s source. In spite of the penalties
laid down in Munition Acts, in spite of the powers vested in military
authorities by the Defence of the Realm Regulations, there would have
been a great strike, and both the Navy and the New Army would have
been hung up gasping for the ships, the guns, and the supplies upon
which they had based all their plans for attack and defence. The
danger arose over that still insistent problem--the "dilution of
labour." The new armies had withdrawn so many skilled and unskilled
workmen from the workshops, and the demands for munitions of all kinds
were so overwhelming, that wholly new and strange methods of
recruiting labour were urgent. Women must be employed in large
numbers, in millions; machinery must be put to its full use without
regard for the restrictions of unions, if the country were to be
saved. Many of the younger and more open-minded of the trade-union
officials had enlisted; many of those older ones who remained could
not bend their stiff minds to the necessity for new conditions. They
were not consciously unpatriotic--their sons were fighting and dying;
they were not consciously seditious, though secret enemy agents moved
amongst them, and talked treason with them in the jargon of their
trades. They simply could not understand that the hardly won
privileges of peace must yield to the greater urgencies of war.

Civilians came north to examine the position on behalf of the Ministry
of Munitions; they came, wrung their hands, and reported in terror
that if dilution were pressed, a hundred thousand men would be "out."
Yet the risk had to be taken, for dilution must be pressed. Dawson was
hard at work sweeping into his widespread net all those whom he knew
to be enemy agents and all those whom he suspected. It was not an
occasion for squeamishness. With the consent of his official
superiors, he picked up with those prehensile fingers of his many of
the most troublesome of the union agitators, and deported them to safe
spots far distant, where they were constrained to cease from
troubling. Still the danger increased, and he saw that a few days only
could intervene between industrial peace and war. Already the
manufacture of heavy howitzers for the Spring Offensive had been
stopped--by a cunning embargo upon small essential parts--and the
moment had arrived for a trial of strength between authority and
rebellion. He made up his mind, plainly told his chiefs what his plans
were, obtaine