Yet, as sporadic announcements in the newspapers presently indicated, the system was by no means producing desired results. Dogmatic trade-unionism was dying hard. The Government’s call to men and women to do their "bit" for the war, either by enlisting in the fighting forces or engaging in munitions work, naturally sent tens of thousands of people to the factories who never possessed a "union card" in their lives. Organized Labor was horrified by the deluge of "scabs" thus created. It saw the results of decades of crusade for "union shops" and for privilege for skilled hands swept away like chaff in the wind. Another phenomenon of no less disagreeable omen was making its appearance. Marvelous American automatic lathes for shell-making were being installed on a prodigious scale--machinery so simple in construction that one man, or even a woman or girl, might learn to keep five lathes running at one time. This conjured up disquieting visions for the devotees of a system which looks upon arbitrary limitation of output and minimum employment of maximum numbers of skilled men as an inalienable heritage of Organized Labor. War might be war, national existence might be at stake, nothing else might count except victory, to say nothing of a dozen other shibboleths dinned incessantly into their ears, but trade-unionists had "rights" and "necessities," too. It had cost them years of blood and tears, and strikes and lockouts galore, to enforce them. Was Labor supinely to permit them to be snatched away bodily under cover of war, which Labor had always opposed? Were sainted rules about Sunday work and other "overtime," about apprentices, about female labor, and a dozen other trophies of triumphant trade-unionism to be renounced? Could Governments, from which hard-won prerogatives had had to be extorted almost by violence, be trusted voluntarily to restore them, once Labor had been cowed into surrendering them, and comfortable precedents established? Was the British proletariat, now only on the threshold of its liberties, to be hurled back at one fell swoop into the abyss of inglorious mid-Victorian "slavery"? Let the nation rant itself blue in the face over Labor’s "disgraceful lack of patriotism." Let Germany find comfort, if it could, in the spectacle of British working men refusing to relinquish their holiest privileges on the blood-smeared altar of Militarism. "Patriotism begins at home," said the trade-unionist. "The Government is looking after its own interests. I am looking after mine," he explained.