cantile builders and mercantile builders into warship contractors. The line of demarcation has become so fine as almost to have disappeared. The Government, as the Admiralty and the Shipping Controller, is "pooling" the national shipbuilding, marine engineering and kindred resources, laying out new national dockyards under private management and placing old private dockyards under national control, until the change in methods of production has become reflected in a change in management, in property relationships, in regulations, in laws, in workmen's conditions and in social arrangements.
Our Debt to Conscription.
The conscript armies, which the improvement in the means of communication, i.e., roads and railways and steamships, has made it possible to place and maintain in the field, have even more profoundly affected industry than have the navies of the world. They have only recently come to influence this country at first hand, but they have had a tremendous influence in the United States and in Germany. The incessant warfare in the West, together with the requirements of the trapper, gave the United States from the first a musket and rifle manufacture. Then the Civil War between armed peoples using the new railways, the new machinery and the new iron industry of the last century in a new world under new conditions, resulted in the wholesale adaptation of iron tools to war work. Large bodies of men could only be held in check by speeding-up the output of bullets from the rifle, hence the Gatling machine-gun, with several barrels and a single trigger. Large bodies of men required numerous stands of rifles, made exactly alike and all using cartridges exactly alike. These could only be made quickly and in great numbers by division of labour, by standardising processes and by the use of accurate machinery. The Americans and the Germans required many millions of rifles, magazine rifles, machine guns and thousands of millions of cartridges. The machine tool makers, the makers of sewing machines, of agricultural and other implements supplied the requirements of their rulers. The rifle industry reacted on the machine trades, and the requirements of the armed peace that followed the Franco-German War thoroughly established the connexion between the machine-tool and rifle manufactures of Germany and New
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