in crop in fifty
years. She started fourteen hundred thousand new war gardens; most
of those who worked them had worked already a long day in a munition
factory. These devoted workers increased the potato crop in 1917 by
three million tons--and thus released British provision ships to
carry our soldiers across. In that Boston speech which one of my
correspondents referred to, our Secretary of the Navy did not mention
this. Mention it yourself. And tell them about the boy scouts and the
women. Fifteen thousand of the boy scouts joined the colors, and over
fifty thousand of the younger members served in various ways at home.

Of England's women seven million were engaged in work on munitions and
other necessaries and apparatus of war. The terrible test of that second
battle of Ypres, to which I have made brief allusion above, wrought
an industrial revolution in the manufacture of shells. The energy
of production rose at a rate which may be indicated by two or three
comparisons: In 1917 as many heavy howitzer shells were turned out in a
single day as in the whole first year of the war, as many medium shells
in five days, and as many field-gun shells in eight days. Or in other
words, 45 times as many field-gun shells, 73 times as many medium, and
365 times as many heavy howitzer shells, were turned out in 1917 as in
the first year of the war. These shells were manufactured in buildings
totaling fifteen miles in length, forty feet in breadth, with more than
ten thousand machine tools driven by seventeen miles of shafting with an
energy of twenty-five thousand horse-power and a weekly output of over
ten thousand tons' weight of projectiles--all this largely worked by
the women of England. While the fleet had increased its personnel
from 136,000 to about 400,000, and 2,000,000 men by July, 1915, had
voluntarily enlisted in the army before England gave up her birthright
and accepted compulsory service, the women of England left their
ordinary lives to fabricate the necessaries of war. They worked at home
while their husbands, brothers, and sons fought and died on six battle
fronts abroad--six hundred and fifty-eight thousand died, remember;
do you remember the number of Americans killed in action?--less than
thirty-six thousand;--those English women worked on, seven millions of
them at least, on milk carts, motor-busses, elevators, steam engines,
and in making ammunition. Never before had any woman worked on more than
150 of th