Our munition women are in the shipyards, the engineering shops, the aeroplane sheds, the shell shops, flocking in thousands into the cities, leaving homes and friends to work in the munition cities we have built since the war. When our great arsenals and factories empty, women pour out in thousands. Night and day they have worked as the men have and it has been no easy or light task. We know that still more will be demanded of us, but we think, as our four million men do, that these things are well worth doing for the freedom of the souls of the nations. In the munition factories that feeling and conviction burns like a flame and the enemy who thinks to demoralize our men and our women by bombing our homes and our workshops finds the workers, men and women, only made more determined. The women handle high explosives in the "danger buildings" for ten and a half hours in a shift, making and inserting the detonating fuses, where a slip may result in their own death and that of their comrades. Working with T.N.T. they turn yellow--hands and face and hair--and risk poisoning. They are called the "canary girls," and if you ask why they do it they will tell you it isn't too much to risk when men risk everything in the trenches--and sometimes the one they cared for most is in a grave in France or on some other front, and they "carry on." The Prime Minister paid a tribute to munition makers in one of his speeches when he said: "I remember perfectly well when I was Minister of Munitions we had very dangerous work. It involved a special alteration in one element of our shells. We had to effect that alteration. If we had manufactured the whole thing anew it would have involved the loss of hundreds of thousands of rounds of ammunition at a time when we could not afford it. But the adaptation of the old element with a fuse is a very dangerous operation, and there were several fatal accidents. It was all amongst the women workers in the munition factories; there was never a panic. They stuck to their work. They knew the peril. They never ran away from it." THE PROTECTION OF WOMEN IN INDUSTRY "Are our faces grave, and our eyes intent? Is every ounce that is in us bent On the uttermost pitch of accomplishment? _Though it's long and long the day is._ Ah! we know what it means if we fool or slack; --A rifle jammed--and one comes not back; And we never forget--it's for us they gave. And so we will slave, and slave, and slave, Lest the men at the front should rue it. Their all they gave, and their lives we'll save, If the hardest of work can do it;-- _Though it's long and long the day is._" --JOHN OXENHAM. CHAPTER VII THE PROTECTION OF WOMEN IN INDUSTRY The Ministry of Munitions has a great department devoted to the work of looking after our workers' interests.