New York Times Current History; The European War, Vol 2, No. 5, August, 1915Various
History
New York Times Current History; The European War, Vol 2, No. 5, August, 1915
Various
World War, 1914-1918
The threatened strike in the Krupp works at Essen, Germany,
simultaneously with the strike of the Welsh coal miners and
the walkout in the Remington Arms Factory in the United
States, would tend to show that labor in the belligerent and
neutral countries is seeking advantages under the strain of
the enormous output of munitions to feed the war. Only in
France, whose people are making supreme sacrifices, and in
Russia, whose factories are not yet organized for the
nation, does industrial peace prevail. In England the
Munitions bill, with its proposals for compulsory
arbitration and for limiting profits unweakened, was passed
on July 1st. The bill retained, also, the power for the
Government to proclaim the extension of its strike-stopping
authority to other trades than the munitions trades.
An account of the conditions relating to labor in the
various countries, beginning with the speech, in part, of
Lloyd George, introducing the Munitions bill in the House of
Commons on June 20, appears below.
A Volunteer Army of Workers
By Lloyd George, British Minister of Munitions
_Addressing the House of Commons on June 20, 1915, Mr. Lloyd George
said, in part:_
What I want to impress not merely upon the House but on the country is
that the duration of the war, the toll of life and limb levied by the
war, the amount of exhaustion caused by the war, the economic and
financial effect--and in order to understand the whole depth and
meaning of the problem with which we are confronted I would state the
ultimate victory or defeat in this war--depend on the supply of
munitions which the rival countries can produce to equip their armies
in the field. That is the cardinal fact of the military situation in
this war. (Cheers.)
I heard the other day on very good authority--and this will give the
House an idea of the tremendous preparations made by the enemy for
this war and of the expansion which has taken place even since the
war--that the Central European Powers are turning out 250,000 shells
per day. That is very nearly eight million shells per month. The
problem of victory for us is how to equal, how to surpass, that
tremendous production. (Hear, hear.)
The Central European Powers have probably attained something like the
limits of their possible output. We have only just crossed the
threshold of our possibilities. In France I had the privilege of
meeting M. Thomas, the Under Secretary for War, a man to whose great
organizing capacity a good deal of the success of the French
provisions of war is attributable, and I am very reassured not merely
as to what France is doing and what France can do but as to what we
can do when I take into account what France has already accomplished.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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