an hour off, would ever again be satisfied to do anything less than their highest, biggest, and best possible output of work. There was talk the other day of the engineers wanting an all-round 15 per cent. rise in wages. No doubt they think themselves fairly entitled to this because the cost of living has risen. But that sort of thinking simply paralyses again the men at the Front. Suppose cost of living has risen, suppose it has risen 50 instead of 15 per cent. Does that mean that the engineers are going hungry or thirsty, doing without a bed to rest on or a roof to keep them dry? Their mates at the Front often do all this, and surely the war-workers might carry some slight share of the hardships without grumbling, and not, because butter is too dear and they must eat margarine, want an immediate rise to allow them to eat butter again. It is instances of this sort that make one realise the ugly “if.” The real gravity of the position, the issue hanging upon them, cannot possibly be fairly understood by any war-workers who slack, or restrict output, or seriously concern themselves over such points as are constantly being raised about pay, hours, and status. It seems so impossible that the critical nature of the war should not by now be understood, but I am sure that some of the war-workers do not even yet fully understand, and they may easily be misled into thinking munitions so plentiful and future supplies so promising that all danger of a shortage is over. Let them remember that our Army that was short of munitions was a very small affair compared with the Army of to-day. That production which left, say, 200,000 men woefully short a year ago may be multiplied exactly twenty times and still leave an Army of four millions just as exactly and woefully short as ever. And it is going to take many multiplications by twenty to raise us from the hopeless shortage that kept us standing still last year, spending flesh and blood in a desperate endeavour to make up for the lacking steel and iron, and holding our bare own, to raise us from that to being an irresistible force capable of advancing and breaking through miles of trenched and barbed-wired and fortified positions, through hordes of well-armed, unbeaten men, through a flaming barrier of shells and bombs, through liquid fire and gas and machine-gun and rifle bullets. The war-workers have to keep going more than the one front of a year ago. There is now the Western Front, the Balkans, East Africa, Mesopotamia, to say nothing of Egypt or any other battle-fronts that may develop. Our war-workers are doing wonders, are turning out mountains of munitions--but so, you may be very sure, are the enemy war-workers. They had a very long start of us, had munition factories and machines built and running, and they have been increasing these while we have been improvising and starting ours. We cannot doubt but that the German and Austrian shops are also running night and day, that