The Project Gutenberg eBook, A Woman and the War, by Frances Evelyn Maynard Greville, Countess of Warwick

A WOMAN
AND THE WAR

BY

THE COUNTESS OF WARWICK

AUTHOR OF
"WARWICK CASTLE AND ITS EARLS," "AUTOBIOGRAPHY OF JOSEPH ARCH,"
"AN OLD ENGLISH GARDEN"

NEW YORK
GEORGE H. DORAN COMPANY

COPYRIGHT, 1916,
BY GEORGE H. DORAN COMPANY

PRINTED IN THE UNITED STATES OF AMERICA

PREFACE

It is not without serious reflection that I have collected these thoughts in war time to offer in book form to those who may care to read and ponder them. They were written for the most part on the spur of vital moments, when some of the tendencies of the evil times through which we are living seemed to call for immediate protest. I have felt more strongly than ever in the past two years that we are in danger of accepting as something outside the pale of criticism the judgments of those who lead, and sometimes mislead us. The support or hostility of the newspaper press—in some aspects the greatest distorting medium in the world—is still ruled by party considerations. Loyalty or ill-will to the men in office colours all the views of those who praise or blame, and it happens often that a good measure is damned for what is best or lauded for what is worst in it. Again, I have felt that while much of the fighting spirit of the country is subject to army discipline, the tendency of government has been to make helpless puppets of the citizens who remain behind the forces in the field. In the near future, if we would save what is left of our heritage of freedom, and would even extend the comparatively narrow boundaries that existed before the autumn of 1914, we must relieve the press of the self-conferred duty of thinking for us. We must not give our rulers a blank cheque; their best efforts tend more to rouse our suspicions than to compel our confidence.

Judging all the matters dealt with in these pages as fairly and honestly as I can, I have found myself repeatedly in opposition to the authorities. The legislation from which we have suffered since war began, the efforts to relieve difficult situations and prepare for obvious emergencies have savoured largely of panic and can boast no more than a small element of statesmanship. So I have protested and the protests have grown even beyond the limit of these book covers, while an ever-swelling letter-bag has told me that I have interpreted, however feebly, the thoughts, wishes, and aspirations of many thinking men and women. We are on the eve of events that will demand of evolution that it mend its paces or become revolution without more ado. The international crisis and the national makeshifts must have proved to the dullest that the world is out of joint.

I make no claim to traverse the whole ground, modesty forbids, and Mr. Zangwill has accomplished the task in his "War for the World," the most brilliant work that has seen the light since August, 1914. I have sought to point out where and why and how we are moving backwards. I can command no eloquence to gild my words, I cannot pretend to have more to say than will have occurred to every man and woman of advanced views and normal intelligence, but it does not suffice to think; one must make thought the prelude of action. Strong in this belief I have not hesitated to attempt something more than mere criticism. I cannot wave flags, abuse enemies, or extol popular idols; and consequently those who read will please accept these and other limitations.

FRANCES EVELYN WARWICK.

Warwick Castle,
August, 1916.

CONTENTS

A WOMAN
AND THE WAR

I KING EDWARD AND THE KAISER

Since the war began I have read numerous extracts from the press of Germany and from the contributions of German writers to American papers stating in the most unequivocal terms that the late King Edward devoted his political sagacity to the task of isolating Germany, that he promoted alliances to that end, and that he deliberately sought to compass the destruction of the German Empire.

At first I took these remarks to be no more than the rather unfortunate outpourings of the uninformed, but I have seen of late that they have been repeated with great insistence until there is a danger that they will become an article of faith, not alone in Germany but in other countries where Germans have a sympathetic following. I do not choose as a rule to discuss questions of this kind, I prefer to leave popular error to correct itself, but, having enjoyed the confidence of King Edward before and after he came to the throne, having heard from his own lips scores of times his attitude towards Germany and the Germans, it seems to be a duty to set out the plain truth. I will do so in the endeavour to sweep away one of the most ridiculous and mischievous conceptions engendered by the present evil condition of things.

Had I ever imagined that the present crisis, or, for that matter, any political development of the peaceful kind would have led to the statements I seek to refute, how easy it would have been to jot down the purport of conversations in which high policy was discussed! Fortunately, I have an excellent memory and it is reinforced by letters to which I have access, and I hope to commit the reports that have been spread abroad to the oblivion that is their proper place. I can vouch for the absolute truth of all I have to say, and I am writing with a full sense of responsibility.

In the first place the intimate relations between the English and German courts should be remembered; one of my earliest recollections is of being taken to visit the old Empress Augusta at the German Embassy. This was when I was a child, and I know I went many times, so her visits would probably have been frequent. On my writing-table is the silver and mother-of-pearl ornament that was her wedding present to me. Everybody respected the old Emperor William, and everybody admired the Crown Prince Frederick. When he married Queen Victoria's eldest daughter, the Princess Royal, who became, after the death of Princess Alice, King Edward's favourite sister, the relations between the two courts could hardly have been more amicable. Queen Victoria loved Germany and the Germans, she adored her grandson. In her eyes he could do no wrong, she even went so far as to hold him up to her eldest son as a model. On the other hand, the Princess of Wales, being a Dane, could not forget or forgive the theft of Schleswig Holstein; her sister the Russian Empress shared her suspicions of German intentions, but I never heard of one or the other originating or encouraging anti-German intrigues.

As the Kaiser grew up towards manhood his personality was hardly known; his father, the Crown Prince Frederick, a far more noble figure, monopolised attention. Beyond the fact that he was Queen Victoria's favourite grandson nothing was known about William II. Nobody thought that he would be called upon to rule before he was middle aged or elderly; his father's illness was unsuspected. But if there was no ill feeling at the English court, it is impossible to say the same of the court at Berlin. The presence of the Princess Royal was resented; many people believed, or affected to believe, that the marriage had been designed to make Germany politically subservient to Great Britain. As everybody knows, these feelings grew apace as soon as the old Emperor William had breathed his last, and when, a few months later, the Emperor Frederick passed away, the Anglophobia had spread throughout the Court circles and the young Kaiser had been tainted with the Court prejudice against his own mother. He did not treat her well; it is not too much to say that he treated her badly. She, naturally enough, complained to her brother, the Prince of Wales,—I have already said that she was now his best loved sister. He was angry on her account and spoke his mind. Relations between the young Kaiser and his uncle were already strained. I must turn back a little to explain why.

In the early days, when King Edward had arrived at man's estate and married, he sought to take a legitimate interest in state affairs. He was disposed to study and to learn, and sought, not without ample justification, to be admitted to the company of the little group of statesmen who advised the Queen and ruled the Empire. But Queen Victoria would have none of it. She practically refused her son access to the Councils of State, she instructed her Ministers to keep all state papers from him; within the compass of a limited monarchy she was determined to rule alone.

Her eldest son, finding that he was not to be accepted as a worker, decided to amuse himself. If he could not direct public policy he would at least direct fashion, if he could not assist the Foreign Office he could at least enable English Society to take rank among the smartest in Europe. So the Marlborough House set came into existence, and with its rise came the first beginnings of the Kaiser's criticism. There were two grounds for this.

In the first place King Edward's personal popularity was unbounded; wherever he went he charmed women and men, and it was quite clear that he would be a force to be reckoned with in diplomacy, when in the fullness of time he ascended the throne; on the other hand, the Kaiser lacked all the qualities that his uncle possessed in abundance. Hard-working and conscientious, he was petulant, exacting, and uncertain. Naturally, then, he found matter for grievance against the uncle who, seemingly without effort, swayed opinion and enjoyed esteem. Jealousy was the origin of disagreement.

There is another side to the antagonism. The Kaiser was always a very strict-living, sober-minded man, a model husband and father, honestly representative of the domestic virtues in the highest degree. King Edward, largely by force of circumstances, lived a life of gaiety and pleasure; whatever he did he did thoroughly; as it might not be work, it was play. He raced, yachted, shot, played cards, entertained, visited all his friends, and had a wide field of friendships. Though shrewd, worldly, and quick witted, he made certain mistakes, and these gave his nephew an opportunity that was quickly taken. Perhaps the Kaiser would utter a criticism on the spur of the moment, it would be taken up, magnified, polished, and brought over to King Edward in the finished and augmented state. By the way, I am referring, unless I state the contrary, to the years when King Edward was Prince of Wales. I use his final title to cover all the years with which I am dealing. King Edward had great gifts, and when the time came to turn them to the best account, they were invaluable to his country but, as I have said, he was not infallible. He made mistakes.

Tranby Croft provided one, his friendship for Baron Hirsch provided another; for the Baron, though he may have been a charming man-certainly his wife was a charming woman and a dear friend of mine—was an unscrupulous financier who had accumulated a vast fortune by curious and unclean methods of which the full story cannot be told, and yet for all his faults, he was not an ignoble man, but in some phases of his complex nature an idealist and philanthropist.

Berlin sneered at Baron Hirsch, Vienna was actually shocked, for in the Dual Empire a man is judged by his quarterings, and even if he should have made a huge fortune honestly and lacks quarterings he is less than the penniless, vicious, and brainless person of high descent.

