It is admitted on all sides that the output of munitions achieved by Great Britain since the spring of 1915 has been little less than miraculous, and this result is all the more astonishing when it is recalled that at least 25 per cent. of the men who were engaged in the chemical and engineering trades at the outbreak of hostilities have joined the Army. It was thus essential not only to fill the gaps, but also to augment the supply of available labour, in answer to the increased demand. The women of the Empire at once responded to the appeal for their help. A new and unsuspected reservoir of labour was thus discovered, without which, in the words of Mr. F. G. Kellaway, M.P. (Parliamentary Secretary to the Minister of Munitions), “the Germans would by now have won the war.” The extent of the help rendered by women may perhaps be best realised by the fact that there are over 700,000 women engaged in munition work, employed on processes which cover practically the whole engineering and chemical trades. Under the general term “munition work” are included varied forms of work, both skilled and unskilled, undertaken by women, from the heavy manual labour of loading and unloading trucks of ammunition, to the most intricate and delicate of engineering and electrical operations. To mention only a few of these highly skilled operations, women are building a great part of one of the best high-speed engines in the country, each woman setting her own tools, work which requires considerable technical skill. In the construction of chassis for heavy army lorries and in marine-engine building women are undertaking more and more responsible work. In the delicate work of constructing aero-engines they are turning on centre lathes to a half of a thousandth of an inch. Women are boring and rifling the barrel of the service rifle: they undertake the hydraulic riveting of boilers: they work the electric overhead travelling cranes for moving the enormous boilers of our men-of-war: they are employed extensively on turbine work. “So wide is the scope of women’s capabilities,” Mr. Kellaway stated recently, “that a prominent engineer has expressed his conviction that, given two more years of war, he would undertake to build a battleship from keel to aerial in all its complex detail, entirely by women’s labour.” And again: “To watch young girls hard at work for twelve hours a day, working on shells, lubricating bullets, handling cordite, making, inspecting, and gauging fuses, examining work where the thousandth part of an inch is a vital matter running their machines deftly and easily, and spending their days in the danger buildings among explosives with as little fuss as if they were knitting socks, brings a realisation of that which lies behind the list of operations on which women are engaged to-day.”