The Belligerents' Munitions Growing Problems of Germany and Her Opponents in Supplying Arms The threatened strike in the Krupp works at Essen, Germany, simultaneously with the strike of the Welsh coal miners and the walk-out in the Remington Arms Factory in the United States, would tend to show that labor in the belligerent and neutral countries is seeking advantages under the strain of the enormous output of munitions to feed the war. Only in France, whose people are making supreme sacrifices, and in Russia, whose factories are not yet organized for the nation, does industrial peace prevail. In England the Munitions bill, with its proposals for compulsory arbitration and for limiting profits unweakened, was passed on July 1st. The bill retained, also, the power for the Government to proclaim the extension of its strikestopping authority to other trades than the munitions trades. An account of the conditions relating to labor in the various countries, beginning with the speech, in part, of Lloyd George, introducing the Munitions bill in the House of Commons on June 20, appears below. A Volunteer Army of Workers By Lloyd George, British Minister of Munitions Addressing the House of Commons on June 20, 1915, Mr. Lloyd George said, in part: W HAT I want to impress not merely upon the House but on the country is that the duration of the war, the toll of life and limb levied by the war, the amount of exhaustion caused by the war, the economic and financial effect-and in order to understand the whole depth and meaning of the problem with which we are confronted I would state the ultimate victory or defeat in this wardepend on the supply of munitions which the rival countries can produce to equip their armies in the field. That is the cardinal fact of the military situation in this war. (Cheers.) I heard the other day on very good authority-and this will give the House an idea of the tremendous preparations made by the enemy for this war and of the expansion which has taken place even since the war-that the Central European Powers are turning out 250,000 shells per day. That is very nearly eight million shells per month. The problem of victory for us is how to equal, how to surpass, that tremendous production. (Hear, hear.) The Central European Powers have probably attained something like the limits of their possible output. We have only just crossed the threshold of our possibilities. In France I had the privilege of meeting M. Thomas, the Under Secretary for War, a man to whose great organizing capacity a good deal of the success of the French provisions of war is attributable, and I am very reassured not merely as to what France is doing and what France can do but as to what we can do when I take into account what France has already accomplished. Let us see the position France is in. Her most important industrial provinces were in the hands of the enemy. Seventy per cent. of her steel production was in the hands of the enemy. She had mobilized an enormous army and therefore had withdrawn a very considerable proportion of her population from industry. |