or peace!"

Moreover, we had our Navy to work for, without which the cause of the
Allies would have gone under, must have gone under, at the first shock of
Germany. What the workmen of England did in the first year of the war in
her docks and shipyards, history will tell some day.

"What's wrong with the men!" cried a Glasgow employer indignantly to me,
one evening as, quite unknown the one to the other, we were nearing one of
the towns on the Clyde. "What was done on the Clyde, in the first months
of the war, should never be forgotten by this country. Working from six to
nine every day till they dropped with fatigue--and Sundays, too--drinking
just to keep themselves going--too tired to eat or sleep--that's what it
was--I saw it!"

I, too, have seen that utter fatigue stamped on a certain percentage of
faces through the Midlands, or the districts of the Tyne and the
Clyde--fatigue which is yet indomitable, which never gives way. How fresh,
beside that look, are the faces of the women, for whom workshop life is
new! In its presence one forgets all hostile criticism, all talk of
strikes and drink, of trade-union difficulties, and the endless worries of
the employers.

The English workman is not tractable material--far from it--and he is not
imaginative; except in the persons of some of his chosen leaders, he has
never seen a ruined French or Flemish village, and he was slow to realise
the bitterness of that silence of the guns on the front, when ammunition
runs short, and lives must pay. But he has sent his hundreds of thousands
to the fighting line; there are a million and a half of him now working at
munitions, and it is he, in a comradeship with the brain workers, the
scientific intelligence of the nation, closer than any he has yet known,
and lately, with the new and astonishing help of women--it is he, after
all, who is "delivering the goods," he who is now piling the great
arsenals and private works with guns and shells, with bombs, rifles, and
machine-guns, he who is working night and day in the shipyards, he who is
teaching the rising army of women their work, and making new and firm
friends, through the national emergency, whether in the trenches or the
workshops, with other classes and types in the nation, hitherto little
known to him, to whom he, too, is perhaps a revelation.

There will be a new wind blowing through England when this war is done.
Not only will the scientific intelligence, the general educ