the war must be finished, and those who merely demanded that it should be stopped, exacerbated people's minds. Rioting broke up a peace-meeting in Birmingham in December, and forced Lloyd George to escape for his life.
The Liberal Revival.—Within a few months the whole scene was changed. By March 19o2 the Boer leaders were known to have opened communications with Lord Kitchener. Peace was signed in May at Vereeniging, on terms generous enough to the Boers in the matters of amnesty and repatriation, with a grant of three millions for re-establishing devastated farms, but also conclusive as to the unity of South Africa under the British Government. Nothing remained to cloud the anticipations of the coronation, which was not only the first for 64 years, but the first great imperial coronation. When last a sovereign of the United Kingdom had been crowned, the colonies had been poor, thinly populated, distant—barely a reality at all to the people at home—and India a chartered company's territory in some what, indeterminate relations with the Crown. Now the colonies were great and prosperous countries, made much more real and vita to the nation by the explicit imperialism of the Conserva tives. Moreover, the king was emperor of India. At the moment of its long-delayed success in South Africa the nation was thor oughly in the mood to savour the meaning of the gay and varied contingents of troops from every quarter of the empire, camped in and around London. Then in the height of the excitement, with princes and potentates arriving from all over the world, King Edward suddenly fell ill, and the ceremony had to be postponed until his recovery from an operation for appendicitis. The corona tion finally took place, with undiminished splendour, on Aug. 9.
So far, the nation had been paying little attention to events which suddenly promoted a much more healthy state of party opposition in the Commons. For some time past it had been felt that the school boards of the 1870 act, though they had worked well in towns, were on the whole too parochial in personnel and policy to envisage education in the large and generous way that was becoming increasingly necessary. A new bill abolished them, and placed education in the hands of statutory committees of the borough and county councils. For the moment the significance of the fact that Church of England schools were brought into the reorganization pari passu with the undenominational board schools escaped notice ; then the old Liberal nonconformist spirit awoke, internal divisions lost their importance, and the Oppo sition became a fighting force. It was not until the autumn ses sion, when non-payment of rates, as a drastic assertion of the rights of conscience against legislation, was launched as a definite policy, that this change in the atmosphere of the House of Com mons had much reverberation in the world outside.
During the session of 1903 it remained principally a House of Commons question ; the attack lay along the line of the precise degree of cabinet responsibility for the new pronouncement. C. T. Ritchie's attitude, in introducing the budget, and the dis cussions on the budget, revealed a strong free-trade element among the Conservatives. But Balfour refused to admit any vital differ ence between himself and Chamberlain, and reiterated that the whole question was one for enquiry and investigation, not for immediate party warfare. Almost immediately the simple im perialism of the first stage had become complicated with the other issues of national finance and the protection of national in dustries. This became clearer in the autumn of 1903, when the campaign on both sides developed rapidly outside parliament. The controversy lacked no skill or competence on either side ; and in the analysis of statistics, the estimation of the comparative position of employers and their employees in Great Britain and elsewhere, the elucidation of the subtle reactions of our long free trade policy upon high finance, banking and international credit, much was achieved in the course of a struggle which enlisted, quite unprecedently, practically the whole academic as well as the whole political force of the nation. It made public life vivid and extraordinarily active for the next two years. It was obvi ous, once division of opinion had become clear, that Chamberlain and the free traders could hardly remain in the same cabinet. Resignations were to be expected ; when they came, they seemed only to make the situation more bewildering. The notable free traders, Ritchie, Lord George Hamilton, Arthur Elliot, Lord Bal four of Burleigh, resigned in September. But Chamberlain had resigned as well. In the reconstruction his son, Austen Chamber lain, succeeded Ritchie at the Exchequer. Another distinguished free trader, the duke of Devonshire, resigned in October.
If 1904 was thus a year which kept some breadth of interest in politics, 1905 was so nearly a year of exclusive concentration upon tariff reform that Balfour, by remaining in office, seemed to do little more than make a present to his opponents of 12 months' electioneering. Under the new Tariff Reform League on one side and the revived Cobden Club on the other, the battle was fairly joined. Reputations were made on the free trade side; Lloyd George, already prominent from his opposition to the Boer War, greatly increased his power over Liberal meetings; and Winston Churchill, who had refused an equivocal position, and left the Unionists in 1903, reached the front rank of politics at a bound. As the year drew on to the inevitable election, argument naturally deteriorated. Tariff reformers' cries of "the foreigner will pay," and "tariff reform means work for all," were matched by Liberal posters of the big loaf and the little loaf. Steadily it became more and more clear on which side the British public as a whole was ranging itself ; and not even the palpable presence of thousands of unemployed, to point the tariff reformers' moral, made the mass of working men willing to risk the gamble of food taxes for the chance of more steady employment.
