In the early weeks of 1916, when work for the Navy, and work in the gun and ammunition shops which were rapidly being organised all over the country, were within a very little of being suspended by a general strike of workmen, terrified for their threatened trade-union privileges, the strength and resource of Dawson put forth boldly in the North dammed the peril at its source. In spite of the penalties laid down in Munition Acts, in spite of the powers vested in military authorities by the Defence of the Realm Regulations, there would have been a great strike, and both the Navy and the New Army would have been hung up gasping for the ships, the guns, and the supplies upon which they had based all their plans for attack and defence. The danger arose over that still insistent problem--the "dilution of labour." The new armies had withdrawn so many skilled and unskilled workmen from the workshops, and the demands for munitions of all kinds were so overwhelming, that wholly new and strange methods of recruiting labour were urgent. Women must be employed in large numbers, in millions; machinery must be put to its full use without regard for the restrictions of unions, if the country were to be saved. Many of the younger and more open-minded of the trade-union officials had enlisted; many of those older ones who remained could not bend their stiff minds to the necessity for new conditions. They were not consciously unpatriotic--their sons were fighting and dying; they were not consciously seditious, though secret enemy agents moved amongst them, and talked treason with them in the jargon of their trades. They simply could not understand that the hardly won privileges of peace must yield to the greater urgencies of war.