esses, and to adapt themselves to them. Could any one have made such
an omelet without breaking a great many eggs? Is it wonderful that the
employers have sometimes felt themselves unbearably hustled, sometimes
misunderstood, and at other times annoyed, or worried by what seems to
them the red tape of the new Ministry, and its apparent multiplicity of
forms and inquiries?

Men accustomed to conduct their own businesses with the usual independence
of regulation have been obliged to submit to regulation. Workmen
accustomed to defend certain methods of work and certain customs of their
trade as matters of life and death have had to see them jeopardised or
swept away. The restoration of these methods and customs is solemnly
promised them after the war; but meanwhile they become the servants of a
public department almost as much under orders as the soldier himself. They
are asked to admit unskilled men to the skilled processes over which they
have long kept so jealous a guard; above all, they are asked to assent
wholesale to the employment of women in trades where women have never been
employed before, where it is obvious that their introduction taps an
immense reservoir of new labour, and equally obvious that, once let in,
they are not going to be easily or wholly dislodged.

Of course, there has been friction and difficulty; nor is it all yet at
an end. In the few danger-spots of the country, where heads are hottest,
where thousands of the men of most natural weight and influence are away
fighting, and where among a small minority hatred of the capitalist
deadens national feeling and obscures the national danger, there have been
anxious moments during the winter; there may possibly be some anxious
moments again.

But, after all, how little it amounts to in comparison with the enormous
achievement! It took us nine months to realise what France--which,
remember, is a Continental nation under conscription--had realised after
the Battle of the Marne, when she set every hand in the country to work at
munitions that could be set to work. With us, whose villages were
unravaged, whose normal life was untouched, realisation was inevitably
slower. Again we were unprepared, and again, as in the case of the Army
itself, we may plead that we have "improvised the impossible." "No
nation," says Mr. Buchan, "can be adequately prepared, unless, like
Germany, it intends war; and Britain, like France paid the penalty of her
honest desire f