On Dec. 4, 1905, Balfour at last resigned, having, it must be admitted, pulled his party over the first shock of the controversy. Some faint hope existed among the Unionists that the internal divisions of the Liberals might revive to weaken them. But when Sir Henry Campbell-Bannerman's Government was announced on Dec. 16 it was seen that H. H. Asquith (afterwards Earl of Oxford and Asquith) was at the Exchequer, Sir Edward (afterwards Vis count) Grey at the Foreign Office, and R. B. (afterwards Lord) Haldane at the War Office ; and a speech by Lord Rosebery a few days later made it as clear as any such thing could be made that nothing had gone on behind the scenes; Liberal imperialists had simply accepted the prime minister's invitation to join him. The new prime minister, it may be remarked here, has his place in constitutional history; he was the first to hold the post as an office. Hitherto the head of the Government had always been obliged to take some office recognized by the constitution—usually the sinecure dignity of first lord of the Treasury, for "prime min ister" was, in strictness, only a descriptive appellation. Now by a royal warrant, giving the prime minister, under that title, a place of official precedence, the king established his position as a formal office of State. (See PRIME MINISTER.) The Landslide Election.—The general election which fol lowed was the most startling that the country had ever seen. Member after member of the late Government lost his seat, in cluding Balfour himself. The astonishing new house was com posed of 397 Liberals, 57 Labour members, 83 Irish Nationalists and a mere 157 Unionists. The Government had a possible maxi mum majority of 374. Free Trade had beyond all question played the largest part in the results; the introduction of indentured Chinese labour into the Rand gold-mines had also provided Lib erals with an electoral weapon which they used with effect. It was obvious, too, that Balfour's long continuance in office after his party had become disunited had not only stimulated to an unusual degree the mere desire for a change, but had also revived in the electorate that sense of inefficiency in their Government which had been strongly vocal during the Boer War. There was undoubtedly another important element in the situation. While the labour world had been rapidly becoming more politi cally energetic and more articulately conscious of its strength, it was not yet in a position to appear in full force as a distinct party, and therefore its effect at the polls was a heavy reinforcement of the Liberal vote. Two things above all had profoundly affected Labour. One was that in 1899 after long and patient work by Keir Hardie (who had been returned in 1892 as the first true Labour member) and others, the various elements in Labour politics—trade unionism of the old-fashioned strictly industrial kind, Fabianism and Socialism—had been drawn together in the foundation of the Labour Representation Committee; in the in tervening 'years this first success was consolidated; the party pledge, after some internal struggles, was imposed, with a com pulsory levy on members of certain trade unions. But what most of all inspirited it, and helped towards the acceptance both of the party pledge and the levy, was the famous Taff Vale case of 1902, in which, after a railway strike, the unions had, to their dismay, found that the law, as it stood, could be held to render them liable for damages for the actions of any individual union member during a strike. The labour world naturally drew together whole heartedly to demand amendment of the law; and since Liberal candidates sympathized entirely with this demand, the Taff Vale case must be added to the reasons for the overwhelming Liberal success. So must the Labour demand for a more active social policy generally. The early years of the century were on the whole free of serious labour disturbances. But active political Labour was aware that employers were working on an ever narrowing margin of profit, and that, with prices slowly but distinctly rising, there must be determined and difficult wage struggles ahead; and the wider social conscience was increasingly concerned about unemployment, "sweated" industries, bad hous ing and the helplessness of the manual worker in sickness and old age.
Much was achieved. The Trade Disputes Act of 1906, definitely placing trade union funds above the normal operations of the law in actions of tort ; a reorganization of the military system in 1907, which created, in the Expeditionary Force and the Terri torial Army, a machine which was to meet the first strain of the World War in 1914 ; the Coal Mines Eight Hours Act and the Old Age Pensions Act of 1908 ; the Housing and Town Planning Act, the Trade Boards Act for "sweated" industries and the Labour Exchanges Act of 1909. But the harvest was gathered with perpetual friction; many bills were lost, and in matters of education and licensing especially the Government was not allowed to carry its proposals. On the Liberal side of the house there was constant agitation on the question of the power of the House of Lords. In one matter at least the latter had been unwise : instead of waiting for the Licensing bill of i 908 (against which, with its proposals of terminating after 14 years all "monopoly value" in a licence and restoring its strictly annual character, there had been much outcry) to come before them in the usual way, they decided, at a meeting of peers at Lansdowne House, to reject it, and announced the decision. Nothing could have been more useful for rousing Liberal opinion against them: it lent itself so well to the complaint that the Lords did not even pretend to act properly as a house of parliament when Liberal measures were in question.
