or does go through the under-size or “won’t go” gauge, that part is immediately outcast and returned for alteration or to the melting-pot. In this factory there are something like 30,000 fuses on the move flowing through the works, and on each fuse and its parts there are about a hundred gaugings to be done. At another place--a motor works in pre-War days--I was told that no girl had been employed by the firm until a few months ago. Now every possible job they can handle is being given to them. Everywhere I heard the same tale from employers, managers, overseers, teachers, from every man who had had any dealings with the women workers--they are intelligent, eager and quick to learn, easy to teach; they are punctual and regular in attendance; they are tractable and obedient and don’t “raise trouble”; they are amazingly keen on their work, take an interest in it, stick closely to it, and honestly do their best all the time. For munition work which is within their handling capacity they are apparently ideal workers. From the point of view of a firm’s or an industry’s progress and advancement--this may have little to do with war work, but is, I think, interesting--most of the engineers I spoke with agreed that the women are not as good as the men, because the women have not the initiative or inventiveness, would not think of or suggest any alteration or improvement in machinery or details of their work; would, for instance, go on for ever taking ten movements of hands and arms in lifting, moving, and laying down each part if they had first been taught to do it in ten movements, and quite ignoring any discovery they themselves might make that the same thing could be done in nine moves or less. And it appears they have little ambition, don’t tire of one simple job and worry to be promoted to a less easy, higher-standard one as men do. Offsetting all this, we must remember that women are new to such work, and everyone admits it utterly surprising they should have picked it up so completely and well. For their keenness and the intelligent handling of their tools I need no hearsay evidence. I saw enough of it myself. In shop after shop I moved about amongst these women, saw them pulling levers, turning hand-wheels, sliding cutters to and from their exact positions, handling complicated-looking lathes and presses and machines as if they had been born and reared to the job, although actually 99 per cent. had never had hand on any machine more intricate than a washhouse mangle. They are doing work, too, that a good many men would hesitate about tackling. Personally, I should be sorry, for instance, to be doing the riveting on of shell base-plates with a riveting machine which delivers its hammer-blows at a rate of about 2,000 a minute, a fiercely rapid roar of jarring blows that made one’s ears and temples throb to hear for a few minutes. Yet women to whom I spoke on that work smiled cheerfully and merely remarked that “you get used to