King Edward smiled at the rage and spite of Vienna and Berlin. He remarked to one of his intimates that he could not allow either capital to choose his friends for him, and in order that there might be no mistake about his intentions he accepted an invitation from Baron Hirsch to shoot with him on his great estates at Eichorn. I don't know whether Baron Hirsch asked any Austrians or Germans, certainly none accepted the invitation, and King Edward found, much to his amusement, that all the other guests were Englishmen. He merely laughed, enjoyed his visit, and then, after it was over, visited the Baron in Paris, to the intense annoyance of the Jockey Club there. Perhaps it was not altogether wise to defy the conventions, but of course English Society has never been quite as exclusive as that of Berlin or Vienna.

The Kaiser chafed at his uncle's association with a mushroom financier whose record was only too well known, he chafed too when King Edward spent long hours at Homburg with the Empress Frederick who had a castle there in the days of her widowhood. The love between the brother and sister was very beautiful. She confided all her troubles to him from the early days, for oddly enough when there were family quarrels Queen Victoria sided with her grandson against the Princess Royal, but it is only right and fair to say that the Kaiser reciprocated her affection, and his grief when she passed away was heartfelt. The Homburg meetings were gall and wormwood to the Kaiser and they renewed the old fear of his uncle's popularity. When instead of going to Homburg in Germany, King Edward went to Marienbad in Austria there was still more uneasiness in Berlin's governing circles, for King Edward's extraordinary personal magnetism was known and feared, he was credited with having the power if he chose to exercise it of seriously disturbing the foundations of the Triple Alliance. The Kaiser need not have been uneasy, his uncle did not enter into political conversations.

It will be seen then that the disagreement between uncle and nephew had been little more than a sort of family quarrel intensified by the high standing of both parties. I have heard King Edward speak angrily of his nephew, but only because of the way he treated his mother, the personal gibes and criticisms did not often sting him, he merely said his nephew was suffering from megalomania and had not learned to control a rather unruly tongue. In all the years I have passed mentally in review I do not remember hearing King Edward utter a single sentence of ill-will to Germany.

The Kaiser's visits to England in the earlier days have left no special impression upon my memory. I remember dancing opposite to him in a quadrille at a Court Ball in Buckingham Palace and being present at a dinner-party given for him in a private house. His friends among the ladies of England were the wives of members of the Royal Yacht Squadron; among these was Lady Ormonde. She used to stay at Kiel for the yachting festival, as guest of the Kaiser with her husband who was then Commodore of the R.Y.S.

In all his criticisms King Edward was scrupulously fair. Even in discussing his sister's relations with her son he would add that they were both strong personalities with different sympathies and view-points, and that sustained agreement between them was probably impossible. He admired the Kaiserin frankly, as all must who know the gracious and kindly lady who in her own quiet and unobtrusive fashion has filled her life with good deeds.

Relations between King Edward and his nephew improved immensely when Queen Victoria died. Not only did the Kaiser come over to the funeral, but he seemed on that occasion to have laid aside the brusqueness that had marked earlier visits. All the Court noticed it, and King Edward commented upon it to me with very evident pleasure. The process of improvement in relations started about 1899. Through the Boer War events had been moving towards a reconciliation.

The Kaiser's correct behaviour during the war, which his frenzied telegram on the occasion of the Raid had done something to bring about, placated King Edward, and after Queen Victoria's death relations between the two men improved sensibly. The Kaiser either limited his criticisms or saw to it that they were not indiscreetly uttered. The old friendliness was resumed, and things became as they were after the attempt on King Edward's life in Denmark when the Kaiser left Berlin and met the royal train at the frontier station to congratulate his uncle upon his escape and inquire after his health. King Edward wrote to me from Sandringham on his return. After thanking me for a letter and telegram of congratulations, he said that the Kaiser came all the way from Berlin to meet his train at Altona and inquire after his health. He thought that was very kind of the Kaiser.

I remember that the Kaiser's later visits to England were quite a success. King Edward remarked to me, when his nephew was staying at Highcliffe in Hampshire for his health, how greatly he had improved in manner, how courteous and considerate he was, and how much of the old unrest and irritability seemed to have gone. Between King George, Queen Mary, and the Kaiser, relations could not have been more friendly, and when King Edward and Queen Alexandra went to Berlin he thoroughly enjoyed his visit, and told me as much on his return.

How then, it may be asked, shall we account for the Anglo-French convention of 1904, and for the meeting between King Edward and the Tsar at Réval when the foundations of friendship between England and Russia were laid? In Germany it is believed that these arrangements were aggressive in their intention and demonstrated King Edward's hostility. In both cases King Edward, absolutely faithful to the Constitution, followed the advice of his ministers, and did not discuss his personal predilections at all. After the Réval meeting I asked him his view of the political situation, and as far as my memory serves this is what he said: "Germany is our commercial rival, she has a magnificent business aptitude, she might develop with growing riches and a few adventurous statesmen a rivalry of another kind. The Réval meeting, with the French convention, will I hope put an end to the possibility. But nothing has been done that stands in the way of a good understanding between London and Berlin. I believe all sensible men desire peace. We have no quarrel with Germany or any other power."

I may add that King Edward admired Germany almost as much as he loved France. The thoroughness of the German business method, the rejection of everything slovenly in thought and action, impressed him greatly, and he once made a remarkable statement to me. It was in London in the late winter of 1909-10, a few months before he died. He came to tea and talked of German administration. "Do you know," he said, "that if this country could be controlled in the same way, we should be all the better for it? If we could be ruled by Germans just long enough to have our house put in order"—he paused, and added with a laugh—"You know the trouble is that if we once had them we could not get rid of them." This statement was made during our last conversation; I never saw King Edward again, but his words should be sufficient to show that he was not animated by an ill-feeling towards the German Empire. They are hardly the words of a man who plotted against the land ruled over by the son of the woman who was at once his favourite sister and most devoted friend.

Age, and an experience of great affairs not to be excelled by any of his contemporaries, had made King Edward a sane and philosophic observer. He possessed very few prejudices, and he never allowed his feelings as a man to stand between him and his duties as a king. But if his personal views had affected political issues it would never have been to Germany's detriment, for every criticism that I heard him utter over a long period of years has been set out here. He had a real love for his French and Austrian friends and a quiet respect for his German acquaintances. I may add that King Edward not only hated war and would have been most reluctant to take any step that might ensue it, but he regarded people with bellicose ideas as fit occupants of asylums. The fine fabric of civilisation impressed him, and he saw in war the blind force that would destroy it and leave the world laboriously and painfully to rebuild. His real interests lay in the direction of social reform, and he even found the trappings of state, in which as a rule he took delight, a little heavy when he realised that they deprived him of the right of free speech enjoyed by the humblest citizen of the realm. He made it his business to know what Germany was doing to solve the problems of unemployment, housing, and factory management, and in the last years of his life his intercourse with Liberal statesmen quickened his interest in plans for the betterment of the class that does the work. Time out of mind he spoke of what Germany had achieved in this direction, always with the frank admiration that only a good sportsman can give under all circumstances. Far from seeking to bring war about, it is with me an article of faith that had he been living in July, 1914, there would have been no war. The immense personal influence he wielded would have been thrown into the scales on the side of peace, he would have reconciled differences at the eleventh hour for he was persona gratissima in every court of Europe, and there is not among the rulers of Europe one who would not have listened when he spoke. Those who suggest that he helped to build the pyre upon which the best and bravest of nearly all the nations of the world are now being consumed, do but slander the dead and testify to their own ignorance.

II THE GREATEST FIGHT OF ALL

In his famous essay on Mr. Montgomery's poems Macaulay speaks of the degradation to which those must submit who are resolved to write when there are scarcely any who read.

It seems a little idle to suggest that two years of war have availed to reduce readers to vanishing point; indeed, editors and publishers of daily and weekly papers testify to an increase of circulation. Paper is harder to obtain than readers; the cause of trouble is that the written word is all of one kind. The love of sensation, strongest amongst those whose mental equipment is of the slightest, is being sedulously catered for, the townsman requires tales of the slaughter of his enemies to give a flavour to his breakfast, his lunch, and his dinner.

Even the countryman, who with no more than one newspaper in twenty-four hours must spread sensation over a day, seems to insist upon flamboyant headlines and cheerful tales of slaughter. Mild-mannered folk, who would turn vegetarians rather than help to kill the meat that is set upon their tables, may be heard enthusiastically calculating the enemy's losses in terms of six or seven figures, and discussing the hairbreadth incidents of flood and field as though they themselves carried a more dangerous weapon than an umbrella and had faced more serious troubles in the normal day than an ill-cooked meal, an appointment lost, or a train missed. In short, people who must stay at home because they are no longer of fighting age, strength, or inclination, are being encouraged to act as the audience. Happily, perhaps, for them, they cannot see the actual performance, but they can hear about it, and, as a rule, they are told what their minds are best prepared to receive. Truth has received instructions to remain at the bottom of her well or risk court-martial. Life is reduced to its primitive elements; war, while it dignifies many of those who take an active part in it, does little more than degrade the constant reader of papers of the baser and most popular kind. It is to be feared that the sane view of life is never the appealing one, the untrained eye can see trees but never a wood, and the man in the street is nearest to the editorial heart because his name is legion, and the advertiser says to him, as Ruth said to Naomi, "Whither thou goest, I will go."

In the early nineties there was a literary movement of great promise in London; the Boer War extinguished it; in the last half-dozen years we have seen a brisk effort towards the development of a national or even international social programme; this war may set it back for a generation; War is ever fatal to ideas. Men whose minds were being turned slowly and reluctantly to questions they had been educated to ignore are now concerned with two problems—winning the war and making good the injuries it has entailed. The increased taxation, the business losses, seemingly irrecoverable, will develop a certain natural hardness of fibre, and there is a danger that the social movements, slow in times of prosperity, will halt in the times to come.