Yet no practical politician could expect to rouse really strong feeling in the country by a generalized attack upon the Lords for their conduct during three sessions. It would become a dry con stitutional question, and the electorate, now that its fear of Pro tection was over, would fall back into all sorts of cross-divisions. And, finally, the attack must be striking and, as far as possible, sensational. For the public mind, losing its single interest of the tariff reform years, had scattered itself upon many things—the rapid expansion of motor transport ; the extension and linking up of "tube" railways; the early successes in flying (mainly, as yet, with dirigible balloons, but Farman and the brothers Wright had flown in aeroplanes in 1908) ; a growth of the week-end and coun try cottage habit ; and an increase in pleasant ways of spending money.
In both cases the Government was able to achieve its object; in neither case, however, in such a manner as to put an end to the Opposition's questioning of the nature and true extent of its authority. The election of Jan. 1910, on the issue of the budget, seemed to support the view that, Free Trade apart, the Liberals had no overwhelming mandate from the nation; the Conservatives now returned actually in a slight majority over the Liberals, and the Government therefore depended upon the Labour members and the Irish Nationalists. The Opposition accepted this as a decision on the budget, which was passed; but mainly because the holding-up of the national finances was an awkward and danger ous way of carrying on a contest, which, after their action on the budget, had better be fought out fundamentally on the issue of a great constitutional change. The problem was twofold. One of the peculiar provocations of the budget incident had been that a house with no element of election in it had the right to render futile a House of Commons majority. Hence the simplest aspect of the question—a statutory limitation of the power of the Lords—was complicated with the possibility of a reformed upper house to which large powers might still be left because of its more satisfactory character.
The Parliament bill was, at any rate, ingenious. Postponing in its preamble for later consideration the possibility of an amended upper house and the powers it might be given, it proceeded to lay down that, until such reform, measures which had passed the Commons unaltered in three separate sessions might be presented for the royal assent without the consent of the Lords; and that financial measures might be so presented, in similar circumstances, without repeated passage, a month after passing the Commons. It was the gravest constitutional measure since the Reform Bill of i 83 2—perhaps, even, since the Act of Settlement; and there were those on both sides who looked for some agreement that might evade such drastic enactment. It was significant of the position King Edward had attained that hope, at this crisis, pinned itself to his tact and sagacity; but his death, in May 1910, re moved the hope centred in him ; and it must be said that it had been cherished rather by the popular mind than by seri ous politicians. Conferences continued through the year, until in November it was announced that they had failed. The grav ity of the announcement of another appeal to the country was enhanced by Asquith's statement (he had become prime min ister on Campbell-Bannerman's death in Feb. 1908) that he had only advised dissolution upon such conditions as would enable the Liberals, if successful at the election, to place the Parliament bill on the statute book against all resistance by the Lords. This was immediately taken as a reproduction of the guarantee given by King William IV. to Lord Grey for the passage of the Reform bill: although in the present case this must mean reducing the House of Lords to an absurdity by a mass creation of 400 or Soo peers, there could be no other interpretation of Asquith's words. The election of Dec. 1910 made little change; a gain of four seats by the Liberals was hardly conclusive, and there were Conserva tives in both houses (they added the name of "die-hards" to political nomenclature) who would have had the Lords reject the bill, believing that the country would never stand such a crea tion of peers as was threatened. Others were for accompanying the rejection with a voluntary reform of the house, or with the institution of a referendum for solving deadlocks. Through all such proposals the Government held steadily on its way with the Parliament bill; the Conservative leaders shrank back at the last, and in Aug. 1911, by the abstention of the majority, the bill passed the House of Lords by 131 votes to 114.
