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1918

SECRETARY BAKER'S PLAN

Secretary Baker proposes, according to the War Depart ment order published February 10, to reorganize the General Staff with a view to co-ordinating all military activities. MajorGeneral Peyton C. March, now in France, will be the Chief of Staff. Under him there will be five Assistant Chiefs of Staff with clearly defined duties and powers, and each the responsible head of a division.

One-Executive Division: To supervise the organization, administration, and methods of all divisions of the General Staff and the several bureaus, corps, and other agencies of the War Department, to the end that all such matters may be comprehensively treated and the activities of all such agencies co-ordinated.

Two-War Plans Division: This will deal with the organization of all branches of the Army, to determine questions of equipment for all branches of the Army, projects of National defense, and other technical military matters.

Three-Purchase and Supply Division: This will have cognizance of and supervision over supplies required for the use of the Army, under an officer designated as the Director of Purchases and Supplies, who shall be assistant to the Chief of Staff. "There shall be in the Purchase and Supply Division the office of Surveyor-General of Supplies under an officer or a civilian. It shall be the duty of the Surveyor-General of Supplies to provide that all arrangements for the purchase, procurement, and production of all munitions and other supplies for the use of the Army shall be so correlated and otherwise scheduled as most effectually to forward the Army programme and most advantageously utilize the industrial resources of the country." Four Storage and Traffic Divisions: with control of all transportation connected with the Army by land and sea, and all storage facilities connected therewith; all movements of troops, munitions, supplies; all arrangements with the Navy for convoy service; all storage of war supplies.

Five-Army Operations Division: The recruitment, mobilization, movement, and distribution of troops; the assignment of equipment; supervision and co-ordination of camp sites.

This plan would seem to make the General Staff a genuinely executive body, possessed of every power necessary for the equipment, training, and transportation of our land forces. Its obvious aim is to make the General Staff a responsible factor in the conduct of the war. The feature which seems to be of the most value is the opportunity it presents of giving Mr. Edward R. Stettinius an executive office of the utmost importance under provision "Three-Purchase and Supply Division."

SHIP CONTROL

The control of transportation as regards shipping has lagged behind that as regards railways. But as a result of coordinated action between the Federal Shipping Board and the War Department, as well as between this country and the Allies, an Inter-Allied Ship Control Committee has now been appointed. It is headed by Mr. P. A. S. Franklin, of New York City, the well-known ship agent. The other members of the Committee are Mr. H. H. Raymond, Port Controller at New York, and Sir Connop Guthrie, Controller of British Shipping.

This Committee is to distribute all available tonnage on this side of the Atlantic, whether belonging to the United States or its allies. It will co-ordinate the needs of the various Government departments, effecting such interchange of tonnage and traffic as may be practicable with the Allied Govern

ments.

The power of this Committee, we are glad to say, will be absolute with regard to the placing and disposal of ships at any American port. In particular, it will take immediate steps to relieve congestion at the port of New York by diverting traffic to other ports. Such a pooling of tonnage has long been necessary, both to obtain the maximum efficiency from the ships now in operation and to avoid the delays of loading and unloading, due often to difficulties of lighterage, that have had a large share in crippling ocean transportation.

The Committee's control extends over passenger as well as freight service; in especial it will supervise the routing of all

tonnage turned over to the War and Navy Departments to carry American soldiers to Europe. An immediate question before the Committee lies in the diversion of other than American tonnage to this task.

We shall be surprised if the work of the Ship Control Committee does not prove the equivalent of a considerable amount of new tonnage to the cause of America and the Allies.

THE LOSS OF THE TUSCANIA

The American losses by the submarine torpedoing of the British transport Tuscania were much less than at first reported: indeed, the wonder is that so large a proportion was saved of the 2,235 persons on board, of whom 2,177 were Americans. As nearly as can be estimated up to February 11, the loss of American officers and men is 113.

The Tuscania was off the northeast coast of Ireland when she was struck at about six o'clock on the evening of February 5. The many ships called by wireless to her aid landed the rescued at points on the very northeast part of Ireland, and even in Scotland. How the submarine evaded the destroyers convoying the Tuscania may never be known. It has been said in some other cases that there is a tendency for a merchant vessel to draw too far ahead of her naval convoys, which must circle about and dash to and fro. There is no report of this, however, as regards the Tuscania.

