I was myself, for a fortnight of last year, the guest of the Ministry of
Munitions, while Mr. Lloyd George was still its head, in some of the
most important Munition areas; and I was then able to feel the current
of hot energy, started by the first Minister, running--not of course
without local obstacles and animosities--through an electrified England.
That was in February 1916. Then, in August, came the astonishing speech
of Mr. Montagu, on the development of the Munitions supply in one short
year, as illustrated by the happenings of the Somme battlefield. And
now, as successor to Mr. Montagu and Mr. Lloyd George, Dr. Addison sat
in the Minister's chair, continuing the story.

What a story it is! Starting from the manufacture of guns, ammunition
and explosives, and after pushing that to incredible figures, the
necessities of its great task has led the Ministry to one forward step
after another. Seeing that the supply of munitions depends on the supply
of raw material, it is now regulating the whole mineral supply of this
country, and much of that of the Allies; it is about to work qualities
of iron ore that have never been worked before; it is deciding, over the
length and breadth of the country, how much aluminium should be allowed
to one firm, how much copper to another; it is producing steel for our
Allies as well as for ourselves; it has taken over with time the whole
Motor Transport of the war, and is now adding to it the Railway
Transport of munitions here and abroad, and is dictating meanwhile to
every engineering firm in the country which of its orders should come
first, and which last. It is managing a whole gigantic industry with
employes running into millions, half a million of them women, and
managing it under wholly new conditions of humanity and forethought; it
is housing and feeding and caring for innumerable thousands;
transforming from day to day, as by a kind of by-work, the industrial