The season of trouble for those "resolved to write" is upon the publicists of the social reform movement. They must be prepared for hard knocks and for all the arts of misrepresentation and vilification. The general reader will first denounce, then ignore and finally listen to the survivors of the common-sense crusade. The people who start to state facts will be the leaders of a forlorn hope, and our brave fellow-countrymen did not face as great an odds in the retreat from Mons. A fight for the universal reduction of armaments and for the remodelling of the existing system of government will be met by indignant cries for conscription and less freedom. The ubiquitous hand of the German will be traced in every line that pleads for toleration, good will, and the removal of all autocracies under whatever name; any suggestion of a return to Christian teaching will be denounced as the highest immorality. There are many who hold that a conscript Army and a larger Navy would have saved us from this war; they cannot see that we should have done no more than postpone the evil day until it dawned upon Europe in a still greater magnitude of evil, if this be possible, and that our commercial class, impeded by forced service, would have been unable to provide the means to pay the bill. The ulcer of European armament has burst at last, and the remedy proposed for the debilitated body of the Western World will be a still larger ulcer to take the place of the one that demanded so much labour to feed and so much life-blood to cleanse it.

In the same way the effort to make democracy articulate, to raise the standard of the national intelligence, will be fiercely resisted by those who believe that the way of the world in the past must be the way of the world in the future. The attempt to improve upon the methods of our fathers is tolerated in the worlds of science, medicine, and commerce, the innate conservatism of government is sacrosanct. To educate millions of able-bodied men, not to the fighting pitch but beyond and above it, will be denounced as high treason, and will be opposed by autocracies, bureaucracies, cannon-makers and publicans alike. A rise to the heights of sanity is, must be, the death of vested interests, and every force to the hands of authority will be employed to check the dreaded movement. According to a well-established formula, the method of attack will be to denounce very bitterly suggestions that have never been put forward and principles that have no adherents. In this way issues can be confused and obscured.

To be drunk with victory or dazed by defeat is to be particularly sensitive to the more brutal cries of war. The victor desires the full reward of good fortune, as Germany did in 1871; the vanquished nurses revenge, as France has done ever since the end of the struggle that found her so ill-prepared. Counsels of moderation are declared to be inadmissible until the status quo ante has been restored, and every force that makes for the spoliation of the simple by the worldly wise takes the field against common sense. The appeal of the dead is forgotten by all living save the woman whose mission it is to raise another generation for destruction; the lessons of history cannot be recalled by those who have never learned them.

Against all the difficulties outlined here, and many another that need not be set down, a small body of men and women, inspired by a great ideal, must labour in every country that has seen war or even realised its significance. They must speak and write in the face of fierce opposition and contempt, for war has swept away many of the landmarks they had already set up, together with many of those who had learned to regard them; they must face the truth that many a genuine altruist, shocked unutterably by the revelations of the war, is a little ashamed of his earlier altruism and anxious to forget its existence. They must be prepared for a certain coarsening of the nation's moral fibre, for a long-lived return to the more brutal outlook associated with the Napoleonic era. In some countries revenge will have become an article of faith, in others suspicion will be a no less dominant factor. The whole mental currency will have suffered debasement, and it will be difficult for some vices to be recognised as anything worse than virtues enforced upon a nation by the hazard of war.

If the truth about the whole conflict that has laid waste so great a portion of the civilised world could be ascertained and agreed, the difficulties would tend to disappear, responsibility would be fixed. Unfortunately, agreement is beyond the generation's reach; we may remember that there are many who still regard the seizure of Silesia by Frederick the Great as a genuine expression of Prussia's mission, and that history is written to suit the country to which it is intended to appeal. Limitations, whether geographical, political, or social, are the sworn foes of truth, and in the effort to remove them an appeal to international common sense affords the best hope of success.

For many of the world's thinkers who stay at home to-day, neither physically fit to fight nor financially able to succour distress, there is this great work waiting to be done. They cannot fight soldiers, but they can fight rancour, malice, and uncharitableness. They cannot fill hungry bodies, but they may help to feed starved minds. They can bring a light to those who walk in darkness and make articulate the thoughts that stir many a heart and brain. They can give courage to those who fear the sound of their own voices and have not the strength of mind to say the words that may not be spoken without offence to the unthinking. When fighting is over—and it will pass, as all tragedies must, though it seems to fill a lifetime while it lasts—the greatest questions of strife will clamour for a wise solution. People write glibly about the war that is to end war, but let us remember that this issue depends not upon statesmen but upon the democracies of all the combatant and neutral countries. What we want is a modern Peter the Hermit or two in every country of Europe, to preach the crusade of Christianity and to bring home to the world at large the price of war. There is no material reward for this service, and even recognition is likely to be posthumous; the courage required is of the fine kind that moves alone over uncharted ground. But, just as a kingdom at war calls for men to man the trenches and face annihilation with the smiling cheerfulness that robs death of half its sting and all its terror, so a return of peace calls for its heroes of thought to do battle with all the evils that make it possible for men who have no quarrel to assemble in their millions for mutual destruction.

The whole system of government that makes these conditions and must be indicted for them is rotten to the core, but it is enthroned in power, and will not deal lightly, or even justly, with those who assail it.

Against this hard truth we have to remember that every evil that has been subdued since the dawn of history has been fought in the first instance by one man or a handful of men. If we have only a small proportion of thinkers to-day we have more than there were of old time, when the simplest education was the advantage of the few. Paganism was a more terrible force than militarism in the years of the advent of Christ, and it was overthrown by the labours of one man and his tiny following. To-day democracy is all powerful, if and when it can be taught to open eyes and ears. Those who will undertake the perilous task may make this war, whatever and whenever its termination, a fruitful thing for the generations to come, while, on the other hand, if the lessons are not read aright, we may look to pass from tragedy to tragedy, until all civilisation is submerged.

III ENGLAND'S DRINK LEGISLATION

It is hard to pierce the thick cloud of cant in which, as a nation, we are all too apt to shroud ourselves. I do not think we are hypocritical, although that charge is laid to our door by all our ill-wishers, but I do believe we are hopelessly conventional, and seldom muster up the courage necessary to call a spade a spade.

I have been re-reading of late, the endless comment upon the drink legislation, some of it frankly inspired by publicans and sinners—I mean distillers—some of it the pure outpouring of cranks, most of it prejudiced, or uninformed, or both. We deplore drunken habits, but when Sir Cuthbert Quilter tried to persuade Parliament to pass a Pure Beer Bill he met with no success. The worst crimes against the person, the common and criminal assaults on women and children, are largely due to drink, and of this drink raw and crude spirits are the worst part; but we do nothing to protect our poorer classes from the poison. To introduce "square face" gin among the black population of some of our possessions is a deadly offence, the punishment is heavy, swift, and certain, but to poison the workers of our great manufacturing centres is business, and many quite worthy people believe that "when Britain first at Heaven's command arose from out the azure main" it was to do business, and as much of it as possible. Naturally it follows that the fight against cant is all the harder because most of us do not recognise cant when we hear it. I remember how when temperance legislation was first mooted as a war measure many friends who can afford to buy pure French wines and spirits of great age and mellowness solemnly assured me that temperance legislation is mere foolishness, and that they themselves are living proofs that moderation, good health, and a wise activity march hand-in-hand.

But of late years a certain number of women of all classes have been drinking more than is good for them, and since the war broke out the working women's temptations in this direction and the opportunity to indulge them have grown side by side.

The majority of working women are as sober as the majority of every class, but, though there are thousands of temperate women, they are matched by thousands of intemperate ones, the number has grown apace, and I feel they should be saved from themselves. The sober classes cannot resent restriction. It leaves them where they were. The intemperate classes may resent restriction, but it remains necessary in their own interests.

I don't suppose many people read Harrison Ainsworth's novels to-day, but I remember a striking passage in "Jack Sheppard," where Mrs. Sheppard justifies herself to her friend Wood, the carpenter, who has told her that Gin-lane is the nearest road to the churchyard. It is worth quoting—

"It may be; but if it shortens the distance and lightens the journey I care not," retorted the widow.... "The spirit I drink may be poison—it may kill me—perhaps it is killing me, but so would hunger, cold, misery—so would my own thoughts. I should have gone mad without it. Gin is the poor man's friend—his sole set-off against the rich man's luxury.... When worse than all, frenzied with want, I have yielded to horrible temptation and earned a meal the only way I could earn one ... I have drunk of this drink and forgotten my cares, my poverty, and my guilt."

The working women whose husbands are at the war have many excuses. They are deprived of their husbands, and—though there is no need to emphasise the point it cannot be overlooked—their lives are a drab monotony of toil, their surroundings are often of the most unfavourable description, the only restraint that can reach them is self-restraint, and their training has done little to provide it. The public-house offers companionship, a brief surcease of anxiety, light and warmth. Many are enervated by much child-bearing, worn out by much house or factory work. They meet temptation and succumb, but let us remember that in classes removed from the same form of temptation there is no lack of intemperance. A very small dose of bad spirits is enough to provide the cheap anodyne some are seeking, and under the influence of drink they are apt to lose their self-respect. The craving for drink grows with what it feeds on, and in all too many cases the hold upon self-respect falters and is lost. We have sent very many men to the war, but enough and more than enough remain behind to take advantage of women who have lost all or even a part of their normal control.

