In conversation he first expressed the idea of social insurance by a parallel from the Canadian farmer who insures his wheat against early winter frosts. That was the image in which he expressed his sense of the vast power of the modern State to build up a properly organised system of individual security. Having once conceived this idea, the various benefits came to him in waves of compassion—sickness, invalidity, maternity, consumption. He worked all these benefits out from his own experience of the sorrows of the poor. “I want to make the little stranger welcome,” he said one day, talking about the maternity benefit. “It is horrible to think that he should come trailing clouds of trouble instead of ‘clouds of glory.’” The story of the consumptive benefits is interesting. He had not felt the need of this benefit until one night he read through a very powerful medical work describing the ravages of consumption in modern Britain. The extent of the evil at once fully dawned on him. He came down in the morning with his mind fully made up. He went straight to the Treasury, called together his experts, told them to put aside £1,500,000 to fight consumption,[143] and so created that famous sanatorium benefit which is still proving only the first step towards removing a gigantic evil. He faced all these familiar troubles of modern life with a “divine discontent” new to modern men. We all knew these things; but most of us had become so familiar with them that our anger was blunted. Our reforming temper had grown tired and stale. But this Welshman approached the matter with some of the ardour of the revivalist. He would not accept the ordinary excuses; he believed these evils to be curable. Fresh from the Welsh hills, he flamed with a new surprise at the power of poverty over modern civilisation. He showed some of the ingenuous dismay of a surprised Gotama emerging from his garden. He realised that private efforts had been tried and found inadequate. What he saw with a flash was that the State alone could cope with the evils produced by the State; the Government must become the parent and no longer the stepmother of its own children. Once he realised this idea he was eager to carry it into effect. He was passing from one great effort to another—from the Insurance Act to the Land Campaign—when the Great War burst upon him. Then the very elements of civilisation had to be defended against an even greater peril. It is recorded that the rebuilders of the Temple had to build every one with “his sword girded by his side.”[144] There must have been times when they had to lay down the trowel entirely and work with the sword alone. Such a time came to Mr. Lloyd George in 1914; the trowel was only laid down. Now it is being taken up again.