It has been said that the department changed its domicile several times; it also changed its constitution and title. When Lord Robert Cecil was appointed Minister of Blockade, the Trade Clearing House severed its connection with Lord Emmott's War Trade Department and became the War Trade Intelligence Department, under Lord Robert and in conjunction with such blockade organisations as the Contraband Committee and the Foreign Trade Department. At the end of the war, its decomposing remains were buried under the Department of Overseas Trade. The task of preliminary organisation was not made easier by the uncertainty into which all government offices were plunged whenever a section of the press proclaimed that every department was sheltering companies of potential recruits. This is not the place to engage in a general discussion of the policy or the morality of conscription as imposed, without reference to the constituencies, on a country which, six years earlier, had supported a liberal government in its contest with the House of Lords. The constitutionalists may object that such a course made mock of representative government; the idealist may feel that the achievement of the voluntary system in the first eighteen months of the war was the greatest in English history and that no victory is worth a press-gang; and every critic who is not also a militarist will wonder how the army, alone of the services which require to draw from the limited common reservoir of man-power, is allowed to say that it can fix no maximum but requires all the men that it can get and then still more. These are general reflections on compulsory service; and, as it had been imposed before the summer of 1916, criticism was then only relevant when directed to the method of its application. If industry was kept in the same uncertainty as the government service, it is amazing that industry was not destroyed. The first principle of applied conscription seemed to be that there were no principles: the system of one day was discarded the next; and no permanent arrangement of work was secure from the risk that a man exempted on Monday would be called up on Monday week. All men of military age were periodically reviewed and subjected to medical reexamination; apart from the waste of time to all concerned and the occasional incivility of medical boards which attributed physical defects to temperamental malice, no personal hardship was involved at first, though, when the doctors were encouraged to pass as fit for general service a man who had with difficulty qualified for "sedentary duty at home," the civil service too often lost a valuable worker in presenting to the army a confirmed invalid. The hardship fell rather on those who were responsible for organising the work without being sure who would be left to do it.