Known facts show that the loss of Allied troops when in transports has been small. Few British transports torpedoed have been destroyed, and the majority of those have been in the Mediterranean. The English Channel is so closely guarded that troops have passed from England to France almost or quite as safely as if there were an under-sea tunnel. Moreover, a British as saying that authority is quoted by the New York "Times only one out of two hundred of convoyed merchant ships in the Atlantic has been sunk. Danger there is; but it is not one to be hysterical about, nor is it excessive as compared with other war risks.

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Americans may well feel proud of the steady courage shown by our troops in presence of imminent death. They stood at attention while hospital patients and the two women on board were cared for, obeyed orders, and sang the National anthem, alternating with the "God Save the King" of their British fellow-soldiers. British officers and naval commanders praise our men cordially, and with real appreciation of their sturdiness and coolness and readiness. We comment editorially on this dis aster on page 279.

PROOF OR RETRACTION

A charge which, if untrue, is atrocious, and which, if true, ought to be fortified by incontrovertible evidence, has been made by Mr. W. G. Lee, head of the Trainmen's Brotherhood. He accuses railway managers of trying to increase cost and cause delay in the railways in order to discredit Government operation. The fact that he made this charge in part by innuendo does not affect the seriousness of it except to make it more difficult to refute by evidence, no matter how overwhelming. For it is impossible to pin down accusation made by innuendo. At a recent hearing of the Railroad Wage Commission Mr.

Lee said:

Why do reports to the Inter-State Commerce Commission show that in Philadelphia recently more engines were allowed to freeze up overnight than ever before? One required two weeks for repairs. We have had winters before. Why all this congestion just now?

The old managements do not want Government operation made a success.

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He added that the real cause of this alleged deliberate breaking down of the railways could be traced back to about four banks in New York City."

Mr. Lee ought to be forced by public opinion to prove his charges. What he has in substance said is, in effect, that railway managers are heartless enough to cause incalculable suffering in order to gain a point. A man who makes such charges as that without proof justly lays himself open to the suspicion that he himself is capable of doing the very thing which he

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Not merely Theodore Roosevelt's friends and neighbors, but all his fellow-citizens throughout the country, are greatly relieved to learn that he is passing successfully through the critical illness which has made him for the first time in his life a patient at a great hospital. That is to say, the first time for natural causes, for he spent a few days at a hospital in Chicago after he was shot during the excitement of the political campaign in 1912. His present illness is directly traceable to the jungle. fever which he contracted during his famous exploring trip in South America in 1913. This most serious form of tropical fever, together with an infected wound in the leg made by jagged rocks in his passage in canoe down the famous "River of Doubt,' have given him more or less trouble periodically since his return from South America. But his extraordinary vitality has enabled him to treat these physical difficulties, which would be serious for the average man, as merely superficial. Possibly as a result of his unintermitting and patriotic work on war questions, a recurrence of the tropical fever conditions brought on some serious abscesses which made it necessary for him to go to Roosevelt Hospital in New York to undergo one or two difficult operations. His condition at first was serious if not critical, but at this writing he is convalescing, and every hope is expressed by the experts in charge that he will be entirely himself again before very long.

His illness has served to bring out once more two notable characteristics of his career-first, the very wide affection in which he is held by all sorts and conditions of men in every part of the country without regard to political affiliations, and, second, his extraordinary physique, which, he says in his autobiography, he built up from the slenderest foundations by systematic exercise and care. He went through physical hardships enough in his African explorations, and again in his South American explorations, to kill a good many men, and he has worked incessantly and at high pressure in positions of responsible leadership for thirty-five years. He has been through one war and through one attempted murder, yet somehow or other he always recuperates. His physical resiliency after a knockdown is striking testimony to the value of systematic bodily training.

ELECTRA

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Revenge is nowadays generally regarded not as a holy, religious duty, but as a brutal instinct to be restrained and pressed. That makes it hard for a modern audience to appreciate fully such a tragedy as "Electra," which was elaborately and effectively performed on the afternoon of February 6 in Carnegie Hall, New York City. When Euripides wrote that great play, the people of Greece had ideas of what is right and wrong very different from those which we accept in America in the twentieth century of the Christian era. They regarded it as a matter of course that gross injustice, mad desire for vengeance, and inescapable terror should be apportioned to mortals by the will of the very gods they worshiped.

