WAR MEMOIRS OF DAVID LLOYD GEORGE 1917

PROBLEMS OF LABOUR UNREST 185
International with a view to controlling the peace settlement,
was rejected by 1,498,000 to 696,000 votes.
The majority of workers were opposed to any weakening
of the national unity or authority. But there was a real
danger that the hardships, anomalies and annoyances of
the times might be worked up by trouble-makers to wear
down their sense of patriotic duty. Some of their grievances
might be trivial; but a succession of pinpricks can be more
exasperating than a violent blow. Information was reaching
me from a different quarter about the growth of industrial
discontent. The late Master of Balliol, A. L. Smith, who
was very much in touch with Labour, wrote warningly to
one of the Ministers on the subject of working-class discontent,
and said of the men from whom he had gleaned his
information:
They are men with exceptional opportunities of judging, and
none of them are alarmists, and all deeply uneasy about the situation.
"A spark may make an explosion" as they put it. "Neither
class knows how angry the other is."
Meantime the talk about following the example of Russia is
being heard everywhere. All agree that the right man sent down
at once on the spot to hear both sides and give some real guarantee
and not mere promises would settle matters.
Another correspondent, a prominent business man, wrote
to one of my ministerial colleagues about the prevalent unrest,
stating in the course of his letter:
At the present moment a very large number, if not the majority
of the firms who are working for the Ministry of Munitions
are seething with discontent. . . .
When Mr. Lloyd George first instituted the Ministry of Munitions,
he stated that it was to be a Ministry without red tape, and
the success of the Department in its early days was extraordinary.
Every contractor was intent only on giving his best, and one of the
marvels of the War was the wonderful response and the rapidly in-