crisscross of their belting, and their ranged machines. But the coming in
of the girls, in their close khaki caps and overalls, showing the many
pretty heads and slender necks, and the rows of light bending forms,
spaced in order beside their furnaces or lathes as far as the eye can
reach, has added a new element--something flower-like, to all this flash
of fire and steel, and to the grimness of war underlying it.

For the final meaning of it all is neither soft nor feminine! These
girls--at hot haste--are making fuses and cartridge-cases by the hundred
thousand, casting, pressing, drawing, and, in the special
danger-buildings, filling certain parts of the fuse with explosive. There
were about 4,000 of them to 5,000 men, when I saw the shop, and their
number has no doubt increased since; for the latest figures show that
about 15,000 fresh women workers are going into the munition works every
week. The men are steadily training them, and without the teaching and
co-operation of the men--without, that is, the surrender by the men of
some of their most cherished trade customs--the whole movement would have
been impossible.

As it is, by the sheer body of work the women have brought in, by the
deftness, energy, and enthusiasm they throw into the simpler but quite
indispensable processes, thereby setting the unskilled man free for the
Army, and the skilled man for work which women cannot do, Great Britain
has become possessed of new and vast resources of which she scarcely
dreamed a year ago; and so far as this war is a war of machinery--and we
all know what Germany's arsenals have done to make it so--its whole aspect
is now changing for us. The "eternal feminine" has made one more
startling incursion upon the normal web of things!

But on the "dilution" of labour, the burning question of the hour, I shall