The last serenade.
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 walkout 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 strike-stopping 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:
WHAT 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 war—depend 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.)