It is such ideas as these that are embodied in the story of the play:

Agamemnon, one of the heroes of Greece, killed his daughter in sacrifice to the gods. Though his act was regarded as unquestionably devout, it called for requital. It was requited by Clytemnestra, his wife, the girl's mother. She betrayed him to her paramour, Ægisthos, who killed him. Upon this, Orestes, the young son of the murdered man, fled from the murderess, his mother, leaving behind him his two sisters, Electra and Chrysothemis. All this has happened years before the action of the play begins. Meanwhile Electra, who had been made a slave in her own home, longs during the years for her brother's return that he may avenge her father's death. As the play opens,

Orestes with his foster-father. He has grown to manappears hood and is unrecognized. He has come home, in obedience to the oracle he has consulted, to kill his mother. According to a prearranged plan, his foster-father tells the mother that Orestes is dead, and describes with dramatic vividness the chariot race ending in the accident that caused his death. Clytemnestra, relieved of her fears, cannot, as she goes out, wholly conceal her joy at the news; but Electra, left alone, is overcome with grief. When Orestes appears, Electra, thinking him to be a stranger, receives from his hands the urn which he alleges contains the ashes of her brother's body. Beside herself with despair, she fondles the urn as a mother would fondle her baby, and lavishes on it all the love that she has been cherishing during the years for her brother. Orestes, greatly moved, reveals himself, and in a delirium of joy Electra is transformed. She becomes once more the embodiment of vengeance. Orestes goes out. and soon are heard the shrieks of Clytemnestra as he kills her. As her body, covered with a cloth, is brought out on a couch, Ægisthos, who since Agamemnon's death has been her husband. returns from a hunt. He has heard the story of Orestes's death, and his joy at the news is unbounded. He sees the couch, and, assuming the body on it to be that of Orestes, bids Electra go call Clytemnestra, that his wife may exult with him in the sight of her son's corpse. Electra, fairly terrified by the prospect of her coming victory, goes to the couch and with gruesome irony cries aloud the dead woman's name "Clytemnestra!" Ægisthos, dumfounded by the incredible suspicion that this strikes into his brain, throws off the cover from the couch and sees the horror of the truth. Like an animal entrapped, he turns to find himself confronted by Orestes with drawn sword still red with Clytemnestra's blood. Trying to defend himself, he is forced out, and from the very hall where Agamemnon had been killed comes the sound of clashing weapons. Electra, statuesque, awaits the outcome. The clashing suddenly ceases; a sword comes hurtling out and falls at her feet. She stoops, recognizes it as the sword of Egisthos, and as the curtain is drawn dances upon it with triumph, heedless of the fact that now the Furies, who have been pursuing Clytemnestra and Ægisthos, must in requital pursue Orestes.

This is the story-and the simple outlines of it are enough to indicate the change that has come over the moral standards of all civilized men since the day it served as the plot of a popular drama.

People call “Electra" "highbrow." It is highbrow only in the sense that it requires some degree of information, intelligence, and imagination to put one's self into such a state of mind that a tragedy like "Electra" would not seem preposterously grotesque. To the people, however, for whom it was written it was not highbrow at all. It was a play written to be performed before enormous crowds-crowds many times larger than those that witness the popular modern play. It was a play for the multitude; and it could not have "gotten across" if the multitude had not understood it.

What makes "Electra" a profoundly great work of art is the structural beauty of the means by which Euripides set forth a moral doctrine of the universe that once was very much alive, though to-day it is even deader than the language in which it was written. Great works of art must, as they are created, embody living ideas. The ideas themselves may then pass away, but the art which enshrines them, if it be consummate, remains, as "Electra" remains, imperishable.

THE PERFORMANCE

Foreign as was the underlying idea of "Electra" to the audience who heard and saw the performance in New York City, there can be no manner of doubt that the tragedy profoundly impressed and at times moved them.

This was due to the effectiveness of the stage-setting, the acting, and the music.

Of course the performance was not a duplication-even ap proximately-of that which the ancient Greeks saw. It was something better. It was such a performance as would give to a modern audience the same kind of impression that the original form of performance must have given to the audiences of old. Originally there was no scenery; in the Carnegie Hall per

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formance the scenery was one of the most impressive elements of the play. The beauty of the setting (which combined that element of realism which modern audiences expect with the severe architectural lines which in Greek theaters furnished the background for all plays) was, with its lighting effects, a distinct triumph of common sense, a sense of what is appropriate, and a sense of beauty.

