The English workman is not tractable material--far from it--and he is not imaginative; except in the persons of some of his chosen leaders, he has never seen a ruined French or Flemish village, and he was slow to realise the bitterness of that silence of the guns on the front, when ammunition runs short, and lives must pay. But he has sent his hundreds of thousands to the fighting line; there are a million and a half of him now working at munitions, and it is he, in a comradeship with the brain workers, the scientific intelligence of the nation, closer than any he has yet known, and lately, with the new and astonishing help of women--it is he, after all, who is "delivering the goods," he who is now piling the great arsenals and private works with guns and shells, with bombs, rifles, and machine-guns, he who is working night and day in the shipyards, he who is teaching the rising army of women their work, and making new and firm friends, through the national emergency, whether in the trenches or the workshops, with other classes and types in the nation, hitherto little known to him, to whom he, too, is perhaps a revelation. There will be a new wind blowing through England when this war is done. Not only will the scientific intelligence, the general education, and the industrial plant of the nation have gained enormously from this huge impetus of war; but men and women, employers and employed, shaken perforce out of their old grooves, will look at each other surely with new eyes, in a world which has not been steeped for nothing in effort and sacrifice, in common griefs and a common passion of will. II All over England, then, the same quadruple process has now been going on for months: The steady enlargement of existing armament and munition works, national or private. The transformation of a host of other engineering businesses into munition works. The co-ordination of a vast number of small workshops dealing with the innumerable metal industries of ordinary commerce, so as to make them feed the larger engineering works, with all those minor parts of the gun or shell, which such shops had the power to make. The putting up of entirely new workshops--National Workshops--directly controlled by the new Ministry, under the Munitions Acts. Let me take you through a few typical scenes.