employed before, where it is obvious that their introduction taps an
immense reservoir of new labour, and equally obvious that, once let in,
they are not going to be easily or wholly dislodged.

Of course, there has been friction and difficulty; nor is it all yet at
an end. In the few danger-spots of the country, where heads are hottest,
where thousands of the men of most natural weight and influence are away
fighting, and where among a small minority hatred of the capitalist
deadens national feeling and obscures the national danger, there have been
anxious moments during the winter; there may possibly be some anxious
moments again.

But, after all, how little it amounts to in comparison with the enormous
achievement! It took us nine months to realise what France--which,
remember, is a Continental nation under conscription--had realised after
the Battle of the Marne, when she set every hand in the country to work at
munitions that could be set to work. With us, whose villages were
unravaged, whose normal life was untouched, realisation was inevitably
slower. Again we were unprepared, and again, as in the case of the Army
itself, we may plead that we have "improvised the impossible." "No
nation," says Mr. Buchan, "can be adequately prepared, unless, like
Germany, it intends war; and Britain, like France paid the penalty of her
honest desire for 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,