The acting deserved the high commendation which it received from most of the critics. Margaret Anglin's Electra was a figure of great dignity and emotional power. Not once did she yield to the temptation to gain a mere factitious effect; not once did she deviate from her purpose of being the Electra of Euripides. That she succeeded in making the character of Electra credible and sympathetic was demonstrated by the attitude of the audience from the beginning to the end, and such an achievement as that is notable among contemporary stage productions. Her company furnished competent support. In particular, special mention should be made of the work of the chorus, which plays a rôle in Greek tragedy for which there is no modern counterpart and which calls for the exercise of special imagination on the part of those who wish to make it credible to the modern audience.

The chief defect of the performance was in the enunciation of the actors. There must have been many-there certainly was one in the audience who had difficulty in understanding a great deal of what was said. There is a practical as well as a dramatic value in an actor's learning to speak in what might be called the grand style. A big performance requires big action and big enunciation.

Not the least effective element in the performance was the music, composed for the play by Walter Damrosch and performed by the New York Symphony Orchestra under Mr. Damrosch's conductorship. It served its purpose of being to the play what inflections are to the individual voice. It tonally lit up the high spots. We doubt whether it would be very interesting performed, even in part, separately for concert purposes. This is not meant as derogatory, but rather as approbative. The music was not meant to obtrude itself, but rather to make the dramatic situations more effectively dramatic. Without the music this performance of the play, without any music any performance of the play, would become comparatively flat.

This music was not an imitation of what is supposed to be ancient Greek music. If it had been, it would have been an attempt to imitate the unknown, in the first place; and, in the second place, it would probably have sounded very absurd to modern ears. What it did do was to serve modern ears in the same way that the music of antiquity served ancient ears. The total effect was a good deal like modern music drama or opera with most of the nonsensical and ridiculously artificial that accompanies modern opera eliminated. If Electra had come to the front of the stage and indulged in an aria, or even in a recitativo secco, or in Wagnerian melos, the audience would have been indignant at the sacrilege to art; and yet that is what audiences. not only endure but applaud night after night.

A few years ago we remarked that "opera is practically as old as the spoken drama." We expected to get a rise, and got it. If we remember aright, "Musical America" rose to the bait rose to the bait and told us what it thought about the origin of opera. We now repeat our former remark with a new emphasis, and add that music drama is the oldest form of drama. Music drama or opera is merely drama in which music is as essential as the scenery or the acting of the players.

It antedates even the Greek drama, and may be found preserved in ancient Hebrew literature. "Electra" is essentially opera. So is the "Song of Songs." Opera is simply a modern name given to what in substance has existed, off and on, for as many years as we have literary record.

OUR CONTRIBUTORS THIS WEEK

Mr. Frederick L. Allen, who writes " Building the Bridge to France," is a graduate of Harvard, was formerly on the staff of the "Atlantic Monthly," later was editorially connected with the "Century Magazine," and is now serving the Government in Washington. His Government work gives him an oppor

tunity to deal with facts in the shipping situation, and the statements in his article may be relied upon as authoritative.

Dr. Odell, who contributes a striking special letter from Washington on the President and his powers, is well known to our readers as the author of the notable series of articles in The Outlook on American camp life entitled "The New Spirit of the New Army." He was formerly a clergyman in Scranton. Pennsylvania, was later a member of the editorial staff of the Philadelphia" Ledger," and is now the pastor of a Presbyte rian church in Troy, New York. He has had special army associations and has been a student of politics and sociology. His work is not always in the political field, as readers of his delightful paper in this journal, "A Trout Stream and the Cracking Universe," will remember.

Miss Monks, the author of "London Etchings," is a Bostonian now engaged in personal social work among the women munition workers of London. She sends us with these etchings a letter. from which we give our readers the following extract, for it is a key to the spirit and purpose of the etchings themselves: When I went to England a year ago to do war work, every one told me that I ought to keep a diary. I took a book with me for this purpose, but f soon found myself immersed in work so strenuous that a daily diary was out of the question. My work was of the most practical kind, and I found that what writing I did was for relaxation and had no connection with the work, although nothing in these days is wholly unconnected with the war. My work took me to a very prosaic suburb of London. I lived there during the week and went to Chelsea for occasional week-ends. All my writing was done in Chelsea, and the pieces entitled "Battersea Nights" were written in a house on Cheyne Walk near the house where Turner lived. The contrast of the beauty of Chelsea to the dingy suburb in which I lived never failed to inspire in me the longing for expression that all artists feel who live in Chelsea and love Battersea Bridge and Four Chimneys.