The Government, after the interruption of 1909-10, returned to its social programme, passing in 1911 the Shops Act, estab lishing the weekly half-holiday ; and Payment of Members (q.v.) . But the principal measure—the National Health Insurance Act— was met with the new kind of opposition. It was open to some objections; the friendly societies were apprehensive of its effect upon their own finances ; the actuarial calculations were not be yond criticism ; the Labour Party translated the "right to work" policy into an attack upon its contributory basis. But reason was lost in a violent newspaper campaign, which attempted to bring about a strike of the medical profession against the duties which the act would lay upon them, and actually succeeded in inducing a large meeting of respectable, and even important, women at the Albert Hall to pledge itself not to "lick stamps" to affix to the cards of insured persons. It was absurd, but it had its alarming side. The Government also set itself to fulfil the statutory conditions for placing Welsh Disestablishment and Irish Home Rule on the statute book by passing them through the re quisite number of sessions. They had other causes of anxiety. The hopes raised, in the first flush of the agreement with France, that our relations with all foreign Powers would grow happier, had waned. It had been becoming apparent that the exchange of visits between British and German municipalities, British and German journalists, and so on, were only superficially cordial; and even King Edward was able to maintain no more than a superficial friendliness in that quarter. In 1911 the Agadir crisis showed that Germany was far from consenting to that predomi nance of France in Morocco which Great Britain had recognized. Approaches to Russia made it rather appear that the end of isola tion meant taking a place in the grouping of Continental na tions. The launching of the "Dreadnought" in 1906, at first a source of pride as the originating of a new type of battleship vastly more powerful in speed and gunfire than anything afloat, had been seen to involve less flattering implications. If battle ships of this kind, battle-cruisers and submarines, were to replace the old fleets, then another country might start in a naval race more on a level with Great Britain than had before been possible. The subject had come into prominence in 1908, when it appeared that Lord Tweedmouth, then first lord of the Admiralty, had been in correspondence with the German emperor, on the latter's initia tive, on the subject of naval expenditure. Winston Churchill, who succeeded Lord Tweedmouth, made offers of a "naval holi day" which, however, met with no response. The whole matter was an uneasy background to an uneasy period.
But only a background; the British public during these years was more concerned with other aspects of public affairs. A rail way strike in the hot summer of 1911, though not complete, had held up railway traffic for several days, and created a new anxiety about the power and the purpose of Labour. Syndicalism was finding its way into England from France, the New Age voicing this policy; and the first Labour daily newspaper, the Daily Herald, appeared in this year. Trade union membership was increasing; it advanced from 2 millions in 1907 to 4 millions in 1913 (including those not affiliated to the Trade Union Congress). In 1912 the loss of the "Titanic" (q.v.), the biggest passenger ves sel yet launched, on her maiden voyage, struck people aghast ; and a strike of coal-miners showing as irreconcilable a temper on either side as the railway strike had shown, and, forcing parliament to pass a minimum wage bill for coal mines, raised spectres of what "direct action" might come to mean. There were worse spectres in the following year, when the huge sympathetic strike started in Dublin under James Larkin; and though the move ment did not spread to the unions in Great Britain, and the "Triple Alliance" of railwaymen, miners and transport workers, established early in 1914, made a subtle distinction between a "sympathetic strike," which it repudiated, and a simultaneous strike for the individual objects of each union, the sense of the threat to the community grew more alarming.
This is not the place for even a brief history of the war (see WORLD WAR) ; all that can be attempted is a sketch of the course of events in England and the reactions to them and to the fluctuations of the war in the national mind and temper. The actual moment of the declaration of war, Aug. 4, was in many ways fortunate. Aug. 3 had been a bank holiday; by a proclama tion prolonging the closing of the banks for three days and a "moratorium" period suspending for a month settlements in finance, the Government was able to prevent both panic with drawal of gold by individuals and panic measures in industry and business generally. Then again, the August bank holiday was habitually a time when Territorial troops were "in being" for training; with the least possible friction the Territorial troops could be mobilized, while the Expeditionary force was being trans ferred to France. Altogether the nation entered more smoothly and more unitedly upon war than could have been thought possi ble. It was satisfied with the immediate changes in the cabinet ; Lord Morley, John Burns and one or two others resigned, and the announcement that Lord Kitchener, at home as commander in-chief, had become secretary of State for war was thoroughly popular. He appealed immediately for volunteers, and, without much regard to his warning that the war would last four years, civilians poured in to the recruiting offices. The warning was taken seriously by hardly anyone ; all other considerations apart, how could a vast European war possibly be financed for more than a few months? The Germans themselves were looking to another swift campaign like that of 187o-71, and the first week of the war seemed to promise it. The news of the retreat from Mons and the anxious days of continued retreat looked as if Paris would be besieged almost before the war had really begun. Then came the turning aside of the German armies, the check at the Marne and the recovery of ground by the French and British troops. And as the hostile lines settled down for the winter, the first battles of Ypres (q.v.) showed the magnificent stuff of the regular army in a way which the public could understand better than it understood the excellence shown during the retreat.
