But when the factory began, the employers very soon detected that it was running below its possible output.  There was a curious lack of briskness in the work—­a curious constraint among the new workers.  Yet the employers were certain that the women were keen, and their labour potentially efficient.  They put their heads together, and posted up a notice in the factory to the effect that whatever might be the increase in the output of piece-work, the piece-work rate would not be altered.  Instantly the atmosphere began to clear, the pace of the machines began to mount.

It was a factory in which the work was new, the introduction of women was new, and the workers strange to each other, and for the most part strange to their employers.  A small leaven of distrust on the part of the men workers was enough, and the women were soon influenced.  Luckily, the mischief was as quickly scotched.  Men and women began to do their best, the output of the factory—­which had been planned for 14,000 shells a week—­ran up to 20,000, and everything has gone smoothly since.

Let me now, however, describe another effect of Dilution—­the employment of unskilled men on operations hitherto included in skilled engineering.

On the day after the factory I have just described, my journey took me to another town close by, where my guide—­a Director of one of the largest and best-known steel and engineering works in the kingdom—­showed me a new shell factory filled with 800 to 900 men, all “medically unfit” for the Army, and almost all drawn from the small trades and professions of the town, especially from those which had been hard hit by the war.  Among those I talked to I found a keeper of bathing-machines, a publican’s assistant, clerks, shop assistants, three clergy—­these latter going home for their Sunday duty, and giving their wages to the Red Cross—­unemployed architects, and the like.

I cannot recall any shop which made a greater impression of energy, of a spirit behind the work, than this shop.  In its inspecting-room I found a graduate from Yale.  “I had to join in the fight,” he said quietly—­“this was the best way I could think of.”  And it was noticeable besides for some remarkable machines, which your country had also sent us.

In other shell factories a single lathe carries through one process, interminably repeated, sometimes two, possibly three.  But here, with the exception of the fixing and drilling of the copper band, and a few minor operations, one lathe made the shell—­cut, bored, roughed, turned, nosed, and threaded it, so that it dropped out, all but the finished thing—­minus, of course, the fuse.  The steel pole introduced at the beginning of the process made nine shells, and the average time per shell was twenty-three minutes.  No wonder that in the great warehouse adjoining the workshop one saw the shell heaps piling up in their tens of thousands—­only to be rushed off week by week, incessantly, to the front.  The