[Footnote 1: The percentage of unemployment at the beginning of October in the trades compulsorily insured against unemployment was 5.1, as compared with 6.3 at the beginning of the previous month.] [Footnote 2: "Certain confidential statistical enquiries on a large scale are said to support the inference to be drawn from the figures published by the Board of Trade, that at least 10 per cent of the fifteen million wage-earners in the United Kingdom are not at work at all, whilst quite as large a proportion are on short time. But out of more than a million men whose services the employers have thus temporarily dispensed with, some nine hundred thousand are being clothed, or are going to be clothed, in khaki, and given Government pay. Thus the actual unemployment among men is, except in (certain) black patches, only sporadic and scarcely more than we are accustomed to. Very different is the situation of the women wage-earners. Of these apparently half a million are now unemployed, and twice as many are working only short time. Though the industrial situation is considerably better than would have been predicted for the end of the second month of a world war, it was, in fact, worse than it has been at any time during the past quarter of a century" _(New Statesman,_ Oct. 3, 1914).] The month of October saw a further recovery and a more normal state of affairs. The percentage of unemployment in insured trades continued to decline;[1] but whilst the number of men on the Labour Exchange registers fell (from 28,664 on October 2 to 24,690 on October 30), the number of women registered remained almost stationary. At the end of three months from the beginning of the war the condition of men's employment was about normal; but women were suffering from excessive unemployment, whilst short time was still common in many industries in which women are largely employed. [Footnote 1: The percentages are as follows: Oct. 2, 5.11; Oct. 9, 4.80; Oct. 16, 4.46; Oct. 23, 4.29; Oct. 30, 4.16.] The large volume of unemployment, which it had been anticipated would accompany a great war, was avoided, partly because of prompt State action in maintaining the fabric of commerce and finance, and therefore the supply of raw materials, and partly because of the large demand for commodities for the Army and Navy--a war demand vastly in excess of that in any previous war. In other words, State intervention and the Navy have placed Great Britain in a much superior economic position to that of her adversaries.