The Board of Trade had withered under the shadow of the great fiscal deadlock of the previous three years (1903-6). Poised between two theories of commerce, it had lingered in the “doldrums,” like a ship waiting for a wind. Thus there awaited in the pigeon-holes of the office a great number of untouched and unfinished projects, loose ends of legislation, belated steps towards giving method and authority to the powers of that great Department. For the Board of Trade reflected in every branch of its administrative powers the spirit of the age in which it had grown up—the timid, tentative, apologetic touch of the nineteenth-century administrator. The scope of its powers, indeed, bulked vast and tremendous—extending from bankrupt firms at one end to shipping, railways, and labour at the other; but over all these branches of national life its sway was mild and illusive. The very Consuls who control our trade abroad were appointed and controlled by another Department.[50] The Labour Department, founded in a spasm of progress, was still mainly advisory. British railways had to be supplicated rather than controlled. The great shipping interests had discovered new sea-ways through obsolete laws. Mr. Lloyd George soon realised the opportunity that lay to his hand. The time had come to give to the Board of Trade a new grasp and stretch of authority. New laws must be passed. But also, and even more important, there must be a new spirit in the administration of the laws that existed. He did not act in a hurry. He spent his first weeks in a thorough study of the work of the Board. He appeared little in Parliament. He took the sensible course of first learning from the able officials of the Board the general outlines of its functions and problems. Then, after some months, he began to legislate; but, before bringing in his Bills, he developed what was then a new system of preparation and anticipation. It had been too often the custom of Ministers in such Departments as the Board of Trade to frame Bills without consulting the interests concerned. Here was the truly “bureaucratic” spirit of the olden days—to assume that the Civil Service must of necessity know better than the public about their own business—to enforce on great private interests measures as to which they had never been asked their opinions, to wait for the inevitable complaints and grievances until it was too late to remedy them without public confessions of ignorance and folly. Such methods have been responsible for many bad laws and for many parliamentary disasters.