The sequel, though not, of course, the immediate result of King George’s total abstinence proclamation, was the outbreak of the South Wales miners’ dispute in full fury a few weeks later. Joint conference between the Federation, the owners and the Government ended in hopeless deadlock. The miners stubbornly refused to accept the principle of compulsory arbitration provided by Lloyd-George’s now enacted Munitions Law. Two hundred thousand men stopped work. Threats to enforce the punitive provisions of the law did not terrify them. The establishment in Wales and Monmouthshire of a "Munitions Tribunal," before which they could be haled, only made them more defiant. In London one heard irresponsible mutterings that "a few leaders of the Federation" might usefully be shot, and it was suggested that if England were Germany, they would be. More than one voice advocated lynching "a few owners," too. The country waited dutifully for the Government to employ the "drastic powers" it had arrogated to itself only a few short weeks before. Instead of anything so heroic, it flung Lloyd-George into the breach. It sent him to South Wales, and in his entourage went Arthur Henderson, the new Labor member of the Cabinet, and Mr. Runciman, the President of the Board of Trade (the government department which deals with industry). The little Welshman drew forth from his inexhaustible arsenal the weapon he seldom unsheathes in vain--his persuasively silver tongue. New terms were drawn up between the miners and the colliery owners. The men got about everything they wanted. "Fill the bunkers," Lloyd-George cried to them amid their cheers in a farewell speech at Cardiff. "It means defense. It means protection. It means an inviolate Britain." The miners went back to work. But peace had been dearly bought by the Government. It had not dared to enforce the coercive paragraphs of the vaunted Munitions Law. The Act, it was now painfully evident, might do very well to discipline a handful of "shirking-men" at some shell works or shipyard, but to invoke its machinery to browbeat two hundred thousand organized miners was manifestly a horse of a different color. And one which the British Government was not prepared to back. Industrial Conscription was magnificent in theory. In its first great test in practise it had proved to be fire with which the authorities preferred not to play. Some one (I think it was Price Collier) called England the Land of Compromise. The Welsh miners seem to have shown that he was right.