Five years ago the efficiency expert was regarded in England as an
intruder and a quack; to use a stop watch on production was high crime
and treason. To-day there are thousands of students of business science
and factory management. In the spinning district girls in clogs sit
alongside their foremen listening to lectures on how to save time and
energy in work. Scores of old establishments are being reborn
productively. There is the case of a famous chocolate works that before
the war rebuffed an instructor in factory reorganisation. Last year it
saw the light, hired an American expert, and to-day the output has been
increased by twenty-five per cent.

The infant industries, growing out of the needs of war and the desire of
self-sufficiency, are resting on the foundations of the new creed.
"Speed up!" is the industrial cry, and with it goes a whole new scheme
of national industrial education. The British youth will be taught a
trade almost with his A-B-C's.

Formerly in England the standardisation of plan and product was almost
unknown. For example, no matter how closely ships resembled each other
in tonnage, structure or design, a separate drawing was made for each.
Now on the Clyde the same specifications serve for twenty vessels.
England has gone into the wholesale production; and what is true of
ships in the stress of hungry war demand will be true of scores of
articles for trade afterward. The old rule-of-thumb traditions that
hampered expansion have gone into the discard, along with voluntary
military service and the fetish of free trade.

Typical of the new methods is the standardisation of exports, which have
increased steadily during the past year. In a room of the Building of