In touch with serious workers in many of the fields of endeavour that make brief oases in the deserts of industrialism, I know that both drink and prostitution have increased since war began, and I know that drink is the great support of prostitution, and that thousands of women of the class we must pity most have a natural sense of shame that drink destroys. If the demons of ruin—gin and whisky—had not been busy pouring gold into the national treasury, day by day and year by year, they would have been exorcised long since. But business is business, and the gentlemen whose activity corrupts the country can always talk of freedom and liberty, and declare to thunders of applause that Britons never shall be slaves. The possibility of being free to be a slave to drink never occurs to them, or if it does they forget to mention it.

But while I welcome legislation that will tend to keep women sober, and believe that our sex stands in need of more sobriety by reason of its sedentary life, I am far from thinking that the law that is good for women is necessarily good for man. The conditions are altogether different. The self-respecting artisan and skilled worker drink less than ever they did. The men who are doing the country's work to-day in all the armament manufacturing areas need a stimulant, need it far more than the prosperous City man, the real toper of our times. He will drink champagne and whisky with his lunch, and, having had quite enough of both, will damn the working classes for being given to the use of intoxicants. I have been through some of those great works in the north, where labour at and round the furnaces is unremitting, and where to-day the pace has been increased to the extreme limit of physical power. To preach temperance to the armament worker is an absurdity; if he is not to be stimulated according to his needs his hours will need to be greatly diminished; it is impossible for him to give out unless he takes in. Why, in the name of all that is sensible, should he not have that which will help him? Why should he have remained so long at the mercy of cheap, vile spirits that are a more or less effective poison? Why should he be at the mercy of the people who, having little hard work to do, can thrive comfortably upon lemonade and barley water? The manufacturers spare no pains to obtain the very finest material for their own work; if it is necessary to spend a few or many thousands of pounds upon new plant the money is forthcoming without a murmur. Does it pass the wit of these sapient people to give to humanity a little of the thought they give to raw material? Can they not see that the best and purest drink that the new regulations permit is within reach of the workers, and that the rest is out of reach?

It has long been the custom of the capitalist class in normal times to give the workman bad drink with one hand and to raise the other hand with an expression of holy horror against the sin of drunkenness, quite ignoring the truth that the quality, rather than the quantity, that people drink is often the deciding factor—that every class drinks, and that if the vice looks worse in one class than another it is because the poorer the man or woman, the viler the alcohol supplied to them. There are so many excellent people who preach temperance and live on the dividends of drunkenness, there are so many who believe that a reasonable excess in matters of drink is a form of manly virtue, and there are yet more who believe honestly in moderation, and do not see that their good brand of claret, burgundy, or brandy should be denied to them, seeing they have never abused it.

For myself, I drink a glass of good wine; failing that I am content with pure water. If we could give our working classes nothing but the best, and at a price within their means, I should look askance at legislation, of whatever kind; but I recognise the old truth that the destruction of the poor is their poverty, and that the working man and woman have always been penalised, and will continue to be, until Government recognises its responsibilities, and rides its supporters of the drink trade with a very tight rein.

Above all I feel that the new legislation that has first restricted and then diluted the working man's drink must not be regarded as an isolated instance, but as part of the vast changes that the war will ensue. The working man will not forego his legitimate refreshment; it is for the Government to see that it is pure and reasonably harmless. Good beer in moderation will not hurt anybody; bad spirits are the foundation of disease and crime, and, in their silent fashion, are always fighting against the best interests of the State. Sometimes, when I read that the perpetrator of some ghastly crime has been sentenced to death or a long term of imprisonment, with all the pomp and circumstance of our criminal courts, I find myself wondering what poison was administered to him in some squalid public-house, and who among those who rejoice that justice has been done, or vengeance executed, have actually derived financial benefit from the drink that turned a man into a beast. We punish the poor fool with a diseased appetite, we confer some honour or reward upon the prime offender. Then when our enemies say that we are hypocrites we are indignant because of their injustice, or contemptuous of their ignorance, knowing as we do, that God is in Heaven, and that business is business.

Finally, and quite apart from the immediate significance of the drink question, I rejoice in any legislation that will help the working-classes to the full possession of their faculties. If drink helps them to forget intolerable surroundings, insufficient pay, the deprivation of their fair share of the world's beauties, let us be glad that it is taken from them in its worst forms. They will see with clear eyes and with wiser heads, they will no longer be at the mercy of those who pander to their weakness in order to keep them weak. They will enter upon the great struggle that lies before democracy with stronger will and stronger armour. They have surrendered much of their power to the public-house, and the longer its shutters are up the more leisure they will have to see that there are better things in life, the greater will be their determination to share them with the fortunate classes.

There is a time of trouble in store; they cannot be too well equipped to meet it.

IV WAR AND MARRIAGE

The problem that faces a State when it sends its best and most virile men to kill and to be killed has certain aspects that few have the courage to handle. For long years, while Europe was an armed camp, the claims of love were admitted amid the demands of war, but now that the dreaded era—which each nation was hurrying through the medium of extravagant armaments and secret diplomacy—has come upon us, we are without a definite plan for securing the continuity of the best elements in the race. If I thought that this appalling war were no more than the prelude to others, I would pray that every woman might be sterile, but hope, our last and eternal refuge against the ills of life, suggests that this most terrible cataclysm will strengthen the hands of democracy and give it the strength to resist further sacrifices in years to come. While the grass grows the horse starves, and while we think of the generation to come, thousands, hundreds of thousands of Europe's best and bravest lie in their hasty graves, and the cry of Mother Earth is still "they come." What has been done by our rulers to see that the fittest shall leave behind them some to take a share of the white man's burden?

Very little. The men of the middle and upper classes who happened to be engaged have in very many cases been wise and patriotic enough to marry, and their wives have proved themselves as full of courage as of love. In order to marry, men have often been obliged to pay the Church an absurd tax, for the Church has shown itself quite inadequate to the occasion, and trumpery restrictions, meaningless in times of peace and a scandal in time of war, have not been relaxed. The poor man cannot afford a special license, and in many instances has married without the aid or sanction of the Church. As we know, the State decided to recognise the unmarried wives of the nation's brave defenders, a courageous and proper step that evoked the wildest protests from the narrow-minded, the "unco guid," and the fanatics who believe that man was made for morality rather than that morality was made for man. They did not pause to reflect that our absurd and antiquated divorce laws are the chief cause of illicit unions, and that divorce is hardly less hard for the poor to obtain than are decent housing, warm clothing, and nourishing food. Happily, in making this concession to the men who are offering their lives to their country, the genius of red tape contrived to assert itself. Hard though it may be to realise, it was for some time a fact that, if a man home on leave married his unmarried wife in order that his children might bear his name, his wife's allowance ceased because he came under the head of those who married after enlisting! The very quintessence of stupidity could have achieved nothing finer.

Unfortunately the majority of those at the front are unmarried. It was considered sufficient to find them physically sound, to vaccinate and inoculate them and then to send them to take their chance. The question of the years to come was never considered. There is no department of War Office or Admiralty that embraces eugenics. I have looked in vain through the speeches of statesmen for a single recommendation to our defenders to marry and leave behind them some pledge of their affection, some asset for the real national treasury that does not consist of gold, as is popularly supposed, but of vigorous men and women as anxious to live for their country as they are willing to die for it. To be sure every wife would have cost the country three pounds a month for the term of the war, and this thought may have given our prudent legislators pause; but I venture to suggest that a wife as a national asset is cheap, even at that price.

The balance has been redressed to some extent, in fashion at once inevitable and unsatisfactory. The billeting of great masses of virile young men in various centres throughout the country, and the opportunities that the new life has afforded resulted in an increase in the number of illegitimate births. I have heard of this from many quarters, and have every reason to believe, in spite of denials, that no district in which large numbers of soldiers have been gathered together will prove an exception to the general rule. Whatever the moral aspect of the question, it cannot be overlooked or ignored. I deplore the promiscuity, though I believe that a wise and daring statesmanship, ready to meet new conditions with new remedies, would have avoided it; but I would like to plead for the foolish mothers, often little more than girls, and for the babes, who in many instances will never see a father's face.

I am not urging humanity in place of morality, for most people lack the moral courage to listen to such a plea; it is rather in the interests of the State that I urge the proper, and even generous, treatment of all those who, before this year is ended, will have entered the world unwanted and unwelcomed. They will be the children of men in the first flush of manhood, of men not lacking in courage and character (or they would not have joined the colours), of men whose fault was that they could not resist temptation in its least resistible form. We must think of the psychology of the soldier who knows that in a few short weeks he may be among the nameless dead, who has embarked upon the greatest of all adventures, and says, "Let me rejoice and be merry, for to-morrow I die." Doubtless in many cases he will return and marry the mother of his child if fate permits, often he will not return, and a soldier's death may well clear a soldier's name.

It should not outrage morality to see that the children, whether they be many or few, born of men gone to the front should be looked after by the State where the mother is unable adequately to provide for them, and it should be possible, too, in cases where the father returns and marries the mother of his child, that such marriage should make the offspring legitimate. It is not a large concession; in many European countries, France included, marriage atones for previous indiscretions, and if this were so in England there would be a much greater tendency to regularise irregular unions for the children's sake. If nothing is done hundreds of young mothers who succumbed to exceptional temptation will be outcasts. Under the most favourable normal conditions, the lot of the little one will be hard. When this hideous war is over, I would like the regimental officers to put the facts fairly and squarely to their men, to ask them to remember the girls they left behind them, and to be able to assure them, in the name of the Government, that if they would, on their return, marry the mother of their child, that child would become ipso facto legitimate.

