he himself moved, on Aug. 5, the day after war had begun, the first vote of credit for 100,000,000, maintaining that " the war has been forced upon us." The fight was, first, to fulfil a solemn international obligation; secondly, to vindicate the principle that small nationalities were not to be crushed, in defiance of international good faith, by the arbitrary will of a strong and overmastering power. No nation, he said, ever entered into a great struggle with a clearer conscience and a stronger conviction that it was fighting for principles vital to the civilized world.
In response to a public demand, peremptorily voiced in the press, he now brought Lord Kitchener, who was on the point of starting back, after a brief visit home, to resume his duties as British agent in Egypt, into the Cabinet as Minister of War, surrendering to him the seals which he had held himself for over four months, and he gave him a wide discretion in conducting the war by land. The conduct of the war remained ultimately with the Cabinet, but its day-to-day direction was practically carried on by Mr. Asquith, Lord Kitchener, and Mr. Churchill, with the assistance of their technical advisers. As Prime Min- ister, too, Mr. Asquith must be accorded his full share in the important measures taken by the Cabinet at this time, such as the financial moratorium, the prompt despatch of the expedition- ary force, the enrolment of Kitchener's army, the glad acceptance of colonial help, the decision to bring over native troops from India, and the Defence of the Realm Act. He, however, strained his relations with the Unionists by determining to pass the Home Rule and Welsh Disestablishment bills under the Parlia- ment Act, only providing that neither should come into effect till after the war, and that special provision should be made for Ulster, which should in no circumstances be coerced. He under- took a series of speeches in the autumn, notable alike for patriotic vigour and for lofty eloquence, in order to educate the nation as regards the objects and necessity of the war, and to stimulate re- cruiting. At the Guildhall on Sept. 4 he said that this was not merely a material but a spiritual conflict, and recalled how Eng- land had in the Napoleonic Wars responded to Pitt's dying appeal to her to save Europe by her example. At Edinburgh, on Sept. 18, he said that the German creed of material force was a pur- blind philosophy, and that, while the British task might take months or years, the economic, monetary, and military and naval position was encouraging. At Dublin, on Sept. 25, he appealed to Ireland to take her due share in a war which was being fought in the interests of small nations. At Cardiff, on Oct. 2, he revealed the fact that, in 1912, the Cabinet had formal- ly notified the German Government that Great Britain would " neither make nor join in any unprovoked attack on Germany," but that Germany had demanded in response a British pledge of absolute neutrality if she were engaged in war a pledge which, of course, Britain could not possibly give. He finished up this series of orations by a resolute speech at Guildhall on Lord Mayor's day; when he told the city that it would be a long-drawn- out struggle, but that England would not sheathe the sword until Belgium had recovered all and more than all that she had sacrificed, until France was adequately secured against the menace of aggression, until the rights of the smaller nationalities were placed on an unassailable foundation, until the military dominion of Prussia was fully and finally destroyed. On Nov. 25 he formed a war council, consisting of the Chancellor of the Exchequer, the Foreign Secretary, the Indian Secretary and Lord Haldane, in addition to Lord Kitchener, Mr. Churchill, and himself; but the main responsibility still rested on the last three, and the naval and military experts attended in a some- what undefined position.
As the fervour of the early months of the war died away, many troublesome questions embarrassed Mr. Asquith and his Government. Besides the anxious problem of the Dardanelles expedition, he had to consider whether the system of compulsory service, hateful to the traditions of the Liberal party, had not become inevitable; how to eradicate spying, and to what extent to intern aliens; how to deal with the problem of the liquor trade and traffic, which seriously interfered with necessary production;
how to prevent the occurrence during war of industrial disputes, which frequently broke out in the first half of 1915. Drink and strikes had a close bearing on the problem which became specially urgent in April, the absolute necessity of an enormous increase in munitions of war. The Times revealed the perilous shortage at the front; Mr. Lloyd George dilated upon it in the House; but Mr. Asquith, in a speech at Newcastle-on-Tyne on April 30, which was mainly devoted to emphasizing the importance of materiel in this war and to encouraging miners, shipbuilders, engineers, iron workers, and dockers to further efforts, raised a storm of criticism by denying that the operations in the field had been crippled because of a want of ammunition.
The uneasiness in the country immediately increased, and there was a pronounced demand for broadening the basis of Government. On May 12 Mr. Asquith repudiated the idea that any such step was in contemplation; but a week later, the quarrel which had developed between Mr. Churchill and Lord Fisher at the Admiralty convinced him that there must be a change, and he invited the Unionists, the Labour party, and the leaders of the two Irish parties to join him in office, by forming a Coali- tion Ministry. From all whom he invited, but Mr. Redmond, he received acceptances, and he was able to find places in his new Cabinet for them without excluding any important previous colleague of his own, except Lord Haldane, whose German af- finities had offended public opinion. He gained the services of many powerful men among the Unionists Mr. Bonar Law, Lord Lansdowne, Mr. Balfour, Lord Curzon, Mr. Chamberlain, Mr. Long, Mr. F. E. Smith, Lord Robert Cecil, Lord Selborne; of Mr. Henderson and Mr. Brace from the Labour party; and of Sir Edward Carson, the Ulster leader. But he kept the pre- miership in his own hands, and retained Sir Edward Grey at the Foreign Office, and Lord Kitchener at the War Office. He explained his decision in the House of Commons in these words:
What I came to think was needed, was such a broadening of the basis of the Government as would take away from it even the sem- blance of a one-sided or party character, and would demonstrate beyond the possibility of doubt, not only to our own people but to the whole world, that after nearly a year of war, with all its fluctua- tions and vicissitudes, the British people were more resolute than ever, with one heart and one purpose, to obliterate all distinctions and unite every personal and political as well as every moral and material force in the prosecution of their cause.
He emphasized the facts (i) that in the Coalition no surrender was implied of convictions on either side; (2) that there was no change in national policy, which was " to pursue this war at any cost to a victorious issue." His Coalition Government made a good start. He constituted a new Ministry of Munitions, pre- sided over by Mr. Lloyd George, who had by this time impressed the public as being the most resolute and determined of his col- leagues; he and his Cabinet issued a great war loan; they intro- duced a measure for national registration; they imposed an enormously increased taxation; and there was established in the Cabinet a system of pooling salaries, so that every minister should receive the same amount. In June Mr. Asquith paid a four days' visit to the British front in France; and in July he attended a conference at Calais in which British statesmen and generals met French statesmen and generals in order to coordi- nate Allied action the first of many conferences of the kind. On the adjournment of Parliament on July 28 he said that the war had become a struggle of endurance.
The formation of the Coalition did not stem the agitation for compulsory service; and in the autumn Mr. Asquith 's Govern- ment appointed Lord Derby director of recruiting, in the hope that his energy would produce such satisfactory results as to obviate the necessity of resorting to compulsion. But Mr. Asquith stated that, if Lord Derby failed to bring in sufficient single men, he would come to the House without any hesitation and recommend some form of legal obligation. Lord Derby had a considerable but not an adequate success; and Mr. As- quith was driven to introduce compulsion in 1916, at first in a somewhat modified form, but later as universally applicable to males between the ages of 18 and 41. These measures caused the resignation of Sir John Simon, the Home Secretary. This