More immediately steadying, perhaps, was the reconstruction of the Government in May; the Liberal ministry was replaced by a coalition including all the Conservative leaders ; and Lloyd George's daemonic energy was felt, even by those who had in the past regarded it as a national danger, to be in a good place at the head of the new Ministry of Munitions. Meanwhile, a new phase of the war had been launched by the Dardanelles expedi tion. The public, knowing little of the divided mind of the Gov ernment, in spite of Lord Fisher's resignation from the Admiralty, welcomed it as offering an attack upon the further side of the Central Powers, and as a move to keep the Balkan Powers from intervention.
The heavy casualties of the heroic landing, the drain of man power, steady and appalling, of the trench warfare in France, roused the nation to a new realization of its task. Compulsory military service was beginning to be discussed in June ; but one more effort of a different kind was to be made first, in the shape of the "Derby scheme," under which men registered in groups according to age and their married or unmarried condition, not for immediate enlistment, but for the calling up of groups as required. The sinking of the "Lusitania" on May 7 had aroused the public more than the loss of a good many merchant vessels (incidentally it was hoped that the number of American passen gers on board would stir the United States to action) ; but the summer did bring some concern for food supplies. Since early in the war the Government had more or less controlled sugar sup plies ; there was now an appeal to everyone who could grow any kind of food to do so, and flower-gardens and lawns gave way to vegetable beds. During the summer and autumn the first Zeppelin raids brought the war home in a new way. Camps and hutments were springing up, housing the first Canadian contin gents as well as the home recruit. (Australian and New Zealand contingents had been diverted on their way, to take part in the Dardanelles campaign, and South Africa was using her contin gents against the German settlements on that continent.) Women were throwing their power into the war ; all over the country they were taking the places of chauffeurs and grooms who had gone; they were working on the land in the place of farm labourers ; they were largely staffing the munition works; and they were establishing and working canteens in camps and factories. Britain was already a changed country when it could hear ministers talking in December of an army of four million men.
Yet, though by now the true character of the war was apparent, and Lord Kitchener's prophecy of four years was beginning to be understood, the great changes were being left, of set policy, as far as possible to the impulse of the nation itself. The belief was that British people rose to a crisis best with as little as possible of statutory compulsion. It was felt that a nation unaccustomed to the military conscription and the far more constant State ac tion in civil affairs under which Continental nations had lived, would suffer rather than gain by a sudden subjection to com pulsion. Not only would there be resentment that might become sullen; the effect of drastic State intervention might be to create nervousness and apprehension, instead of the confidence and self reliance which were needed. In every way, therefore, unusual methods were avoided. The Treasury had set itself to avoid them as far as possible. By steady increase of taxation, especially the income-tax and the duties on alcoholic liquors, and later by the imposition of the excess profits duty it forced up the revenue amazingly; and beyond that it relied during the early years upon votes of credit financed by advances from the banks, rather than upon the launching of any big public loans. The rapid and large increase of currency, which the inconvertible paper basis made possible, swelled banking figures to a point which enabled them to keep the Treasury's quiet policy going for some time. Equally the Government set itself to avoid conscription and food-ration ing, which began early in Germany. Throughout the war opinion on this policy was strongly divided, and to the end the British effort remained a mixture of wholly devoted volunteering, and a piece-meal kind of compulsion.