I am quite sure that many excellent people will find this plea immoral, that they will say it is condoning irregular sex union, that it is removing the burden from those who have transgressed. I deny these suggestions even before they are made. To my mind there is more immorality, more glaring offence to the Creator in one battlefield full of dead and mangled humanity, than in all the illegitimate children who will have come crying into our tear-stricken world before the war draws to its end. Those who rule over Europe and, being unable to settle their differences, sent millions of men, who have no quarrel, to deface the earth and slaughter one another, are morally responsible for every change in the normal life of mankind. Those who replenish the earth are better than those who destroy it.

War is a monstrous immorality that seeks to destroy the world; the illicit unions, to which I refer in the interest of those who pay the penalty—the mother and the child—are a minor immorality from which, with a little care, a little loving-kindness, and a little fore-knowledge, much good, much deep morality may spring.

There is not much time to lose; there will be much opposition to overcome, and the work of helping the helpless will be widely condemned by those who, having no feelings, are always able to control them. But the effort is worth making, and so I plead here, first, for ample facilities for those who wish to marry before they go abroad; secondly, for the legitimation of the children whose fathers, now at the war, come back and marry the mothers, and, lastly, for some special care of the mother and children themselves.

V NURSING IN WAR TIME

Abuses cling to a crisis as barnacles to a ship, and every aspect of war has its own peculiar abuses. While millions do their duty with quiet heroism, there is always a minority that takes advantage, that corrupts others—or itself. Some believe that fraud and foolishness stay at home, that they cannot approach the field of arms, but this is far from being the case.

My thoughts turn back to the South African war, when certain scandals were supposed to have reached their zenith; I look around me to-day, listen to the well-authenticated stories brought to me by relatives and friends, and know that South Africa did not tithe the possibilities of folly and excess. For once I am not pleading for my own sex, I plead for one part of it against the other, for a majority against a minority, for those who are doing what they are paid to do, against those who are voluntary workers. The position comes a little strangely to me when I look at it in this light, but the highly trained, conscientious, painstaking hospital nurse, whose patient heroism proclaims her a true follower of Florence Nightingale, has been exposed to scandalous annoyance for no good purpose and to no useful end, and I feel that I must plead her cause, since she is in the last degree unlikely to plead it for herself.

Society women of a certain class made themselves so notorious in the military hospitals and elsewhere during the South African war that at least one General threatened to send them home and another refused to allow any more to come out. As soon as the greatest struggle of our history started in August, 1914, certain women of means and position proceeded as silently and unostentatiously as was possible under the circumstances to equip hospitals and to set about their self-appointed work. They laboured conscientiously and sought no more publicity than was necessary to enable them to collect money from philanthropists and friends. They did their best, some were already qualified by previous experience, others acquired their knowledge under the most trying conditions possible. They have worked since war began, well content to "scorn delights and live laborious days," some who are near and dear to me have said that they have well-nigh forgotten the old life and the comforts they deemed indispensable only a little while ago. I think it may be claimed for them that they have played a good part, and that in helping others they have not sought to draw attention to themselves or minimise the credit due to the trained sisterhood of love and pity that cheers the wounded and comforts the dying as "The Lady with the Lamp" taught them to do in the far-off days of the great Crimean struggle. They have made many friends and no enemies; the hero of the trenches and the assaulting party has not given more to his country, for both have given their all, the man his strength, the woman her practical sympathy, and both a high degree of physical and moral courage.

Unfortunately there is in London to-day a very large company of young women to whom war was little more than a new sensation. They are not old enough to understand or young enough to be restrained. In normal times they must be "in the movement," however foolish that movement may be, and a war that staggers the old world and the new leaves them very much where they were before. Under the rose they have not diminished their aforetime gaiety, dances and dinner-parties have been the order of the hour. They have not been trumpeted by the section of the Press that delights in recording vain things, but those who view the currents of London's social life know that I am writing the simple truth. There is nothing to be said; let those laugh who may and can at such a season, their laughter proclaims them what they are.

Unfortunately the people I have in mind have not been content to devote themselves to brainless frivolity because they must sample every sensation that the seasons provide, they invaded the sanctuary of the hospital nurse. Scores found their way to the great London hospitals in town to face what they were pleased to regard as training; I have known some who have danced till 3 a.m. and have presented themselves at the hospital at 8 o'clock! Everybody knows that the training of a real hospital nurse is a very serious matter, that it makes full demand upon physical and mental capacity, and that a long period is required to bring the seed of efficiency to flower or fruit. The social butterflies made no such sacrifices; they acquired a trifling and superficial knowledge of a nurse's work, and then set their social influence to work in order to reach some one of the base hospitals where they might sample fresh experience. If they were really useful there it would be unkind to offer a protest, but the general opinion is that they did more harm than good. They subverted discipline, they were a law to themselves, they were too highly placed or protected to be called to order promptly, they showed neither the inclination nor the capacity for sustained usefulness. To sit at the end of a bed and smoke cigarettes with a wounded officer does not develop the efficiency of a hospital.

One heard repeatedly in the early months of the war that this girl or that had gone to the front, and one imagined devotion, self-sacrifice, self-restraint, and a dozen kindred virtues. Unfortunately it is chiefly in the realm of imagination that these virtues existed. For the rest the interlopers wanted limelight, and plenty of it, their pictures flooded the illustrated papers, and to read what was written of them the inexperienced person might imagine that they were bearing the heat and burden of the day, the solitude and anxiety of the night, while in very truth they did no more than search for fresh sensation in an area that should be sacred.

The type of mind that can seek refuge from self and boredom in such surroundings cannot be stricken into seriousness; tragedy cannot reach it. To do a very minimum of work, to attach themselves to the most "attractive" cases, to carry small talk, gabble and gossip into places where so many come to die, these were the main efforts of the young society nurses, and all these outrages were carried on for months on end. The real nurses and sisters were, I am told, bitterly indignant. They asked no more than to be left alone to do their best; but they knew how hard it is to make an effective protest, and they had little or no time to do so. They recognised by reason of their training, the full motive of the excursion into the region of suffering; that craving for excitement, or, in bad cases, erotomania was the motive power. They found their work impeded by the sisterhood of impostors that responds so readily to a fashion of its own making, and their chief hope was that this sensation might pass as so many others have passed, and that the brainless, chattering, thoughtless, empty company, tired of blood and wounds, would find some paramount attraction nearer home.

If there are any who are prepared to think I have overstated the case or have traduced the young women who were lately "somewhere in France," let them find out from their particular heroine how much time she gave to training, how she received her appointment, and how much real hard work she did day by day. That a few have striven hard and nobly I would be the last to deny, but these are not enough either to leaven or purify the mass or to elevate the action of a class that might have been better employed. Let us remember, too, that suffering is always with us, and that even when war is over there will be far too much in all the great centres of our own country. Are these butterfly nurses prepared to remember in the future the profession they invaded? Will they respond to the calls that are made to help, not young, attractive and valiant men, but men, women, and children in every phase of helplessness and hopelessness? I do not think so. There is neither notoriety nor limelight in the sober, serious life of the hospital nurse and sister. Above all there is a hard and necessary discipline that calls for much moral courage to render it tolerable. Physical courage is seldom lacking either in men or women who are well-bred, and it may be freely granted that a certain measure was demanded even of the butterfly nurses; but there is no redemption in this. To savour the full sense of life without courage is impossible. One might as readily make an omelette without breaking eggs. In this case it is courage misdirected, energy misspent.

I feel very strongly about this scandal—so strongly that I have not hesitated to write what is bound to offend some of my own friends; but there are times when it is impossible to be silent if one would live on tolerable terms with one's self. I feel that in these days woman is called upon to make supreme sacrifices, that what she is giving even now is less than will be required of her later on, that her war record and her record when peace is about to return will be scanned closely and critically by generations of really free women yet unborn. To know of a blot upon woman's war-time service record and to make no attempt to erase it is impossible. The record of the real nursing sisterhood is brilliant in the extreme. Why should it be obscured for the sake of a few highly placed and foolish young women who sought with the minimum of labour to make the maximum of effect? It is unjust, ungenerous, and altogether unworthy of the representatives of families that in many cases have earned their ample honours legitimately enough.

Great Britain owes more than it can ever repay to the nursing sisterhood; and it is intolerable that while their silent heroism passes with so little recognition, any girl of good family who assumes a uniform she has not won the right to wear should pose as the representative of a sisterhood she is not worthy to associate with, of whose tradition she is ignorant, of whose high discipline and complete restraint she is intolerant. There are three classes of women in our midst. The first earns reward and claims it, the second earns reward and does not claim it, the last claims reward and does not earn it. Of these classes the real nurse belongs to the second, and the butterfly sisterhood to the third. At such a season as this there is no room in our midst for the last, and it would be well for us all if authority could spare a moment from manifold activities firmly and ruthlessly to suppress its future activities. The hardship involved would be of the slightest and the benefit serious and lasting.

