fold_ since the outbreak
of war. The total weight of shell delivered during 1915 was--in
tons--fourteen times as much as that of 1914. The weight of shell
delivered per week, as between December, 1914, and December, 1915, has
risen nearly ten times. The number of work-people, in these shops, men and
women, had risen (a) as compared with the month in which war broke out, to
a figure eight times as great; (b) as compared with December, 1914, to one
between three and four times as great. And over the whole vast enterprise,
shipyards, gun shops, ammunition shops, with all kinds of naval and other
machinery used in war, the numbers of work-people employed had increased
since 1913 more than 200 per cent. They, with their families, equal the
population of a great city--you may see a new town rising to meet their
needs on the farther side of the river.

As to Dilution, it is now accepted by the men, who said when it was
proposed to them: "Why didn't you come to us six months ago?"

And it is working wonders here as elsewhere. For instance, a particular
portion of the breech mechanism of a gun used to take one hour and twenty
minutes to make. On the Dilution plan it is done on a capstan, and takes
six minutes. Where 500 women were employed before the war, there are now
close on 9,000, and there will be thousands more, requiring one skilled
man as tool-setter to about nine or ten women. In a great gun-carriage
shop, "what used to be done in two years is now done in one month." In
another, two tons of brass were used before the war; a common figure now
is twenty-one. A large milling shop, now entirely worked by men, is to be
given up immediately to women. And so on.

Dilution, it seems to me, is breaking down a number of labour conventions
which no longer answer to the real conditions of the engineering trades.
The pressure of the war is doing a real service to both employers and
employed by the simplification and overhauling it is everywhere bringing
about.

As to the problem of what is to be done with the women after the war, one
may safely leave it to the future. It is probably bound up with that other
problem of the great new workshops springing up everywhere, and the huge
new plants laid down. One thinks of the rapid recovery of French trade
after the war of 1870, and of the far more rapid rate--after forty years
of machine and transport development, at which the industry of the Allied
countries may possibly recover the ra