I have spoken already of “The Room of the Old Men,” one of the finest samples I have seen of a patriotic endeavour by the workers to be up and “doing their bit” for the country and the Front. The Room is part of a National Factory that was commenced upon only last July. The men in it are skilled mechanics and engineers, doing the work which only skilled men can do, work without which a munitions factory cannot run. They are nearly all old men, men who had retired from their trade eight or ten or twelve years back, who, after a good long life of hard work in the shops, had taken off their overalls and laid down their tools, as they thought then, for good and ever. The manager took me round amongst them and introduced me to them and gave me a chance to speak to them and tell them that I hoped to let the Front know of their plucky retackling of their old jobs. Old as they were, up to the oldest of them--68 he proudly admitted to--they were doing a full and hard day’s work. One man in that room, for all his rough, toil-hardened hands and work-stained clothes, is worth his £20,000. Another when he dropped his trade had invested in “a little farm well filled” and worth its thousands of any man’s good money. And that man works each day in the factory from 8 a.m. to 5 p.m., and before he comes in from his little moorland farm, and at night after he returns to it from his day’s work, he milks his cows, and feeds his chickens, and settles up the odd jobs that must be done each day upon a farm. All the Old Men felt exactly the same way about the War. They were too old--very regretfully they were too old--to do their bit in khaki at the Front, but they were glad and thankful for the chance that was still left to them to do their bit in the shops. The manager, a local man himself, knowing the district well, when he took up the munition work went over in his mind all the old and retired mechanics he could remember. He went round to them and put the facts straight to them--the Front was held up for munitions, a National Factory was being started in their town, there was a sad lack of the skilled men that they, skilled men themselves, well knew were necessary, and--would they come? _Would they?_ They were ready, then and there, to put on their caps, and walk back to the works with him, and start in on the job. And there they are now. The general manager, by the way, was deservedly enthusiastic about his Old Men and their fine effort, but he said exactly nothing at all about his own. That I discovered, by questioning, from the Ministry official who was showing me round the district. He told me how the general manager had been running a business of his own, but had left it when the word went round for business men and practical men to help the Munitions Ministry, how the works had been got together, how machines had had to be found and tools made, how the working of an industry quite new to him had to be