VI TWO YEARS OF WAR—WOMAN'S LOSS AND GAIN

The long-drawn-out agony of strife is now two years old and, as each day adds its tale of slaughter to the incalculable total, we women may pause in our war work for a moment and endeavour to estimate our own position. We are no longer as we were, "like Niobe, all tears." Niobe, if I remember rightly, taunted the gods, and for this offence all her children were taken from her. We women did nothing to cause our own misfortune; on the contrary, we strove in our little way to promote peace, and to that end, above many others, we sought a hearing in the councils of the nations.

But it was not to be. Our claims were ridiculed or ignored, and now man-made war has swept over Europe like a blight, and we are left to aid our country through the day and to mourn, when the long day's work is done, for our fathers and brothers, our husbands and sons. Yet perhaps the worst is not with those who mourn. The Immortals can sport with them no longer. When the last of Niobe's twelve children had passed, the limits of Latona's vengeance were reached. To have killed the mother too had been a kindness.

The woman whose son or husband has been snatched from her knows the fullness of sorrow, but anxiety for their fate must pass her by, while those of us whose loved ones are on the battlefield would hardly hope for a moment's peace of mind if it were not for the duties that engage our working hours and sometimes earn dreamless sleep. In a wonderful procession that tramped through muddy London under the rain a year ago I saw a great petition by women for the means not only to serve, but to forget.

After all, this claim to national service is no more than was advanced in the old days when access to the heads of the Government was barred and the hooligans of a great city were allowed to give full rein to their impulses. Then our rulers thought they could dispense with women, to-day we are recognised as indispensable. That is all, but it is very much, and it sets me the question that is the title of this brief paper—What has woman lost and what has woman gained?

She has lost much that was dearest to her, much that life is powerless to replace. All the springs of her being have nourished the love that she has given to her dear ones, to the man who was her choice, to the son who fed upon her life. In many cases she has lived almost entirely in her children, for the ties that bind her to the active pleasures of life grow weak in conflict with the powers of maternity. She has forgotten the brief years in which she lived for herself and savoured all the sweets of existence, she has lived in her children, happy chiefly in their happiness, ambitious only for their future and concerned with the struggle for the freedom of her sex less on account of her own generation than on account of that which is to follow. It is woman's rôle to give, it is man's rôle to take, and custom has staled for him the infinite variety of his taking. And now he has taken so much that made life worth living that she seeks an anodyne for her grief in giving him all that is left to give, the labour of her hands.

This is not only true of the women of England, it applies equally to the women of every belligerent country, friend and foe alike, and it may be said that between the women of the world there is a common sacrifice and a common sympathy. All have suffered, all must continue to suffer, on a scale that this old world of ours, with all its crimes and tragedies beyond number and beyond belief, cannot parallel. It is this truth that steadies our nerves and strengthens our hearts and sets us looking, past the ultimate sacrifice, to what may lie beyond, not for ourselves but for others.

All that we have has been taken or is being demanded of us. Is there in all the world something to which we may look forward with confidence, something that may justify hope? I think there is. Without any sense of pride we may claim that woman has at least vindicated the claims she advanced in those peaceful days that seemingly lie so far behind us. She claimed that she was worthy to play her part in the conduct of national life, that she was in very truth indispensable to it; she was told, by brutal word or brutal deed, that her ambitions outran her capacities. One year of war has given the lie to this assertion. Woman, even before the coming of compulsion, encouraged her dearest to go, if needs be, to their death, in a war for which she has no shadow of responsibility before God or man. Conventions, agreements, treaties, alliances, in all these things she has no share, but as soon as they materialise in war she must pay the heaviest price.

The excitement and glory of a struggle in which the fighter feels that he has surrendered his life to high causes is not for her, she must be content with the pale reflex or with the tragedy. In her heart she may know that man incurs the penalties of his ambitions or bad diplomacy or unpreparedness for upheaval; but those penalties press heavier on women than on men, for, even granting that the love of husband for wife and wife for husband be equal, yet the passion of a mother for her child and her grief when he is snatched from life in the hours when life is unfolding all its possibilities, is something beyond the strength of man to grasp.

But woman has not failed on account of her griefs, she has strangled them—or she has tried to with all the strength that has been given to her—and she has gone out into the market-place and said, "What more do you require of me? Ask and I will give, direct and I will obey." Hers has been the supreme sacrifice, and now at the moment when all that seemed worth striving for had passed, she sees suddenly a fresh horizon, the Pisgah view of the Promised Land.

She realises that man is at last beginning to understand and even to acknowledge her place in the world, that the future cannot repeat the errors of the past, that the day-dawn of her emancipation is visible. This war, reconciling so many differences, rebuking so much pride and bringing so many men and women face to face for the first time in their life with life's actualities, has united all workers, irrespective of class or sex. It is seen now that woman has a part to play in the conduct of the State, and that there are spheres of activity in which women might and must work for the common good. She and man together must build up a new civilisation out of the wrecks of the old one, not only here but throughout the strife-stricken world. Old barriers, time-worn prejudices, a blind conservatism—what part have these in the mental attitude of nations freed from overwhelming peril?

The soul of my sex would be as desolate to-day as the ruined cities of Belgium, Poland, and Servia, were it not for the certain knowledge that our sacrifice has not been made in vain. We have the right to hope that our share in the work of the world is to be acknowledged at last, and that the spheres of our activity are to be widened. In this way, and only thus, we shall be able, in years that have yet to be, to influence thought and to influence action, to bring a humanizing note into the great chord of life. We shall strive through the sisterhood of women towards the brotherhood of man, and we shall be working among those who will be able to see for themselves what one-sided rule and one-sided domination have done for progress and civilisation after their slow ascent to a position that at best left so much to be desired.

The women of my generation will sow where they may not hope to reap, but there is nothing new for woman in this experience. It is her mission in this world to sacrifice herself, from the hour when she accepts motherhood until the end. Her happiness is derived from the contemplation of the happiness of others, she lives in the new lives with which she renews the world. She will leave contentedly to others the prizes for which she laboured in years of peace and suffered through the season of war. It will be sufficient for her dimly to foresee the time when those who have replaced her will give birth to sons with no more pangs than Nature demands, and give birth to daughters in the belief that they will not be widowed or fatherless or childless through catastrophes of man's own making.

So it seems to me, looking back at the cruel record of two years, that woman, for all her losses, has gained, that what she has lost is matter for her private sorrow, and what she has gained is matter for universal joy. She has found the uses of adversity, she has accepted self-sacrifice for the sake of those who will be the better able to enjoy the rich fruits of life. In this knowledge she will labour, for the sake of this truth she will persevere with a confidence in the future that no shifting tides of chance can shake. And her watchword in the coming year is, Hope.

VII CHILD LABOUR ON THE LAND

It is a commonplace that war brings in its train evils without number, but there are certain ills that are added to the inevitable ones either by greed of gain, indifference to progress or a determination to make profit at the expense of the State. We have in our midst at all times certain people who are concerned only with their own ends, and who regard all the means to those ends as legitimate. War time reduces the measure of restraint that the common sense of the community imposes upon its greedier members. They find and seize their hour when normal conditions are upset. It would be easy to multiply instances, but in writing this paper I am concerned with one only—the employment of children on farms.

To the average man who does not know a swede from a turnip or the difference between sainfoin and clover this is a small matter; to those of us who know the land and its problems, who administer estates large or small, who are morally if not legally responsible for the happiness and well-being of village communities, it is a tragedy.

I can remember hearing my elders talk of the bad old days when the gang system prevailed all over England. The ganger was a contractor of irregular labour. He would enter a district in charge of his wretched company of men, women, and children, and would supply their labour at fixed rates to the farmer who needed it. He charged so much a day for each hand; he saw to it that one and all did their full day's work. They were fed abominably, housed in barns and out-houses, and lived in a promiscuity that would revolt a gipsy. At last even the thick-skinned countryside could endure the abomination no longer, and the "ganger" disappeared. It took years for the Legislature to discover that, apart from the cruelty involved in the custom, it was creating fresh material for gaols and asylums, that children needed education rather than field labour, that the mothers could not combine maternity with hard work in the fields, that if you deprive people of the means of living decently they will revert to the state of savagery.

The agricultural labourer's struggle has not been limited to the land. He has been fighting for years to raise his miserable wage. When I was a girl it was about a shilling a day with "small beer" of the farmer's brewing thrown in. It is about 3s. 6d. a day now; but against this the price of necessities has gone up between 50 and 100 per cent. Saving is impossible, and even the old age pension that lightens the evening of his long day hardly avails to keep him from the workhouse—unless he has a wife of equal age or children who, out of their tiny means, will render a little assistance. He lives in a cottage that, if often picturesque, is nearly always overcrowded; his food and clothing are of the roughest, and for holidays he has Christmas Day and the wet weather, when he may sit at home—at his own expense—for when there is no work there is no pay. But he lives in hope; and sometimes he goes on strike, to the disgust and indignation of his employer, and his children have been getting a better chance in life than he had. They are supposed to be kept at school until they are fourteen. He was rook scaring at the ripe age of ten for a penny a day.

Rural education is a poor thing enough. Children may have to walk two miles or more, in all weathers, to the village school. Their father cannot afford to buy them good boots or a water-proof coat; it is beyond his means to give them nourishing food, and so help them to fight the diseases of childhood; but he feels that something is being done for them, and, as a rule, he does nothing to make them wage-earners before their time. Now they are taken from school two years before an age that the trade unions hold to be insufficient; they are sent on the land to work for a wage of eighteen pence a day, in any weather, on any soil, without the proper clothing and with insufficient food. There they will undersell the rural labour market, they will be robbed of their childhood, they will go without supervision at a time when they need it most. And the Bumbles of our Education Councils have nodded thick, approving heads.

