The War on All Fronts: Englands Effort | Page 3

remember that they are doing common service with their husbands, and sweethearts, and sons, and brothers, who are perilling their lives in the trenches.
None of this distinguished writer's romances compare in vivid description and heart-inspiring eloquence with these accounts that she gives of what she has seen with her own eyes of the resurrection of England.
It is not for me to anticipate her startling and thrilling narratives on this subject. She takes for her text what Mr. Lloyd George said in his speech in the House of Commons on reviewing his new department: "Unless we quicken our movements, damnation will fall on the sacred cause for which so much gallant blood has flowed," and Mr. Asquith's serious words in December: "We cannot go on," said he, "depending upon foreign countries for our munitions. We haven't the ships to spare to bring them home, and the cost is too great. We must make them ourselves."
Mrs. Ward dwells with keen insight upon the difficulties met with among the trade-unions and labor people, and successfully overcome, and explains in full what they call over there the work of the Dilution Commissioners, which is a wholly new phrase for us, and she gives this clear definition: "Dilution means, of course, that under the sharp analysis of necessity, much engineering work, generally reckoned as 'skilled' work, and reserved to 'skilled' workmen by a number of union regulations, is seen to be capable of solution into various processes, some of which can be sorted out from the others, as within the capacity of the unskilled, or semiskilled worker. By so dividing them up and using superior labor with economy, only where it is really necessary, it can be made to go infinitely further, and the inferior, or untrained, labor can then be brought into work where nobody supposed it could be used; where, in fact, it never has been used." This novel experiment, together with the equally novel employment of women in such work, soon proved a triumphant success, and the women proved themselves able to do the work of men, some of it even better. There were, of course, difficulties at first, but the mischief, whatever it was, was quickly cured, and in one factory that Mrs. Ward names, "men and women soon began to do their best. The output of the factory, which had been planned for four thousand shells a week, ran up to twenty thousand, and everything has gone smoothly since."
The adaptation of firms and factories, already existing, the control of which was taken by the Government, was wonderful, but the national shell-factories, founded, financed, and run by the Ministry of Munitions, are more wonderful still, and give us many new ideas about government ownership in an emergency, which we may sometimes have to think of more seriously. The speed, the efficiency, the success of the new system have been marvellous, so that in the short space of a year the demands of Mr. Lloyd George and Mr. Asquith have been satisfied, and England will depend no more upon foreign contracts and foreign supplies for her ammunition, but will be able not only to manufacture all she can use herself, but to help to supply her Allies.
In one department of labor, it is a very startling thing to learn that "in a single fuse factory, what they call the danger buildings, mostly women are employed. About five hundred women are found at work in one of these factories on different processes connected with the delicate mechanism and filling of the fuse and gaine, some of which is really dangerous, like detonator work." It is the insertion in the shell of the little pellet which gives it its death-dealing power, that is so risky, but the women do not shrink from even this. In the largest fuse shop known, quite new, fourteen hundred girls, in one shift, are at work.
"An endless spectacle of gun-carriages, naval turrets, torpedo-tubes, army railway-carriages, small Hotchkiss guns for merchant ships, tool-making shops, gauge shops, seems to be going on forever, and in the tool-making shops the output has risen from forty-four thousand to three million a year." The vastness of the work, and the incessant and enormous multiplication of all the products for war must be as overwhelming as it is monotonous. And then there were the huge shipyards, which before the war were capable of the berth of twenty ships at once, from the largest battleship downward, and which, as we have already had Mr. Balfour's word for it, have since the beginning of the war added a million tons to the navy, but Mrs. Ward in her rapid journeys had not time to stop and inspect these, to our very great regret, for her description of them would have been most instructive.
She declares from actual observation