The spiritual awakening in England is very noticeable in all classes. Not only are the educated and intellectual people thinking it of the foremost importance, but the reward of sacrifice and self-control is bursting out in the hearts of the laboring people.

A social worker in this country asked me the other day if the English workingwoman were not losing her health through the long hours her patriotism enables her to keep. I answered: "The long hours may strain and fatigue her body, but she is finding her soul. Her hours are no longer than the hours of those of us who are working to make things easier for her. Government officials voluntarily work as many hours as she does. Her hours are shorter and the hardships few compared to the duties of the men in the trenches or the sailors patrolling the North Sea, and we are all of us conscious together that serving an ideal instead of our personal advantage is giving us a spiritual strength which is beyond the reach of even the worst German frightfulness."

Mr. Driggs, who brings the adventures of Arnold Adair to a conclusion in this issue, is an ordnance and airplane expert of New York, and has done much studying and writing in connection with airplane problems. His lively and vivid stories of Arnold Adair and his colleagues are about to be brought out in book form by Little, Brown & Co., of Boston.

Dr. Richmond, whom many of our readers will remember as the author of the taking "Brother Jonathan" poems, contributed to The Outlook in the early years of the European war in the spirit and manner of the "Biglow Papers," is President of Union College, at Schenectady, New York. In a letter accompanying his poem "For the Sailors at Sea" he says: "I have a nineteen-year-old boy who has been at sea for three months serving as an ordinary seaman in the Regular Navy. I wonder if there are other fathers to whom the inclosed might appeal?"

Mr. Herbert Vaughan Abbott, whose paper on Keats affords a welcome relief from the strain of war, is Adjunct Professor of English at Smith College, Northampton, Massachusetts.

The pleasant and smiling picture of camp life (to which we are compelled by the modesty of the author merely to append the pen-name of " An American Woman") is sketched from the other side of the footlights by a writer whose war poetry has received wide attention throughout the country. It records some of her experiences as an entertainer at the camps of our new Army.

1918

W

NOT IN VAIN

THATEVER military success Germany may have gained by the sinking of the Tuscania will cost her dear. Unlike the sinking of the Lusitania and the air raids over London, this latest great exploit of German war by stealth can be defended under the laws of warfare; for a transport conveying combatant troops is not a peaceful merchantman nor is it a community of civilians, but is legitimate prey. But, like the air raids and the sinking of merchantmen, this deed has put new fighting spirit into Germany's foes. It has proved again how far astray Germany goes in her calculations. It has revealed anew the self-control of the American fighting man, his readiness for emergency, and his inflexible determination for victory. And it has stimulated recruiting in this country. For every man that lost his life in that disaster more than one man has offered himself for service against Germany.

Those who sorrow for the loss of their men who went down with the Tuscania have no cause to feel that their loved ones died in vain. They gave their lives heroically and to a great end. They have been the means of gaining new strength for the arms of their country. They have made all Americans their debtors. To them, as well as to those who die at the front, will belong the victory which they have helped to purchase with their lives.

THE BUILDERS OF OUR SHIPS

As this issue of The Outlook appears, a Nation-wide campaign is being carried on by the Government for the purpose of informing the American public that if we are going to win the war we must build ships. The facts, which are of grave importance, are given in an article on another page by Mr. Frederick Lewis Allen, who is in the Government service at Washington, who has access to authoritative information, and whose statement of the problem and its only possible solution may be relied upon. The American people have now gone into the war wholeheartedly. They are giving their money and their men without stint or complaint, but billions of money and millions of men will not win the war unless the men and the commodities bought for the money can be transported to the European fronts. The ship-building mechanics of the United States are therefore today the men on whom we must depend.

It is the hope of our Government, as stated by the Secretary of War, to have one million five hundred thousand American soldiers on European soil during the year 1918. The estimate of English experts is that it requires five tons of shipping to transport and supply each soldier on foreign soil, and this amount of shipping increases directly with the distance of the home country from the seat of war. Thus, on the most conservative basis, the United States will need from eight to ten million tons of shipping to transport, equip, feed, and supply with powder and guns its army of a million and a half, if it should have such an army this year.

