So now Mrs. Black is given a careful medical examination when she first presents herself for employment. After that, she is looked over at regular intervals. At any time, if she so much as appears pale, the doctor is right there to take her pulse. Any little thing that may be the matter with her is reported at once on the “sickness register.” A Health of Munition Workers Committee, appointed by Mr. Lloyd George with the concurrence of the Home Office has directed, “Week by week the management should scrutinise their chart of sickness returns and study their rise and fall.” Also any factory employing over 20 women is required at regular intervals to fill out a questionnaire concerning the environment and conditions of its employés, and this record is kept on file at the Home Office. You see how scientifically the woman in industry is handled? Why, if the munitions output fell off this afternoon, the whole English Parliament might rise to demand Mrs. Black’s health record to-morrow morning. Mrs. Black must not be allowed to be ill! She ought not even to be permitted to get tired! Gentlemen, pass her a cup of cocoa or hot milk in the morning at half-past ten. It is a government order which is obligatory for factories where she is employed on specially fatiguing processes. At about four in the afternoon, she should pause for rest and a cup of tea. If she is engaged on a rush order, the tea may be passed to her in the workroom. But it is most advisable that she go to the canteen for it and have a brief period of inactivity in an easy chair in the adjoining rest room. This isn’t fiction. This is industrial fact for women to-day. And there is more. The Health of Munition Workers Committee are now strongly of the opinion that for women and girls a portion of Saturday and the whole of Sunday should be available for rest. That Sabbath day commandment, it is discovered, isn’t only written in the Bible. It is indelibly recorded in the human constitution. Even if you keep at toil for seven days, you are able to produce only a six-days’ output. Except for extraordinary, sudden emergencies, “overtime” is a most wasteful expedient. “The effect of all overtime should be carefully watched and workers should be at once relieved from it when fatigue becomes apparent.” Recently in a “General Order” for the hosiery trade, a condition is included “that every fourth week must be kept entirely free from overtime.” A White Paper says: “The result of fatigue which advances beyond physiological limits (‘overstrain’) not only reduces capacity at the moment, but does damage of a more permanent kind which will affect capacity for periods far beyond the next normal period of rest. It will plainly be uneconomical to allow this damage to be done.”