But it was not only the commercial men that came forward voluntarily to answer the call. The Civil Servants also volunteered from all branches of the Service to undertake increased responsibility without additional gain. It was laid down from the beginning that none of those Civil Servants who came into the Munition Service should receive extra pay for extra work. Second division clerks raised to higher posts still continued to receive the old salaries; so great was the eagerness to save the country that men worked overtime without complaint, and there were in those early days many men who came suspiciously near to working night shifts as well as day.
It was precisely the combination of the best Civil Servants with the best commercial men that gave to the Ministry of Munitions such a marvellous touch of efficiency. Manufacturers coming up from the provinces were now pleasantly surprised to find a new swiftness of despatch in the conduct of their business. Every one brought into touch with the Ministry of Munitions found a new spirit which seemed to give a new hope for the government of this country. There was a certain thrill about the most common affairs within those walls. Every servant of the Ministry, down to the very boys and girls who carried the messages, seemed to feel that they were called to a high task for a great end. It was in this spirit that this great effort was undertaken and sustained throughout the years that followed. At the same time the country as a whole found itself provided at last with a capable machinery for using its services. Not only was the centre quickened and sharpened to new uses, but the whole of the United Kingdom was mapped out and in every district there sat a Committee who formed a careful estimate of the resources of that area.[[95]]
On the basis of that estimate there now began to grow up, as if by magic, that vast network of new war factories which saved the armies in France. The factories grew up chiefly near the iron and coal which provided the raw material of munitions and handy to the great supplies of skilled labour.[[96]]
But no adjustment could avoid a great upheaval of social life. For it was part of this great change that a vast mass of labour must be transferred from the industries of peace to the industries of war.
It was also part of the great stress of this crisis that the State must be sure of its labour and that it must be able to draw from that labour the utmost power of effort, sustained and continued through a prolonged period of time.
Here lay the necessity for a new War Labour policy, difficult and delicate to justify and administer, but indispensable for the safety of the country.
It was clearly impossible to guarantee the adequate war output of this vast aggregate of factories and workshops on the basis of the old peace conditions—with an uncertain supply of skilled labour shifting about from shop to shop along the ordinary channels of demand and supply. The habit of “stealing” labour by the offer of higher wages had already grown to so high a point in the early days of the war that the Munitions Committee had had to issue an order under the Defence of the Realm Act making it an offence to “entice.”[[97]] Thus the peace freedom of movement had already been suspended. But now it was necessary to carry the restrictions further and to guarantee to the nation at war a hold on its workmen similar in kind, though not in degree, to the hold on its soldiers.
Mr. Lloyd George characteristically wished to make the bold appeal, and to say to the workmen: “Submit to the same discipline as your sons in the trenches. Place yourselves under the same law, with this only difference—that you are better-paid men.”[[98]] But this proposal, when laid before the leaders of the Trade Unions, met with fierce opposition. The “conscription of labour,” as it was called, was denounced as a “new slavery.” Some degree of national consent to such a measure was plainly necessary. So that proposal was dropped, and the Ministry of Munitions set out to search for a new policy.
The policy finally agreed upon took shape in the first Munitions Act and the subsequent amending measures. Round those measures a great strife afterwards arose, and it may be worth while to say something as to their origin and justification.
It was absolutely necessary, if the armies were to be properly supplied with the immense mass of munitions required, that the workers should both consent to the limitation of their freedom of movement and should also suspend a number of those limitations and conditions of toil which had been won in the course of the long conflict between Capital and Labour.