– the young solicitor was doing well enough to marry Margaret Owen, who belonged to a prosperous yeoman family just outside Criccieth. The marriage was happy and helpful.
Lloyd George’s boyhood was cast in the great days of the Welsh national revival, which for tactical reasons looked to the Liberal rather than to the Conservative Party. Always a Nationalist and a Democrat, in this respect a typical Welshman, he had no part in the traditions of either party, and his politics were rooted in incidents and accidents of the early struggles of Welsh Nationalism. He said later in life that the chapel was his secondary school and university, and with the sap of the new national life rising in its services and in its institutions it was one not to be despised. ‘How the past holds you here!’ he exclaimed when he visited Oxford after the South African War, ‘I am glad I never came here.’
At an early age, when most boys are content to reflect the commonplaces of their school-books, he was the Hampden of the village politics. At 18 he was writing over the name ‘Brutus’ in a local newspaper articles showing a curious detachment of political judgment, but inclining strongly to the Radical wing of the Liberals. Early in 1886 he was on the first Irish Home Rule platform at Festiniog, and greatly impressed Michael Davitt by his speech. Two years later he was adopted as the Liberal candidate for Caernarvon Boroughs, and in 1890 was elected at a by-election by a narrow majority.
He did not speak frequently, and at first men noted chiefly the pleasant softness of his voice and his turn for personal quips. It was a platform speech on Welsh Disestablishment at the Metropolitan Tabernacle that first made him famous outside Wales, but he wisely stuck to his Parliamentary work, and presently became the most active among the Welsh Parliamentary rebels. He made an unsuccessful effort to create an independent Welsh Nationalist Party, with an organization of its own, and he used every device of the mutinous Parliamentarian to force the Rosebery Government to bring in a Welsh Disestablishment Bill and pass it through the Commons.
South African War
After the cordite vote of 1895, when the Liberal Government was defeated by a chance vote on the insufficiency of small-arm ammunition, the Liberals were in opposition for 10 years. Up to then a Welsh Nationalist, hardly interested in party controversy except in so far as it served Wales, Lloyd George in the 1896 Parliament became the leader of the Left Wing Liberals. Foiled in his ambition to be the Parnell of all Wales, he now threw himself with ardour into English politics. He opposed the Agricultural Rates Bill with such vigour that he got himself suspended. This was the opposition of the peasant, ‘cottage-bred’ man to the landlord who, he alleged, was subsidized by this measure.
Local feeling had run very high in his election in 1892 and 1895, but his resistance to the South African War made him the most unpopular man in the country. He conducted a campaign for the conclusion of peace, and it was almost the rule for him to have his meetings broken up. But the worst riot, and one which brought him within peril of his life, was that in Birmingham in the week before Christmas, 1901, from which he only escaped under escort by dressing in the uniform of a policeman. Yet it may be doubted whether he was ever so thoroughly happy as he was at this period of his life. He took the risks quite deliberately, believing that he was right; and he had his reward in the reputation for courage and constancy acquired at this time.
The end of the South African War marked also the end of the long period during which he had bothered or opposed his own party almost as much as their rivals. The Conservative Education Bill of 1902 gave him his first real chance to emerge as a leader of the whole Liberal Party. The Bill, which proposed to give public assistance to all voluntary schools, whether sectarian or not, offended the cardinal principle of the Nonconformists that denominational teaching should not be fostered by the State, and rallied practically all Liberals against the principle of granting public funds without imposing public control. He had full scope for his gifts of industry and oratory during every stage of the Bill, and he used them to such purpose that he won a tribute during the closing stages from Balfour himself. His efforts during 1902 procured for him a position and reputation which made his inclusion in the next Liberal Government certain.
From 1906, when the Liberals came into power, he held office continuously for more than 15 eventful years. His conduct of the Board of Trade, to which office he was appointed in 1906, was a complete surprise to all his old enemies who knew him only by his agitation in the South African War and expected to find him an intransigent, unpractical extremist. On the contrary, he was accessible to argument, ingenious in compromise, and much more independent of his officials than most Ministers. Not only was he ready to hear what the interests affected had to say on a measure that he was preparing, but he made it a practice – and here his procedure was quite original – himself to seek them out, call them in conference, and embody their criticisms, if he thought them valid, while the measure was still in the drafting stage. In this way he not only secured the more rapid passage of Bills through Parliament, but when they became law he had the cooperation of the interests affected in making them a success.
The Merchant Shipping Act, the Port of London Act, and the Patents Act (which, by the way, offended the strait-laced free-traders) were all remarkable products of this new method of legislation, which completely broke with bureaucratic tradition. Broadly, it would probably be true to say that he always had an imperfect sympathy with the orthodox Civil Service habit of mind, and, while he relied on it to administer existing law, he despaired of its giving him new ideas and looked elsewhere for them. Here was the germ of what was later known as the new bureaucracy. While he was at the Board of Trade, too, he showed his ingenuity as a mediator by settling the railway strike of 1907. His industrial settlements, however, had a way of being opportunist rather than permanent. The loss of his eldest daughter a few weeks after the strike ended was a sore grief to him.
Chancellor of the Exchequer
The 1909 Budget
In 1908 Campbell-Bannerman died. Asquith succeeded him as Prime Minister and was succeeded as Chancellor of the Exchequer by Lloyd George. At this time, and for some years later, Lloyd George was in very close association with Mr Winston Churchill. Mr Churchill, who succeeded Lloyd George at the Board of Trade, contributed a minimum wage in sweated industries, a weekly half-holiday for shop workers, and the Labour Exchanges. Lloyd George, on going to the Treasury, found an Old Age Pensions Bill already drafted by his predecessor, and after he had carried this through he turned his thought towards schemes of national insurance against sickness and unemployment, and visited Germany in the autumn of 1908 to study the German insurance system. The combination in one pair of hands of responsibility for national finance and of directing a vigorous policy of social reform was unique.
His first Budget, brought in on April 29, 1909, was described by its author as a ‘war budget’, the war being against poverty and squalor, and it dominated politics for the next two years. The speech in which it was introduced was the longest and one of the least successful that he ever made, and with its central idea of taxing the increment on land values, or at any rate with the machinery for doing this, his advisers at the Treasury are believed to have been in very imperfect sympathy, and the Bill was very badly pulled about during the eight months of unclosured debate that it consumed in passing through the Commons. Fierce as was the controversy in the Commons, it was still fiercer in the country, and rarely in our modern politics have such hard words been used on both sides. A speech at Limehouse, made by Lloyd George in July which added a new verb to the English language, is probably the best statement of his case; another at Newcastle in November described the proposals as fraught with ‘rare and refreshing fruit for the parched lips of the multitude’.
In invective and abuse Lloyd George was surpassed by his critics, and future generations re-reading the speeches of 1909 will marvel that so much sound and fury should have been generated over taxes whose yield never approached the cost of collection and which disappeared almost unregretted 10 years later. Lloyd George undoubtedly thought that the country was with him, and when the Lords threw out the Finance Bill he is alleged to have exclaimed: ‘I have them now.’ But the comparatively small majority of 124 at the first election of 1910 was almost equivalent to a defeat, for the Liberals had lost 115 seats, or 230 votes.
Leaders’ Conference
This election had a profound effect on his future. Perhaps