ABSTRACT
The first of Britain's wartime home secretaries who needed to draw a line against dissent, Samuel was also the last whose distaste for the task often outweighed his sense of its urgency. The NAC, forcibly came to the notice of police authorities in spring 1916 when it announced its intention to hold a series of monster, dissenting meetings aimed at the working class. During the first half of the year, as conscription was implemented first for single men and then for married men, dissenting organizations began to demonstrate a new level of activity. They began to find a popular voice, and to identify methods and media with which to amplify it. The official history of the Ministry of Munitions summarized the situation on the home front at the end of 1916 as follows: If the situation on the home front in the winter of 1916-17 was not, perhaps, desperate, it certainly gave no grounds for absolute confidence.