There are to-day afloat ships which can be used for this purpose amounting to certainly not more than three or four million tons. Thus by a very simple process of elementary subtraction it will be seen that we must construct this year at least six million tons if we are to carry out our hopeful programme of placing an army of a million and a half men in the field. We must do this or rely on British or Allied shipping, and the submarines are constantly depleting British and Allied shipping. To get this six million tons of shipping, without which we cannot strike the blow we ought to strike against Prussian barbarism, the Shipping Board, whose Chairman is Mr. Edward N. Hurley, is bending every end to the completion of the vast programme of building from six to eight million tons of shipping. Under conditions as they exist to-day, with shipyards as they are now being operated and with the number of men now employed in ship-building, it is believed that if we construct three million tons of shipping we should be doing well. We must therefore augment in some way or other our shipyard capacity, the number of men who are already at work in those yards, and the per capita efficiency of those men. It is towards this augmentation of American ship-building power that the campaign inaugurated by the Government is directed. The movement is officially called a movement to create

a body of "United States Shipyard Volunteers." The men who sign the pledge as volunteers under this campaign may not be summoned to work to-morrow or the next day, but the Government wants to know what body of expert mechanics it may have in reserve to call on as yards, ship ways, and houses are constructed for this ship-building army.

The question may arise in the mind of the reader what he has to do with this movement if he is not an expert ship mechanic. His first duty is to take such part as he can in arousing public opinion to the necessity of ship-building. Second, he must help his community to make it plain to every mechanic who is fitted by skill and experience to work at shipbuilding that it is his patriotic duty to volunteer. The shipbuilder's work is equal in its honor and responsibility to the duty of the man who has enlisted or been conscripted in the Army or Navy. Our Army and Navy recruits are giving their whole time and thought to the fighting problem. Every man who can lay a keel or drive a rivet must give his entire thought to that question.

If you who read this know a mechanic who is working in a shipyard or who has volunteered to work at some future time in a shipyard, take him by the hand and tell him that you look upon him with the same grateful respect that you look upon the men who are fighting at the western front, and that his country expects him to do his duty just as it expects the soldier or the sailor to do his. Every rivet driven into the plates of a new American transport is a bullet driven into the ranks of the barbarous militarism of Prussia.

THE POWERS OF THE PRESIDENT

The President's request for absolute and unconditional powers to make whatever changes he thinks best in the administrative departments of the Government has definitely established two important facts: (1) That a radical reorganization in those de partments is necessary to secure co-ordination and co-operation and power of immediate action; (2) that this power is not granted to the President by the Constitution, and cannot by him be exercised unless granted by legislation.

The United States Constitution gives to Congress power

To make all laws which shall be necessary and proper for carrying into execution the foregoing powers [that is, all the enumerated powers of Congress], and all other powers vested by this Constitution in the Government of the United States, or in any department or officer thereof.

These departmental powers have been conferred and defined by a great number of laws which the President has no authority to repeal, disregard, or override. The reorganization of the War Department by Secretary Baker, of which we give a summary on page 275, probably goes as far as the President can go without further legislation. It marks a great step in advance. It provides a carefully devised plan both for giving to bureau chiefs authority to act and for co-ordinating their action under one responsible head. It practically abolishes, as far as executive order can do so, the antiquated and ineffective war machine, and puts another in its place. So far as one can judge from reading the description of a new machine in print, it is admirably adapted to its purpose.

But its purpose is limited to a single department of the Gov

ernment.

It does nothing, and could not do anything, to expedite our ship-building. It does nothing, and could not do anything, to meet the possible perils involved in our complicated labor problem. In England the Government has brought about a reorganization of the laboring force of the whole country, shifting labor from factory to factory and from department to department in factories, so that its productive force has been enormously increased. The British Government has done this by promoting highly skilled labor to the highest places, and promoting the less skilled labor to take their places, thus using the skill of every workman to the greatest advantage, and by bringing women into munition work to such an extent that it has been authoritatively said that the women of England by their shell-making won the Battle of the Somme.

The order of Secretary Baker gives the War Department powers to deal with the transportation of military supplies, but

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