It is used to the full, and as a result thousands of machines and scores of thousands of hands have been turned from other work on to munitions. A mechanic may no longer work where and on what job he pleases. If he is running a machine for stamping out trouser-buttons and the Ministry wants him to turn over to stamping out cartridge discs, he has to do so. If a firm is busy making motor-cars, the Ministry inspector may step in and tell the firm to drop that work and start making shells. If another firm already making munitions is employing daily 100 skilled and 100 unskilled hands, the Ministry will almost certainly take away a number of the skilled hands and hand them over to another factory where skilled men are scarcer and more urgently required. All this simply means that the engineering resources of the country are mobilised and efficiently organised and turned full force on munition-making. The Munition Machine is running now with wonderful smoothness, but it is easy to see what a gigantic task it must have been to get it in running order. It could only have been done with the willing agreement and co-operation of the great engineering and business men and firms throughout the country. You have heard how the Ministry called on local business men to organise their districts, to form local committees, and to set themselves to getting the last ounce of munition work out of their districts. Now I am telling you how those committees have done their work, how they and the local Ministry offices and officials have handled the job. But I doubt if ever the country will realise how well it has been done or how much it owes to these people. I have come in contact with many of them in my tour, and I found only one thing greater and more wonderful than their efficiency, and that is their keenness. Obviously and emphatically their whole hearts and souls are in the job. They have in many cases sacrificed their incomes, in every instance I met the whole of their leisure or pleasure or ease to their work. I met one works manager who has not seen his home in daylight for over six months, who has not seen his young children awake in that time, whose normal working hours have been 6 a.m. to 11 p.m., Saturday, Sunday, and Monday alike. These works owners and managers, and inspectors, and committee-men, and chairmen and secretaries, the brains of the munition business, are amazing and wonderful beyond words. They are the organisers and the driving power behind the whole vast machine, and what that machine is we are going to know more and more fully as the War goes on. I have often in the past heard expressions of wonder that the services of the great business men, the “captains of industry,” were not properly employed in the service of their country. That, when one comes to realise the truth, is rather a good joke, because, while people are still grumbling about it not being done, it has been done--has been, quite after the fashion of real