bout government
ownership in an emergency, which we may sometimes have to think of more
seriously. The speed, the efficiency, the success of the new system have
been marvellous, so that in the short space of a year the demands of Mr.
Lloyd George and Mr. Asquith have been satisfied, and England will depend
no more upon foreign contracts and foreign supplies for her ammunition,
but will be able not only to manufacture all she can use herself, but to
help to supply her Allies.

In one department of labor, it is a very startling thing to learn that "in
a single fuse factory, what they call the danger buildings, mostly women
are employed. About five hundred women are found at work in one of these
factories on different processes connected with the delicate mechanism and
filling of the fuse and gaine, some of which is really dangerous, like
detonator work." It is the insertion in the shell of the little pellet
which gives it its death-dealing power, that is so risky, but the women do
not shrink from even this. In the largest fuse shop known, quite new,
fourteen hundred girls, in one shift, are at work.

"An endless spectacle of gun-carriages, naval turrets, torpedo-tubes, army
railway-carriages, small Hotchkiss guns for merchant ships, tool-making
shops, gauge shops, seems to be going on forever, and in the tool-making
shops the output has risen from forty-four thousand to three million a
year." The vastness of the work, and the incessant and enormous
multiplication of all the products for war must be as overwhelming as it
is monotonous. And then there were the huge shipyards, which before the
war were capable of the berth of twenty ships at once, from the largest
battleship downward, and which, as we have already had Mr. Balfour's word
for it, have since the beginning of the war added a million tons to the
navy, but Mrs. Ward in her rapid journeys had not time to stop and inspect
these, to our very great regret, for her description of them would have
been most instructive.

She declares from actual observation that in the Clyde district, in whose
populous centre some threats of disquiet have existed, the work done by
thousands and tens of thousands of workmen since the beginning of the war,
especially in the great shipyards, and done with the heartiest and most
self-sacrificing good-will, has been simply invaluable to the nation, and
will never be forgotten, and the invasion of women there has, perhaps,
been more startlin