Factories and mills which had long lain idle in the North of England were hastily refitted, and they added every day to the muster-roll of hands employed. Our shipping increased by leaps and bounds, but even then barely kept pace with the increased rate of production. The price of the quartern loaf rose to sixpence, in place of fivepence; but the wages of labourers on the land rose by nearly 25 per cent., and the demand exceeded the supply. Thousands of acres of unprofitable grass-land and of quite idle land disappeared under the plough to make way for corn-fields. Wages rose in all classes of work; but that was not of itself the most important advance. The momentous change was in the demand for labour of every kind. The statistics prove that while wages in all trades showed an average increase of 19-1/2 per cent., unemployment fell during the year of the Peace to a lower level than it had ever reached since records were instituted. In that year the cost of living among working people was 5-1/2 per cent. higher than it had been five years previously. The total working earnings for the year were 38-1/2 per cent. greater than in any previous year. Since then, as we know, expenditure has fallen considerably; but wages have never fallen, and the total earnings of our people are still on the up grade. Another cause of the unprecedented access of prosperity which changed the face of industrial and agricultural England, was the fact that some seven-tenths of the trade lost by Germany was now not only carried in British ships, but held entirely in British hands. Germany's world markets became Britain's markets, just as the markets of the whole Empire became our own as the result of preference, and just as the great oversea countries of the Empire found Britain's home markets, with fifty million customers, exclusively their own. The British public learned once and for all, and in one year, the truth that reformers had sought for a decade to teach us--that the Empire was self-supporting and self-sufficing, and that common-sense legislative and commercial recognition of this fundamental fact spelt prosperity for British subjects the world over. But, as John Crondall said in the course of the Guildhall speech of his which, as has often been said, brought the Disciplinary Regiments into being, "We cannot expect to cure in a year ills that we have studiously fostered through the better part of a century." There was still an unemployed class, though everything points to the conclusion that before that first year of the Peace was ended this class had been reduced to those elements which made it more properly called "unemployable." There were the men who had forgotten their trades and their working habits, and there were still left some of those melancholy products of our decadent industrial and social systems--the men who were determined not to work.