line or two. It is a draft going out to France for the first time, north
countrymen, by their accent; and life-belts and submarines seem to amuse
them hugely, to judge by the running fire of chaff that goes on. But,
after a while, I cease to listen. I am thinking first of what awaits us
on the further shore, on which the lights are coming out, and of those
interesting passes inviting us to G.H.Q. as "Government Guests," which
lie safe in our handbags. And then, my thoughts slip back to a
conversation of the day before, with Dr. Addison, the new Minister of
Munitions.

A man in the prime of life, with whitening hair--prematurely white, for
the face and figure are quite young still--and stamped, so far as
expression and aspect are concerned, by those social and humane
interests which first carried him into Parliament. I have been long
concerned with Evening Play Centres for school-children in Hoxton, one
of the most congested quarters of our East End. And seven years ago I
began to hear of the young and public-spirited doctor and man of
science, who had made himself a name and place in Hoxton, who had won
the confidence of the people crowded in its unlovely streets, had worked
for the poor, and the sick, and the children, and had now beaten the
Tory member, and was Hoxton's Liberal representative in the new
Parliament elected in January 1910, to deal with the Lords, after the
throwing out of Lloyd George's famous Budget. Once or twice since, I had
come across him in matters concerned with education--cripple schools and
the like--when he was Parliamentary Secretary to the Board of Education,
immediately before the war. And now here was the doctor, the Hunterian
Professor, the social worker, the friend of schools and school-children,
transformed into the fighting Minister of a great fighting Department,
itself the creation of the war, only second--if second--in its
importance for the war, to the Admiralty and the War Office.