t 15,000 fresh women workers are going into the munition works every
week. The men are steadily training them, and without the teaching and
co-operation of the men--without, that is, the surrender by the men of
some of their most cherished trade customs--the whole movement would have
been impossible.

As it is, by the sheer body of work the women have brought in, by the
deftness, energy, and enthusiasm they throw into the simpler but quite
indispensable processes, thereby setting the unskilled man free for the
Army, and the skilled man for work which women cannot do, Great Britain
has become possessed of new and vast resources of which she scarcely
dreamed a year ago; and so far as this war is a war of machinery--and we
all know what Germany's arsenals have done to make it so--its whole aspect
is now changing for us. The "eternal feminine" has made one more
startling incursion upon the normal web of things!

But on the "dilution" of labour, the burning question of the hour, I shall
have something to say in my next letter. Let me record another visit of
the same day to a small-arms factory of importance. Not many women here so
far, though the number is increasing, but look at the expansion figures
since last summer! A large, new factory added, on a bare field; 40,000
tons of excavation removed, two miles of new shops, sixty feet wide and
four floors high, the output in rifles quadrupled, and so on.

We climbed to the top floor of the new buildings and looked far and wide
over the town. Dotted over the tall roofs rose the national flags, marking
"controlled" factories, i.e., factories still given over a year ago to
one or other of the miscellaneous metal trades of the Midlands, and now
making fuse or shell for England's Armies, and under the control of the
British Government. One had a sudden sharp sense of the town's corporate
life, and of the spirit working in it everywhere for England's victory.
Before we descended, we watched the testing of a particular gun. I was to
hear its note on the actual battle-field a month later.

An afternoon train takes me on to another great town, with some very
ancient institutions, which have done very modern service in the war. I
spent my evening in talking with my host, a steel manufacturer identified
with the life of the city, but serving also on one of the central
committees of the Ministry in London. Labour and politics, the chances of
the war, America and American feeling towards