The efforts to compose the Home Rule conflict were not entirely successful (_post_, p. 203); but less menacing differences were settled or suspended at once. The contest in the London building trade, which had been somewhat mitigated in July by sectional submissions on the part of several of the Trade Unions concerned, was settled on August 6 by the abandonment of the project of a general lock-out by the masters, and the withdrawal on the part of the men of their refusal to work with non-unionists; and settlements were also effected of a dockers' strike at Liverpool, of various sectional railway disputes, and of a coal strike in South Wales, which for a day or two had seemed likely to interfere with the supply of coal for the Fleet. Political propaganda, too, was formally suspended, notably by the Women's National Liberal Association and the Land Union; and the appointment of Earl Kitchener as a non-political War Minister was followed by rumours of the impending establishment of a coalition Government. The only approach made to this, however, consisted in the invitations to Mr. Austen Chamberlain, Mr. Long, Mr. F. E. Smith, and other Unionist leaders, to give their counsel and assistance in various departments to the Government; and they accepted cordially. A general amnesty was announced (Aug. 11) both for suffragist prisoners and for persons convicted of offences in connexion with industrial disturbances; and both the non-militant and the militant groups of the suffrage societies provisionally abandoned their agitation (though a few of the militants made a scene at the Home Office on August 27), and organised themselves for the relief, in various ways, of the women and children sufferers by the war. Admirable work was done in these directions by the National Union of Women's Suffrage Societies, and by the Women's Emergency Corps; and Miss Christabel Pankhurst, on her return from Paris a little later, repaid the Government by speaking at meetings designed to encourage recruiting for the "new Army."