Twice in the first half of the year the public mind received sudden shocks. At the end of April, armed rebellion broke out in Dublin for a terrible week, followed by many executions on the spot, and months later by the trial and execution of Roger Case ment in August for high treason in securing German help for the rising. The rebellion was quite unexpected ; Birrell, the chief sec retary, acknowledged that the significance of a new influence at work in Ireland had been underestimated. The Home Rule Act had been placed upon the statute book soon after the outbreak of war, but to meet the protests of those who objected to ad vantage being taken of the abandonment of party strife, it had been accompanied by an act suspending its operation till after the war. Irish regiments had maintained all their old reputation; and little attention had been paid to the new movement of Sinn Fein, until the rebellion made clear how forcefully it had been working in detachment from the old political nationalism (see IRELAND : History) . The other shock came, very differently, in June, when Lord Kitchener, starting to visit the Russian front, was drowned by the mining of the cruiser in which he was travel ling. Accusations of treacherous betrayal of his plans lasted for years, so sharp was the effect on the public mind. A great deal of uneasiness was also caused by the one great naval affair of the war, the battle of Jutland (q.v.) on May 31; not all the power of the censorship could make it appear a victory. There was, indeed, as the year went on, a growing tendency to wild accusa tions. Members of the Government were charged with having treasonable sympathies ; Lord Haldane, whose reorganization of the military machine had done more than anything else to enable the country to take the first strain of the war, had had to resign from the Government, because much of his education had been in Germany ; others, especially Asquith, were charged with an over-tenderness for German prisoners of war. More and more loud, too, grew the complaints that in every direction the at tempts to make the nation put out all its strength were being evaded. Khaki was now everywhere, but it was said that it cov ered a multitude of shirkers. Conscientious objectors were in creasingly hounded. The tribunals had been interpreting exemp tion in such cases from military service to mean exemption from actual combatant service, and not to cover non-combatant enlist ment ; public opinion, in any case impatient of these exemptions, supported this view. But there were many conscientious objec tors who went much further than this ; some from deep religious conviction, like the stricter Quakers, and some from violent political opinions, like the extreme Labour men, refused any service connected with the prosecution of the war; and many of them were sent to prison.
Appeals to cut down luxury expenditure and to use food eco nomically, were felt to be so useless that the Government was pressed to introduce compulsory rationing. Labour was accused of putting its old quarrels in front of the national need in strik ing at such a time; another serious trouble in the south Wales coalfield in November led to the putting of coal-mines under the Defence of the Realm Act, with power for the Government to take them over if necessary. A man-power distribution board was set up in September, with promises of "combing out" all employ ment at home. Compulsory rationing was refused, but in Novem ber the appointment was announced of a food controller with wide powers; the submarine campaign was growing serious. The real response to all the dissatisfaction came in December when As quith, who had been peculiarly grossly attacked, resigned. Lloyd George became prime minister, with a "war cabinet" of four members—himself, Lord Curzon, Lord Milner and Arthur Henderson—and a Government that included three new minis tries—of labour, food and shipping—brought in "business men," and promised a universal national service scheme.
Every aspect of life was new, and yet incredibly accustomed. The armies were new, for the men of the old armies were nearly all dead or disabled, or in the higher command; their training was new; the officering was new; the speedy discovery of the terrible costliness of the war in the commissioned ranks had been met by the formation at home of officer cadet battalions to which men from the armies in France were steadily drafted for train ing; they had never known anything but the new fighting and the command of the new soldiers. Much that the old army valued might have gone; but the new armies understood their job.
There was in 1917 the feeling that the crisis of the war was at hand, especially with the first important news of the year, the great withdrawal of the Germans to the Hindenburg line. But for the rest of the year events conspired to make a strained fluctua tion of hopes. The capture of Vimy Ridge in April had been pre ceded in March by the Russian Revolution. The third battle of Ypres (q.v.) in July, and the capture of Hill 7o in August were followed by the Caporetto (q.v.) disaster to the Italian army; and the long dreadful struggle in the mud of Passchendaele in November was followed by Russia's withdrawal from the war in December. The main result at home was renewed agitation about manpower, and pressure upon the Government for a re-examina tion of discharged men, and for drastic "combing out" of the civil service, of munition works and of other occupations where exemptions had been granted largely to "indispensables," as well as an equally drastic "combing out" of the non-combatant military organization in the back areas in France.
