306 ENGLISH SAGA

on the unimaginative slogan of Safety First, asked for a renewal
of its mandate, it was found it had forfeited the confidence of the
country. The change of rulers was not based on reason so much
as on the human feeling that there was more suffering in Britain
than flesh and blood should be asked to bear.

Yet the Socialists, who again took office with unofficial
Liberal support, could do no more than the Conservatives to
alleviate that suffering. In fact, through no fault of their own,
they were able to do far less. In the autumn of 1929 a series of
crashes on the New York Stock Exchange were followed by a
failure of credit from one end of Europe to the other. The great
world economic crisis or trade blizzard began. It was grimmer
and bigger than any that had ever happened. By the
autumn of 1931, unemployment in Britain was approaching
3,000,000. In the same month, the government's unbalanced
borrowings to meet the deficit on the Unemployment Insurance
Fund precipitated a panic among foreign depositors and an
incipient flight from the pound. Amid much confused bandying
of figures and waving of depreciated pound notes, and a wholly
irrational but rather moving recrudescence of patriotic feeling,
a hastily-formed coalition government appealed to the country
for a "doctor's mandate** to solve the economic ills under which
its people were suffering. It received it with a majority un-
precedented in British electoral history. The Socialist and former
pacifist Prime Minister, who had abandoned his Party at the
dictates of his conscience and the Bank of England, was returned
to power with a following of 556 members, 472 of whom were
Tories.

The new government made little impression on the un-
employment figures at first, which, true to the uncontrollable
laws which seemed to govern world trade, continued to rise
gently until 1933. Thereafter they fell substantially for three
years, and then with the " National" government still in power,
showed unmistakable signs of rising again. Yet it would be
unfair to say that the administration's efforts, which were
painstaking if uninspired, had no effect on them at all.
Comprised in the doctor's mandate, though the purer and less
accommodating Liberal free traders who supported the coalition
subsequently denied it, was a carte blanch& to adopt some form of
protection for native and imperial industry. In the cumulative
distress and anxiety of 1931, Britain, after close on a century,