of the men
workers was enough, and the women were soon influenced. Luckily, the
mischief was as quickly scotched. Men and women began to do their best,
the output of the factory--which had been planned for 14,000 shells a
week--ran up to 20,000, and everything has gone smoothly since.

Let me now, however, describe another effect of Dilution--the employment
of unskilled _men_ on operations hitherto included in skilled engineering.

On the day after the factory I have just described, my journey took me to
another town close by, where my guide--a Director of one of the largest
and best-known steel and engineering works in the kingdom--showed me a new
shell factory filled with 800 to 900 men, all "medically unfit" for the
Army, and almost all drawn from the small trades and professions of the
town, especially from those which had been hard hit by the war. Among
those I talked to I found a keeper of bathing-machines, a publican's
assistant, clerks, shop assistants, three clergy--these latter going home
for their Sunday duty, and giving their wages to the Red Cross--unemployed
architects, and the like.

I cannot recall any shop which made a greater impression of energy, of a
spirit behind the work, than this shop. In its inspecting-room I found a
graduate from Yale. "I had to join in the fight," he said quietly--"this
was the best way I could think of." And it was noticeable besides for some
remarkable machines, which your country had also sent us.

In other shell factories a single lathe carries through one process,
interminably repeated, sometimes two, possibly three. But here, with the
exception of the fixing and drilling of the copper band, and a few minor
operations, one lathe _made the shell_--cut, bored, roughed, turned,
nosed, and threaded it, so that it dropped out, all but the finished
thing--minus, of course, the fuse. The steel pole introduced at the
beginning of the process made nine shells, and the average time per shell
was twenty-three minutes. No wonder that in the great warehouse adjoining
the workshop one saw the shell heaps piling up in their tens of
thousands--only to be rushed off week by week, incessantly, to the front.
The introduction of these machines had been largely the work of an able
Irish manager, who described to me the intense anxiety with which he had
watched their first putting up and testing, lest the vast expenditure
incurred should have been in any degree thrown away. His cheerful loo