In a rifle cartridge factory I saw girls who were examining the brass cartridges for defects. A girl would take a handful of cartridges and roll them rapidly one after another across her palm, and, quick and constant as the motion was, she missed no slightest fault. Some defects, indeed, were so slight that when I picked up some of the rejects I could see nothing wrong even on close and slow examination until the girl pointed out a tiny scratch, a rough dot, an almost invisible dent or bulge. There can be no hope of finding expert engineers (if that is what the M.P.’s want) as inspectors here. The cartridges are pouring from that factory at a rate of millions a week. Walking about the works, you see girls shovelling brass cases with a thing like a big coal-scoop into the capacious maws of hoppers to machines that joggle and jolt the cylinders into their back teeth, and turn and solemnly chew them over, and slide them out in a clicking and tinkling stream, with one more operation performed on their way to completion. Everywhere you may meet full barrels of cartridges wheeling round, or standing in rows, or being emptied and filled; you can see miles of ribbon-like brass bands sliding under punches that chop round discs from them, watch the discs running in hundreds from machine to machine, each machine giving it a punch in the passing and pressing it more and more into its finished stage. You may watch long ropes of lead running off fat reels into and through the machines which chop it into lengths and shape it into bullet-cores which stream along to meet another converging stream of nickel cases and become one with it; and pour on further to join up with the brass cartridges after they have run through the filling factory and had the cordite pushed in and sliced off and a wad rammed on top. And the surging torrent of completed, capped, cordited, wadded, and bulleted cartridges that sweeps into the packing-rooms and out from the factory is so largely the work of “amateurs” that there are about ten new hands employed for each one of the old hands that used to man the works. And when that factory is completed it will be turning out 5,000,000 cartridges a week--mainly by the hands of “amateur” girls swept in from all over the country to “do their bit.”