It is hard to write patiently of such retrograde devices, put forward, as all such proposals are, in the name of the country's needs. If these needs be genuine, which I doubt, if there be no adequate supply of female labour to be obtained for a fair price, why should the children of our poorest, the little ones whose physique has never been strengthened by sufficient nourishing food and by the hygiene of the home, be called upon to bear the burden single-handed? Why should not Eton and Harrow, Rugby, Marlborough, Winchester, and other schools without number, serve the national need? The lads at these expensive establishments can at least complete their education after the war, they can carry health and strength to the fields, they can acquaint themselves at first hand with the realities of labour, a knowledge that, with the changing times ahead, will be valuable to many of them who will inherit land in days to come. Will the farmers who are sending to the fields the half-grown children of their ill-paid labourers contribute their own to work by their side? I am sure that the mere suggestion will rouse the wildest indignation; but all the children, whatever their advantage or disadvantage, are British citizens, and it is not too much to suggest that those who have a stake in the country should at least do as much as those for whom fortune provided no birthright. Let us be democratic in deeds as well as words. I am quite sure that, if the doubtful privilege extended to the rural labourer's children were conferred at the same time upon the children of all patriots, the councils would expunge their fatuous resolutions from their minute books; they would make all possible haste to forget them.

But it may be urged that, in pleading for the children, I have overlooked the crying needs of the countryside, that I am ignorant of the real need for labour to deal with the increased area of the corn and for the late-sown spring crops, for it is clear that, as soon as the proposal for universal child labour is made, the scheme falls to the ground.

I am well aware of the existing conditions—what landlord is not?—and I have a remedy for them. It is not a popular one, but I am not searching for popularity. In spite of the genuine sacrifices that have been made by many classes of the community, much more remains to be done. We have all over the country racing stables full of lads who cannot go to the war and of men who have passed serviceable age. Hard work in the fields from April to the time the last corn is under the stack thatch would do them all the good in the world, and, with some knowledge of all classes of horses, I believe that horses would survive and the superiority of the British sires would not be lost.

Having depleted the racing stables, even at the cost of reducing the number of race meetings, I would turn my attention to the golf clubs: their name is legion. What an army of "ineligible" caddies might be recruited for the fields and given the chance of earning a living intelligently! I go so far as to hint that thousands of the elderly gentlemen who still pursue the golf ball might find more useful occupation in ministering to the country's genuine needs.

Let me pass from one monstrous suggestion to another. I would enroll the gamekeepers and the gillies; for once I would leave the wild pheasants to breed as they will and the grouse to work out their own salvation. A desperate remedy, but then our disease is dangerous. We need corn even more than pheasants, and other game birds can look after themselves. There might be an epidemic of poaching, in which case I would sentence every poacher to three months' hard labour—on the land. We have in this country to-day hundreds, I might say thousands, of sturdy middle-aged men who are now following occupations that, while they are perfectly reasonable in times of peace, are superfluous, even derogatory, to-day.

There is yet another class that can be mobilised to serve the country's need. I would like to see the last remaining footmen and the valets of middle age allowed to enjoy a summer of useful activity. They, too, may be in their right place at normal times; now their country needs them more than their masters do. A little hardship would be involved, but I do not believe there are many employers of superfluous or ornamental labour who would, if the matter were put before them fairly and temperately, place their own petty comforts before the country's need for food. We hope and believe that we may rely upon our Fleet to feed us, but why should we run risks? No war is won until it is lost, and if by ill-fortune we experienced a shortage, I do not think that the owners of racing stables, the renters of shooting and fishing, the members of golf clubs and the employers of men servants could acquit themselves of a serious responsibility. If all these sources of supply are tapped, and it is still found that the supply of labour in the fields is inadequate to the nation's needs, let us proclaim a national holiday in all the schools of the country, and let the high and the low born, the rich and the poor, seek the fields together. But until all sources of adult labour have been exhausted let us spare the little ones, and in any case let us see that those whose share of the good things of life is smallest are not called upon to endure trials and make sacrifices that we would shrink from demanding of our own children.

VIII COMRADES

In times when national emotion is deeply stirred it is possible for the close observer to get a glimpse of the main trend of thought. Just as a feather will show the direction of the wind, a word may show the direction of a man's mind. It is on this account that I was deeply moved and greatly stimulated of late by hearing that as the gallant Frenchmen attack the enemy their rallying cry is "Camarades, Camarades!" This is one of the most beautiful words in any language, it is the one by which a nation may rise to the height of its greatest achievement, whether in clearing its beloved land of a hated enemy or clearing its administration of the abuses from which no administration is free. One hardly dares to think of what the world might be like to-day if war had not been needed to establish the wonderful unity the word bespeaks.

There is not on all the earth a more democratic army than that of France, and to-day it is a perfect union, a veritable brotherhood. From the highest General to the humblest "piou-piou" there is but one aim, one ideal, prince and peasant pursue it to the end. One and all know that if success is to be achieved against heavy odds, it is by the help of the real brotherhood, the feeling that the accidents of birth and fortune do not count any longer, that "a man's a man for a' that." Other countries have caught a glimpse of the truth, our own among the number, but it needed French clarity of vision to recognise the truth and crystallise it in a word—a simple word with the mystic number of letters and so powerful that, when it becomes the rallying cry in times of peace for all civilised nations, the evils under which men and women labour will be swept away like chaff before wind.

For many years past I have been convinced that the enemies of mankind are not men. Ignorance, poverty, greed, vice, disease, these are the foes that prey upon all communities, and while those who foster them are of no brotherhood, those who would combat them need no more than brotherhood in order to overcome. War, in which a man makes the supreme surrender, in which he discounts the terror of death and makes purposes splendid by his devotion, reveals the truth even to those who have never thought before. Will brotherhood survive war, or does it need the exaltation born of the greatest of world tragedies to open a nation's eyes—and keep them open?

The history of our civilisation depends upon the answer to this question. Nothing less than brotherhood will enable the nation to face the widespread poverty that already exists, but will not be recognised until peace is restored. There will be very little money left in the countries of combatant nations, and there will be very many needs. The care of the wounded, the maimed and the helpless, provision for the widows and the children of war will come first. Then there are the schools; nothing is more vital to the future generation than education, and few great claims are more in danger of a grudging treatment.

There are two ways of handling a nation's affairs, one is to make the rich richer at the expense of the poor, the other is to make the poor less poor at the expense of the rich. The peaceful solution of the whole problem is found in the battle call of our gallant Allies. If we are "camarades, bons camarades!" we can endure our national privations and scarcely feel them, for we shall all be in the same boat, and it is not poverty that galls but the contrast between poverty and wealth. Down to the time when war began this contrast was ever present, it was becoming one of the great dangers of our time; it has not disappeared to-day, but it is far less noticeable, and as we continue to spend between thirty and forty million pounds a week on war, the cases of contrast will tend to grow less and less. I look for the time when men and women will find it as distressing to flaunt riches as the poor find it to display the outward and indisputable signs of poverty. One does not envy even now the state of mind that enables a man to say that he is "doing very well out of this war."

Among "comrades" such a thing would be impossible, the only excuse for making money out of national misfortune is to be found in its wise distribution to alleviate the suffering that war renders inevitable. To amass wealth from the country's needs, to spend it on purely personal ends, to allow an orgie more terrible than the Black Death to fill private coffers, this surely is the negation of brotherhood, and those who do it are the outcasts of civilisation, even though they purchase palaces and peerages and every honour that unscrupulous Governments vend in semi-privacy. How will the men who have thrown their lives into the scale tolerate the men who trafficked in the necessities of life, or the implements of death, and demand the high places as a reward for successful huckstering? They will not lightly reckon them in the ranks of the "comrades"; in a world founded on brotherhood there will be no place for them. If there be a place in the near future perhaps it will be the nearest lamp-post. Stranger things have happened.

Sometimes I think we could afford to lose this war, or, at least, not to win it, if the Frenchman's battle call could become the rallying cry of all parties and all grades in this country. Much as I loathe war and all it stands for, I feel that an instant victory would have been very bad for us, while a success won by waiting must at least purge our national life of the grosser elements. The mingling of high and low, of rich and poor, the price of strife demanded of each and all, the community wrought by suffering and by heavy loss, all these things are salutary for a nation grown plethoric by prosperity. It will not greatly matter if we lose half the world and gain our own souls, for the simple reason that an England wide-eyed, clean-limbed, and efficient could yet achieve and retrieve, while an England besotted by sloth and bemused by riches can only endure until the advent of a stronger and more determined race.

Whatever our destiny, whatever the future holds in store, we shall be happy indeed if we can face difficulties, dangers, privation, or supreme victory with the cry of "Comrades!" When war came, this country was fast sinking towards civil strife, drifting for lack of the spirit of good fellowship. A few masters, innumerable men, industry organised into limited liability companies that the human touch, the community between employer and employed, might cease, the wealth of the country divided on lines that gave 90 per cent. to a tenth of the population and divided the remaining one-tenth of the wealth between 90 per cent. of the people who create it,—these conditions were making for a social upheaval of bloodiest kind. Education starved, an infant mortality greater than the present waste of war, discontent, ill-feeling, class hatred, all these things were, all these things may be again, but not if the cry of "Comrades!" is taken up.

