“But it will take so long to learn my trade, five years, six years, seven years.” “Ah, so it will. Very well, then, teach the women a part of your trade at a time, a process in which instruction can be given in the shortest length of time.” “But the tools of my trade, they are heavy for a woman’s hands.” “There shall be special tools made.” And there have been. So, the now famous “dilution” of labour has been arranged. Mrs. Black is “in munitions.” I saw her standing at a machine that is called a capstan lathe, drilling the opening in a circular piece of brass. There used to be employed in this shop, 1,500 men and the man power has been now so diluted, that there are 200 men and 1,300 women. There are rows and rows of the capstan lathes and down each alleyway, as the space between them is called, there are lines of women like Mrs. Black. They have to start the machine, to feed it, and control it, and stop it. In three weeks’ time most of them were able to learn these repetitive operations. But they do not yet know how to take the machine apart or to fix it if anything breaks. So up and down each row there goes a skilled man who is still retained for this, a “setter-up,” he is called in the trade. And to supervise each section there is a foreman. It was the foreman who called my attention to the machines. “They are,” he said, “small lathes, specially adapted to the women. We had them made in America since the war.” EASY ENOUGH TO ARRANGE Like that you see, it is done. Sometimes to make over the job for the woman, there was necessary only the simplest expedient like adding the “flap” seat in the Manchester tram-cars for the woman-conductor to rest between rush hours. Even in skilled trades it hasn’t always been necessary to remodel an entire machine. Sometimes only a lever has to be shortened. Sometimes it has been done by the addition of “jigs and fixtures,” so that a process formerly involving judgment and experience, is now automatically performed at a touch from the operator. Are there heavy weights to be lifted? The paper factories met the situation by reducing the size of the parcel. The leather, tanning and currying trade put in special lifting tackle. The chemical industries have trucks for transporting the heavy carboys. The pottery and brick trades have trolleys. And the engineering trade, for manipulating the heavy shells, has put in electrical cranes and carriages: they are operated by a woman who sits in a sort of easy chair from which she only lifts her hand to touch the right lever.