In the conduct of domestic policy a change was brought
about in 1906 by the defeat of the Conservative Govern-
ment which had conducted the Boer War, and the return
of the Liberals to power, 376 strong, with 54 Labour
members at their back, in place of two Labour members
when the century began. Sir Henry Campbell-Banner-
man, the new Premier, had declared before the General
Election, that twelve millions of the population of Great
Britain were in the grip of perpetual poverty and on the
verge of hunger. In an attempt to mitigate, if not to
remedy, this state of things, the Liberals passed a num-
ber of measures of a Socialistic character -- Workmen's
Compensation Act ( 1906), Small Holdings Act ( 1907),
Old Age Pensions ( 1908), National Insurance Act ( 1911),
Minimum Wage Act ( 1912). Expenditure, chiefly for so-
cial services, rose from 149 million pounds to 209 millions
before the War, and has increased enormously since.
Lloyd George, who had sponsored the National Insurance
Act, speaking at Glasgow on Scottish Land Reform not
long before the outbreak of the Great War, said: "You
have hundreds of thousands of men working unceasingly
for wages that barely bring them enough bread to keep
themselves and their families above privation. Generation
after generation they see their children wither before their
eyes for lack of air, light, and space, which is denied them
by men who have square miles of it for their own use.
Take our cities, the great cities of a great Empire. Right
in the heart of them everywhere you have ugly quagmires
of human misery, seething, rotting, at last fermenting. We
pass them by every day on our way to our comfortable
homes. We forget that divine justice never passed by a
great wrong. You can hear, carried by the breezes from
the north, the south, the east, and the west, ominous
rumbling. The chariot's of retribution are drawing nigh.

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