Every building, as well as every man and woman, that could be put to the work, has been availed of, and the results have been incredible.  Another instance she gives of special interest:  “An old warehouse, bought, so to speak, overnight, and equipped next morning, has been turned into a small workshop for shell production, employing between three and four hundred girls with the number of skilled men necessary to keep the new unskilled labor going.  These girls are working on the eight-hours’ shift system; working so well that a not uncommon wage among them, on piece-work, of course, runs to somewhere between two and three pounds a week,” and all the time they are at work they remember that they are doing common service with their husbands, and sweethearts, and sons, and brothers, who are perilling their lives in the trenches.

None of this distinguished writer’s romances compare in vivid description and heart-inspiring eloquence with these accounts that she gives of what she has seen with her own eyes of the resurrection of England.

It is not for me to anticipate her startling and thrilling narratives on this subject.  She takes for her text what Mr. Lloyd George said in his speech in the House of Commons on reviewing his new department:  “Unless we quicken our movements, damnation will fall on the sacred cause for which so much gallant blood has flowed,” and Mr. Asquith’s serious words in December:  “We cannot go on,” said he, “depending upon foreign countries for our munitions.  We haven’t the ships to spare to bring them home, and the cost is too great.  We must make them ourselves.”

Mrs. Ward dwells with keen insight upon the difficulties met with among the trade-unions and labor people, and successfully overcome, and explains in full what they call over there the work of the Dilution Commissioners, which is a wholly new phrase for us, and she gives this clear definition:  “Dilution means, of course, that under the sharp analysis of necessity, much engineering work, generally reckoned as ‘skilled’ work, and reserved to ‘skilled’ workmen by a number of union regulations, is seen to be capable of solution into various processes, some of which can be sorted out from the others, as within the capacity of the unskilled, or semiskilled worker.  By so dividing them up and using superior labor with economy, only where it is really necessary, it can be made to go infinitely further, and the inferior, or untrained, labor can then be brought into work where nobody supposed it could be used; where, in fact, it never has been used.”  This novel experiment, together with the equally novel employment of women in such work, soon proved a triumphant success, and the women proved themselves able to do the work of men, some of it even better.  There were, of course, difficulties at first, but the mischief, whatever it was, was quickly cured, and in one factory that Mrs. Ward names, “men and women soon began to do their best.  The output of the factory, which had been planned for four thousand shells a week, ran up to twenty thousand, and everything has gone smoothly since.”