Looking back on this clause now, with all the excellent results that have flowed from it,[53] it is clear that it represented the merest justice to the British trader. The Tariff Reformers congratulated Mr. Lloyd George on conversion; the Free Traders reproached him for desertion. Neither had any leg to stand on. The mere fact of granting patents is, in a sense, a form of protection for the patentee. But to ask that a nation should grant so great a privilege in order that it should be used against its own citizens is surely the very ecstasy of “freedom.” Then, just before leaving the Board of Trade, he finally settled up the Port of London by buying out the Dock Companies. There again he arranged the terms of purchase by bargaining before he brought in his Bill. One company stood out. He went straight on without that company. It was awkward; but it would have been fatal to show weakness. He was just about to move the Second Reading of the Bill, leaving that company out, when the announcement of its agreement to his terms was brought to him in his room at the House of Commons before he went in to the Committee. Thus a problem was settled which had defied several Governments and paralysed London as a port. “Not an ideal way of legislating,” it will be said. Certainly not. Nor was then our Parliament an ideal legislative machine. In a speech made at Liverpool on May 24th, 1906, Mr. Lloyd George described how the menace of the Lords then threw its shadow over all Liberal policy. He told how, in framing every Bill, the Cabinet, even before the Bill was drafted, had to take the attitude of the Upper Chamber into consideration. This was, in fact, still his own governing consideration in these Board of Trade measures. He was soon to show that he was quite ready to fight the Lords when it seemed to him a necessary stroke of high policy. But he did not believe in half-defiances. So he modelled these Board of Trade Bills to pass by agreement. But, after all, it was not in law-making so much as in administration that he was destined to make his highest reputation at the Board of Trade. It was not only that he sent into every tentacle of the great organism a new vigour and intensity of purpose; it was also that he showed in a very high degree a genius for conciliation in great labour disputes. It was in the late autumn of 1907 that there came to him the great test of the threatened Railway Strike. He had just achieved in October a very surprising triumph of peace-making at the Welsh Convention summoned at Cardiff to denounce him for some supposed weakening on Welsh Disestablishment. They were just preparing to sacrifice him with his own borrowed weapons when he appeared in the midst of them, claimed to speak, and won them over to spare him.