At home life was growing more painful in many ways ; yet sweeping measures of control were avoided, mainly with the idea that the less enforced restriction there was, the better for the moral of the "home front" ; fox-hunting was not abandoned till the spring of 1917, and racing not till later in the year. Thus, although the submarine menace was most alarming in April and May, only voluntary rationing was called for ; one special ground for anxiety was that the last potato crop had been very bad. The Germans had announced an "unrestricted" submarine campaign; it was answered by an amazing display of ingenuity and undaunted courage in the "Q ship" anti-submarine campaign. And above all it turned the scale in America ; the United States declared war, and began to muster and train contingents on the new war scale of millions. Without going as far as a full imposition of rationing, the Government steadily increased their control of purchasing and prices. But this was largely due to a violent out burst of complaint about "profiteering." It was not till long after the war that people began to understand that an enormous increase in currency was bound to make high prices, and to en rich many people; at the moment it was all taken as a preying upon the nation's necessities. At any rate, it helped to finance the war ; a loan put out in January was subscribed to over a thousand millions ; and there was another huge one in October ; while excess profits duty and the income-tax were forced up every year. This kind of extensive and heavy diversion to the State of the profits of commerce and industry was seen by Labour leaders as a lesson and an actual hope for the future. And similar hopes appeared in many directions. The control of licensing and the drink traffic ; the energetic organization of housing and welfare schemes in munition areas; the reorganization of the railways under Government control ; the semi-nationalization of mining and industry ; even such a purely internal development as the banking fusions which, in 1917 and 1918, produced the "Big Five," so prominent in the post-war financial world—all this seemed to indicate that the nation might have finished with much ill-organization. An economic conference of the Allies in Paris in June 1916 had outlined large schemes for future co operation. And in quite a different way, imperialism was becom ing a new thing, not only by the presence of great contingents of colonial troops, but by the activities in England, first of W. M. Hughes, the prime minister of Australia, and then of Gen. Smuts, the latter being made a member of the war cabinet in June 1917.
There were several bad strikes during the year—of munition workers at Barrow in March, of engineers in Lancashire in May, of railwaymen in November—partly on "dilution" quarrels, partly on wage disputes. Irish affairs were dispiriting; all at tempts to make a modus vivendi during the suspension of the Home Rule Act broke down, and there was a growing sense of the control of opinion in Ireland passing from the old leaders to the new Sinn Fein movement. Parliament, indeed, set itself to some constructive work, with a large franchise bill establishing virtually adult suffrage, and, at last, women's suffrage (q.v.). A useful education bill was passed. During the summer, raids by squadrons of German aeroplanes, at first on moonlit nights, and then in broad daylight, packed the "tube" railways with refugees, and led to complaints of the insufficient defence of London.
With the sense of the crisis for the armies, the people at home passed under much more restriction. Restaurants and theatres were obliged to close early ; the purchase of clothing was regu lated; there was restriction of railway travelling; and finally, in July, extended rationing, which now included sugar, butter, mar garine, lard, butcher's meat and bacon. These restrictions (though nothing in comparison to the sufferings in Germany) were seri ous and were causing much anxiety about the children growing up in such conditions, most of all, of course, the children of the homes where poverty was added to rationing. National food kitchens had been opened and were doing much good ; rations gave the best results where they could be used in bulk; and the fat ration especially went furthest in this way; so that private individuals began to learn, here and there, to "pool" their prepara tion of meals. Another service bill called out men up to so years of age; the "comb-out" required more and more elderly men to fill up the non-combatant parts of the service ; and with this last calling-up it became apparent that there was only the "comb-out" to depend upon now for supplying the wastage of the trenches.
Some events of the summer provoked the question whether even now the country was wholeheartedly at war. The news of another violent German effort in July, this time farther south, which was causing again an alarming withdrawal of the Allies, coincided with the outbreak of another considerable strike in munition works at Coventry, which had spread to Birmingham and into Yorkshire, before the Government's threat to draft the strikers into the army caused it to collapse. There were more strikes in August, including the astounding spectacle of the Metropolitan Police Force itself on strike, for bonus pay, to meet war prices, and for recognition of their right to form a union. Luckily there was a kind of substitute force available. From early in the war men over military age had all over the country been doing excel lent service as special constables; and as the needs of the army grew heavier, this force was more and more highly organized and used. It did splendid work in times of air-raid, and gave a new meaning and status to the special constable.
The contrast is worth making ; for there is this last word to be said in an attempt to depict the mind of Great Britain during this period. Throughout the war there had been, on the whole, a wonderful sense of unity between those at home and those in the fighting forces. Leave had been as well organized and probably as generous as was possible ; the postal service had been little short of marvellous. Experience had been shared, as far as it could be. But shared in the real sense it could not be. What "the front" really was, only those who were there knew, or ever will know. And what "home" really was, in the agony and the blind waiting, waiting, waiting, only those who lived through time that was timeless knew, or ever will know. With all the unity there remained a deep unbridgeable gulf. The men of the armies would not have bridged it if they could. They lived their own heroic lives and died their own heroic deaths.