f Brotherhoods and Men's
Societies. Texts were suggested and ready-made and ready to deliver
sermons were included. One of these sermons was called "The Honour of
the Willing Gift," another was entitled "The Nation and Its Conflict,"
and its peculiarly appropriate text was "Well is it with the man that
dealeth graciously and lendeth."

A special address (in words of one syllable) to the children of England
embodying the virtues of penny saving and showing how these pennies
could be made to work and earn more pennies, as shown in the concrete
example of a War Savings Certificate, was read by thousands of Sunday
school teachers to their classes throughout the nation.

Nearly every human being in Great Britain got the Message of Thrift that
week. Boy Scouts and Girl Guides went from house to house bearing copies
of the various kinds of instructive literature that had been prepared
for the campaign. Typical of the thoroughness of the detail is the fact
that in Wales all this material was printed in the Welsh language. The
only country where no special efforts were made was Scotland, where to
preach thrift is little less than an insult.

For seven days and nights the almost incessant onslaught was kept up.
When the smoke cleared and the count was taken, it was found that
3,000,000 Certificates had been sold during the week while the total for
the month was 10,700,000.

So vividly was the phrase "War Savings Week" driven home that the War
Savings Committee decided instantly to capitalise this new asset. In a
few days hundreds of bill boards and fences throughout the Kingdom
blossomed forth with this sentence, painted in red, white and blue
letters: "Make Every Week National War Savings Week."

Not content with splashing the bill boards with the injunction to save,
the National Committee hit upon what came to be the most popular medium
for disseminating the Gospel of Thrift. It enlisted the movies. A film
called "For the Empire" was made by a number of well known motion
picture actors and actresses who gave their services free of charge.

It was a moving and graphic story of the war showing how a certain
English lad volunteers at the outset and goes to the front. You get a
vivid picture of life in the trenches shown in actual war scenes. Then
you see the young soldier fall while gallantly leading a charge: his
body is brought home and he is buried with military honours. Then the
screens hurls the question at the audience