rence with their rights and with their prospects. But as I have
already pointed out to you, Government regulations have to be
suspended during the period of the war because they are inapplicable
in a time of urgency. The same thing applies to many trade-union
regulations and practices. ["Hear, hear!"]

The first I should like to call attention to are those rules which had
been set up for very good reasons to make it difficult for purely
unsullied men to claim the position and rights of men who have had a
training--that is true in every profession.

I happen, my Lord Mayor, to belong to about the strictest trade union
in the world--[laughter]--the most jealous trade union in the world.
If any unskilled man--and by an unskilled man we mean a man who has
not paid our fees--if any man of that sort, however brainy he was,
tried to come in and interfere with our business, well, we would soon
settle him. [Laughter.] But if during the period of the war there were
any particular use for lawyers--[laughter]--if you find that upon
lawyers depended the success of the war, and it requires a good deal
of imagination; even my Celtic imagination will hardly attain to the
exalted height--[more laughter]--but if that were possible for a
moment, do you suppose that even the Incorporated Law Society, the
greatest and narrowest of all trade unions, could stand in the way of
bringing in outside help in order to enable us to get through our
work?

Well, now, the same thing applies here. If all the skilled engineers
in this country were turned on to produce what is required, if you
brought back from the front every engineer who had been recruited, if
you worked them to the utmost limits of human endurance, you have not
got enough labor even then to produce all we are going to ask you to
produce during the next few months. Therefore, we must appeal to the
patriotism of the unions of this country to relax these particular
rules, in order to eke out, as it were, the skill, to make it go as
far as it possibly can go, in order to enable us to turn out the
necessary munitions of war to win a real and a speedy triumph for our
country in this great struggle.

Now, the same thing applies to the work of women in the factories.
There is a good deal of work now done by men, and men only, in this
country which is done in France at the present moment in shell
factories by women. Why is that? They have not enough men to go round.
The men are working as