sometimes let his theme--of the national need, and the insignificance of
all things else in comparison with it--carry him into a vehemence which
the workmen have resented, and which foreign or neutral countries have
misunderstood.

He found in his path, which was also the nation's path, three great
foes--drunkenness, the old envenomed quarrel between employer and
employed, and that deep-rooted industrial conservatism of England, which
shows itself on the one hand in the trade-union customs and restrictions
of the working class, built up, as they hold, through long years, for the
protection of their own standards of life, and, on the other, in the
slowness of many of the smaller English employers (I am astonished,
however, at the notable exceptions everywhere!) to realise new needs and
processes, and to adapt themselves to them. Could any one have made such
an omelet without breaking a great many eggs? Is it wonderful that the
employers have sometimes felt themselves unbearably hustled, sometimes
misunderstood, and at other times annoyed, or worried by what seems to
them the red tape of the new Ministry, and its apparent multiplicity of
forms and inquiries?

Men accustomed to conduct their own businesses with the usual independence
of regulation have been obliged to submit to regulation. Workmen
accustomed to defend certain methods of work and certain customs of their
trade as matters of life and death have had to see them jeopardised or
swept away. The restoration of these methods and customs is solemnly
promised them after the war; but meanwhile they become the servants of a
public department almost as much under orders as the soldier himself. They
are asked to admit unskilled men to the skilled processes over which they
have long kept so jealous a guard; above all, they are asked to assent
wholesale to the employment of women in trades where women have never been