Certainly the restrictions were very formidable. No workman or workwoman could leave their employment in the war factory without a special “leaving certificate.” All rules or customs restricting labour were suspended; no strikes were allowed; and all questions of wages and hours were to be settled by compulsory arbitration. To administer these rules Munition Tribunals were set up in every district; and they had powers of inflicting heavy fines. Such provisions must depend largely on the good faith and good-will of employers; and there must always be some who will not “play the game.” Hence the chronic movements of revolt—the rise of the shop stewards, the engineers’ strike, the war-weariness of so many industrial districts in the summer of 1917. In the autumn of 1917 Mr. Winston Churchill, the new Minister of Munitions, found it possible to suspend the leaving certificate and to slacken some of these conditions. But there could be no doubt as to their necessity up to that time. The sole and sufficient excuse for these grave restrictions of liberty was always the war, and the war alone. War is a terrible master; and wherever he raises his head, few escape his tyranny. All that can be said is that, with all their troubles, the sufferings of the men in the workshops were as grains in the balance against the sufferings of the men in the trenches. But, even so, the work of the men alone was not enough to meet the need. Other sources of labour must be tapped. It was now necessary to call in the women to the aid of the men. Mr. Lloyd George ventured on a bold appeal. He asked the women to come from their pleasures and their comforts; he asked them to save the lives of their brothers, their sweethearts, and their husbands. They came in multitudes. They filled the ranks, and they filled the shells.[100] They silenced their sourest critics, even in their own sex. They worked by day and they worked by night. They earned for themselves a new position in the State. They showed that women could be patriots themselves, as well as the wives and mothers of patriots. Not easily will England forget those splendid women of 1915-18. As for Mr. Lloyd George himself, he worked as hard as any one in the ranks of this new Labour Army. He was here, there, and everywhere. All through the summer of 1915 he travelled over the country, appealing, stimulating, and even when necessary rebuking. He visited all the industrial centres. He spoke straight to the English working classes; and it was only their worst friends who resented his honesty. He told them to suspend their peace weaknesses in this supreme hour; and he told them, as John Stuart Mill told them once before, where their chief weakness lay. He set up a Drink Control Board, as well as Munition Tribunals; and all that was best and most loyal among the artisans acquiesced. _Ça ira_; the plan worked; the machine began to do its duty.