It is managing a whole gigantic industry with
employes running into millions, half a million of them women, and
managing it under wholly new conditions of humanity and forethought; it
is housing and feeding and caring for innumerable thousands;
transforming from day to day, as by a kind of by-work, the industrial
mind and training of multitudes, and laying the foundations of a new,
and surely happier England, after the War. And, finally, it is
adjusting, with, on the whole, great success, the rival claims of the
factories and the trenches, sending more and more men from the workshops
to the fighting line, in proportion as the unskilled labour of the
country--men and women, but especially women--is drawn, more and more
widely, into the service of a dwindling amount of skilled labour, more
and more "diluted."
* * * * *
But the light is failing and the shore is nearing. Life-belts are taken
off, the destroyers have disappeared. We are on the quay, kindly
welcomed by an officer from G.H.Q. who passes our bags rapidly through
the Custom House, and carries us off to a neighbouring hotel for the
night, it being too late for the long drive to G.
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