The actual steps by which the war raised the industrial status of women from serfdom to freedom are not difficult to trace. In the first eighteen months of the war more than five million young men from every class, but mainly from the flower of the industrial population, volunteered for military service. Before the end of the war Great Britain was maintaining in the war more than eight and a half million men.[6] This naturally left a shortage of labour in nearly all industries, including agriculture. Naturally also there was, simultaneously with this reduction in numbers of the men in industry, a huge increase in the demand of our own Government and the Governments of our Allies for arms and ammunition, cloth for uniforms, boots, ships, hutments, food for the armies, optical glass, and every sort of military equipment. Every man and woman who could work in the fields or factories producing these things could get continuous employment at wages higher than had ever before been paid. In September, 1915, after fourteen months of war, the rate of unemployment registered at Labour Exchanges was only ½ per cent., the lowest on record. The weekly sum paid in wages had gone up by the end of October by £519,484. In March of the same year what is known as the Treasury agreement with the Trade Unionists came into existence, by which the trade unions consented, in face of the national emergency, to suspend for the duration of the war their rules and customs which prevented the employment of women in most of the skilled trades. The Treasury, on its part, gave a solemn promise not to use women as a reservoir of cheap labour, and agreed to give the same wages for the same output, and, moreover, to restore by Act of Parliament when the war was over the pre-war practices of trade unions, which had severely limited the employment of women. Women themselves were not in any way consulted when this agreement was arrived at. They were, therefore, not parties to it; and suffragists generally, while welcoming the breaking down of the barriers which prevented women having a free choice in industry, even if this were only temporary, felt that the restoration of pre-war practices by Act of Parliament when the war was concluded would make the industrial position of women, in a sense, worse than ever; for formerly, as they pointed out, women were excluded from nearly all the best paid trades simply by the rules of private societies: it was a different and a worse position to be excluded from them by statute.