Page:Our Girls.pdf/128

From Wikisource
Jump to navigation Jump to search
This page has been proofread, but needs to be validated.
110
OUR GIRLS

these strange new cities must not pause for a moment.

Finally, we look along the Clyde to the great city that gained its first prosperity, perhaps, out of the only British war that remotely resembled this one, when "the great Commoner," sick of the corruption and inefficiency with which it was being prosecuted, went down from his house in Hampstead to the mansion of the First Lord of the Treasury in Lincoln's Inn Fields, and said, with splendid audacity, "I can save England and nobody else can," and then, being made Minister of War, startled the Empire by asking for ten millions in a single year to prove his word. He did prove it. He made himself the first Englishman of his time, and England the first country in the world, and Glasgow, meantime, the greatest manufacturing centre in North Britain. But not even in his wildest dreams could Pitt have thought that a time could come when the shipyards of the Clyde would have to work day and night, and all