ment with the general course of the spring
fighting to a head. By May 19th the Ministry which had declared the war
and so far conducted it, had disappeared; a National or Coalition
Ministry, drawn from the leading men of both parties, reigned in its
stead. The statement made by Mr. Asquith, as late, alack, as April 20,
1915, that there was "no truth in the statement" that our efforts at the
front "were being crippled or at any rate hampered" by want of ammunition,
was seen almost immediately, in the bitter light of events, to be due to
some fatal misconceptions, or misjudgments, on the part of those informing
the Prime Minister, which the nation in its own interests and those of its
allies, could only peremptorily sweep away. A new Ministry was
created--the Ministry of Munitions, and Mr. Lloyd George was placed at its
head.

The work that Mr. Lloyd George and his Ministry--now employing vast new
buildings, and a staff running into thousands--have done since June, 1915,
is nothing less than colossal. Much no doubt had been done earlier for
which the new Ministry has perhaps unjustly got the credit, and not all
has been smooth sailing since. One hears, of course, criticism and
complaints. What vast and effective stir, for a great end, was ever made
in the world without them?

Mr. Lloyd George has incurred a certain amount of unpopularity among the
working classes, who formerly adored him. In my belief he has incurred it
for the country's sake, and those sections of the working class who have
smarted under his criticisms most bitterly will forgive him when the time
comes. In his passionate determination to _get the thing done_, he has
sometimes let his theme--of the national need, and the insignificance of
all things else in comparison with it--carry him into a vehemence which
the workmen have resented, and which foreign or neutral countries have
misunderstood.

He found in his path, which was also the nation's path, three great
foes--drunkenness, the old envenomed quarrel between employer and
employed, and that deep-rooted industrial conservatism of England, which
shows itself on the one hand in the trade-union customs and restrictions
of the working class, built up, as they hold, through long years, for the
protection of their own standards of life, and, on the other, in the
slowness of many of the smaller English employers (I am astonished,
however, at the notable exceptions everywhere!) to realise new needs and
proc