The adaptation of firms and factories, already existing, the control of which was taken by the Government, was wonderful, but the national shell-factories, founded, financed, and run by the Ministry of Munitions, are more wonderful still, and give us many new ideas about government ownership in an emergency, which we may sometimes have to think of more seriously.  The speed, the efficiency, the success of the new system have been marvellous, so that in the short space of a year the demands of Mr. Lloyd George and Mr. Asquith have been satisfied, and England will depend no more upon foreign contracts and foreign supplies for her ammunition, but will be able not only to manufacture all she can use herself, but to help to supply her Allies.

In one department of labor, it is a very startling thing to learn that “in a single fuse factory, what they call the danger buildings, mostly women are employed.  About five hundred women are found at work in one of these factories on different processes connected with the delicate mechanism and filling of the fuse and gaine, some of which is really dangerous, like detonator work.”  It is the insertion in the shell of the little pellet which gives it its death-dealing power, that is so risky, but the women do not shrink from even this.  In the largest fuse shop known, quite new, fourteen hundred girls, in one shift, are at work.

“An endless spectacle of gun-carriages, naval turrets, torpedo-tubes, army railway-carriages, small Hotchkiss guns for merchant ships, tool-making shops, gauge shops, seems to be going on forever, and in the tool-making shops the output has risen from forty-four thousand to three million a year.”  The vastness of the work, and the incessant and enormous multiplication of all the products for war must be as overwhelming as it is monotonous.  And then there were the huge shipyards, which before the war were capable of the berth of twenty ships at once, from the largest battleship downward, and which, as we have already had Mr. Balfour’s word for it, have since the beginning of the war added a million tons to the navy, but Mrs. Ward in her rapid journeys had not time to stop and inspect these, to our very great regret, for her description of them would have been most instructive.

She declares from actual observation that in the Clyde district, in whose populous centre some threats of disquiet have existed, the work done by thousands and tens of thousands of workmen since the beginning of the war, especially in the great shipyards, and done with the heartiest and most self-sacrificing good-will, has been simply invaluable to the nation, and will never be forgotten, and the invasion of women there has, perhaps, been more startling to the workmen than anywhere else.  Where not a single woman was employed in the works and factories before the war, except in textiles, “there will soon be fifteen thousand of them in the munition workshops alone, and that will not be the end.”