"Speed up!" is the industrial cry, and with it goes a whole new scheme
of national industrial education. The British youth will be taught a
trade almost with his A-B-C's.

Formerly in England the standardisation of plan and product was almost
unknown. For example, no matter how closely ships resembled each other
in tonnage, structure or design, a separate drawing was made for each.
Now on the Clyde the same specifications serve for twenty vessels.
England has gone into the wholesale production; and what is true of
ships in the stress of hungry war demand will be true of scores of
articles for trade afterward. The old rule-of-thumb traditions that
hampered expansion have gone into the discard, along with voluntary
military service and the fetish of free trade.

Typical of the new methods is the standardisation of exports, which have
increased steadily during the past year. In a room of the Building of
the Board of Trade, down in Whitehall, and where the whole trade
strategy of the war is worked out, I saw a significant diagram, streaked
with purple and red lines, which shows the way it is done. The purple
indicated the rosters of the great industries; the red, the number of
men recruited from them for military service. No matter how the battle
lines yearn for men, the workers in the factories that send goods across
the sea are kept at their task. This diagram is the barometer. For
exports keep up the rate of exchange and husband gold.

England is creating a whole new line of industrial defence. The
manufacture of dyestuffs will illustrate: This process, which originated
in England, was permitted to pass to the Germans, who practically got a
world monopoly in it. Now England is determined that this and similar
dependence must cease.

For dyemaking she has established a systematic co-operation among state,
education and trade. In the University of Leeds a department in colour
chemistry and dyeing has been established, to make researches and to
give special facilities to firms entering the industry, all in the
national interest. A huge, subsidised mother concern, known as British
Dyes, Limited, has been formed, and it will take the place of the great
dye trust of Germany, in which the government was a partner.

This procedure is being repeated in the launching of an optical-glass
industry; this trade has also been in Teutonic hands. I could cite many
other instances, but these will show the new spirit of British
comme