Whether we win or lose, I see civil unrest inevitable, for this war has sounded the death-knell of the old industrial, social, and political conditions. Nothing within the range of possibility can leave us just where we are, and worse than the struggle with an enemy is the struggle with a friend. Though I hold all war to be fratricidal, yet civil war must ever remain the worst form of it. As soon as the old problems force their way again to the fore the danger of civil strife becomes imminent, and let us remember that the working classes that come back from war will have forgotten what fear means. It seems to me that salvation lies in the Frenchman's fighting cry, that in giving his brothers a lead he has offered a lead to civilisation. He has shown us how to make the inevitable changes peacefully.

Idealism is out of fashion to-day because—let us not burke the truth—our idealists were deceived about Germany's intentions, and those in high places unconsciously misled the people. Yet let us cling to our ideals, for they may prove our best possession, and let us realise that the cry of "Comrades!" may, as years pass and the old bitterness dies away, extend across frontiers and bind in a common brotherhood the sons of the men who sought to destroy one another. Such is the potency of a word that revivifies life, laughs at wounds and disarms death. It sums up the aspirations of the greatest reformers and social workers of old time, of the men, from John Ball to William Morris, who strove for England. Only the French people, with their innate sense of selection, could have picked upon a word that can sum up the best of the ideals of the human race. We are their debtors for it, and there is no nobler way of paying the debt than by developing the cry until it resounds from one end to the other of our Empire. It will renew our youth, it will destroy many of the old evils that were even worse than war, it will realise the ambitions of men who lived and died for England in times of peace, when there is no reward for social heroism other than the consciousness of a supreme effort made on behalf of people one may never see, people who will never understand.

If the future of the world is with sane, wide-eyed democracies; if man is to be free to do the world's work and develop human destiny without turning aside at the bidding of kings and rulers; if humanity, with its common lot and destiny, is to develop the spirit of brotherhood that makes life beautiful,—we could have no finer rallying cry than France has offered. I do not believe that the country capable of originating and responding to it can be beaten by sheer weight of numbers; I feel that it is one of the world's assets, and that somewhere in the background the Great Force we strive to comprehend, and, comprehending, to worship, will guard it against ultimate defeat. To doubt this were to believe that the race is to the swift and the battle to the strong, and that the man who can invent the most efficient machinery can dominate God's world. Such a belief is to me the most unpardonable form of atheism. This world was not made, was not populated, was not instructed, that soulless machinery might hold it in thrall at last. The French know this, hence the battle cry that thrills me as I write.

IX THE CURSE OF AUTOCRACY

In the great gale that sweeps over Europe the few rags that hide the nakedness of monarchy flutter like scarecrows; I find myself watching for the gust that will reveal to the gaze of the least discerning what a dangerous and ridiculous thing the bare bones of kingship have become.

England has filed the teeth of the serpent, it can bite no more—the phrase is Swinburne's not mine. We keep our kings as we keep the Regalia in the Tower, well housed and well looked after, and between the ruler and the ruled there is a pleasant, but indefinite relationship. Kingship for us is the focus of patriotism and loyalty, but we should not go to war because the house of Guelph were jealous of the house of Hapsburg, or on bad terms with the house of Hohenzollern.

Those German pundits who believe that King Edward made the Anglo-German war have never grasped our national attitude toward monarchy, or King Edward's ungrudging recognition of the merits of the German people.

With us monarchy is an abstraction, very little more.

There was a time when it was supposed to be the fountain of honour, but politicians have fouled the waters so much and have bought and sold honours so unblushingly that modern royalty would be a little ashamed to father so large an illegitimate progeny. A business nation, we have a fixed price for everything. We pay our kings so much a year, and if they exceeded their allowance the State would hesitate to make up the deficit. Baronies, baronetcies, knighthoods and the rest have their fixed price, generally, though not invariably, payable to the party whips who consider themselves morally bound to deliver the goods.

When we were on the brink of war in 1914, M. Poincaré wrote a touching letter to King George, such as an old-time king might have sent to a brother sovereign. King George signed a reply that has been published—one would wager that nothing save the signature involved his heart or his pen. It was no more than the letter of a greatly harassed minister who was trying to think while he balanced himself on a high and unstable fence. Here was ample evidence that all who run might read of the final surrender of the monarchy, and incidentally, of the desire of England to maintain peace.

Nobody wants more than the shadow of kingship in this country. Everybody with more than the most perfunctory knowledge of history has realised that half the wars of the world have been fought for the gratification of kings, and most of the others have been waged in the name of religion, i.e. to demonstrate the superiority of one orthodoxy over another. Slowly, and at such a sacrifice as the world may well shudder to contemplate, we have come within sight of the end of religious strife. There remain wars of kingship, the present one is little more than that.

Down to a few years ago the old gates were still standing at Temple Bar to divide the City from Westminster. At Warwick Castle the drawbridge is still raised every night. In some of the cities of Southern Spain watchmen, armed with spears and oil lamps, still proclaim the time of night and the state of the weather. The "Miracle" of the Sacred Fire remains an annual spectacle at Eastertide in the Church of the Holy Sepulchre that is in Jerusalem.

The world, as though conscious of the ugliness of so much that is modern, still clings to old customs and institutions even when they are absurd. That is why autocratic kingship survives.

The house of Hapsburg has been ruling in Europe since the thirteenth century; in Germany as well as Austria for part of the time; the rule of the Hohenzollerns dates from 1871. A German, Count Berthold, is said to have originated in the eleventh century the house of Savoy that governs Italy. In Spain we find the ubiquitous Hapsburgs and the Bourbons sharing rule. A Hohenzollern is in Rumania, and on the distaff side in Greece. A Princess of the Hohenzollern house was the mother of King Albert of Belgium; Ferdinand of Bulgaria has Coburg and Bourbon blood.

A system of inter-marriage has retained power in the hands of a few houses, but nature is ill-disposed toward inbreeding and has scourged the cunning of kings with insanity and disease. While democracy has grown in stature and in vision, while it has been claiming its own place in the sun, the small privileged class has diminished physically, mentally, morally, but still clings desperately to place. There are a few brilliant exceptions, Albert of Belgium for example, but Hapsburgs, Hohenzollerns, Coburgs, and Bourbons are, generally speaking, no longer qualified from any standpoint to rule the destinies of free peoples. They are a little better than well-connected anachronisms, avid of the power that is passing from them and ready to offer any sacrifice that their subjects are capable of making in order that their time-tarnished prestige may shine again.

The wishes of their people are the last thing to be considered by autocratic monarchs. They will not stand in the scale against the interests of their relatives, and in the courts of Europe it is hard to find a ruler who is not a cousin of some sort to all his fellow-sovereigns. Jealousy, ambition, ill report, dyspepsia, disease, dementia, any one of these evils if it be backed by greed, may avail to plunge innocent nations into the hell of war. Forces that sway a republic are powerless in an absolute monarchy or in one where servility and orthodoxy strive hand in hand. There are few European rulers who have half the sagacity of the chief advisers whom they may override at will. They are not as a rule men and women of great culture, few if any have ideas that belong of right to the twentieth century, their function has outgrown them, and the reverence they demand and receive is founded very largely upon ignorance and superstition.

To plunge Europe into war for purely personal ends has always seemed in the eyes of kings a reasonable action. Frederick the Great admitted that he started the Seven Years' War by stealing Silesia from Austria for "glory," and the records of Spain and Austria are full of similar crimes.

Now that Europe has been shaken from base to summit, will the sober manhood of the twentieth century allow the present system to endure?

On the other hand, I see a great movement toward giving kingship a fresh lease of life, toward perpetuating secret diplomacy and developing clericalism. But men who have stood face to face with the living God should decide to worship henceforth after the inclination of their own hearts. Elderly gentlemen of conservative tendencies are already writing to warn the public that, however awful the chaos now prevailing, democratic rule would have made it worse. I welcome such warnings, for they are a proof that the upholders of tradition are at last aware of the slippery places over which they must so shortly tread.

If the democracy can see the truth, if its eyes refuse to be dazzled by flags, medals, and uniforms and its ears will convey each plausible speech to the brain for sober analysis, this war will not have been waged in vain.

I hold in all seriousness that it is a strife of kings. Gladstone once asked anybody to tell him how the Austrian Empire had been of any service to humanity. The aggregation of uncongenial nationalities has been kept together for the greater glory of the effete house of Hapsburg, a house whose true history, even since Kaiser Franz Josef came to the throne, could not be printed. The genius of the German people, their magnificent education, stern discipline, tireless industry and full nurseries were conquering both hemispheres, but that was not sufficient. Unless the German could pay tribute to the house of Hohenzollern and increase the Imperial prestige, progress was an egg without salt to the palate of the Potsdam hierarchy.

The fruits of forty years of labour and a generation of child-bearing were flung into the scale that the Hohenzollerns might stand more directly in the limelight.

The people whose blood was to be spilt, whose wives were to be widowed, whose wealth was to be squandered, were wilfully deceived and were driven to war as the Pharaohs drove their warrior-slaves.

Their awakening must come, and with it let us hope a further accession of strength to the Social Democracy that is the best hope of Germany.

We know that neither England nor France desired war, that Russia, whatever her interest in the great Slav-Teuton controversy, was not ready for it, and the worst to be said of the Allied Powers is that, conscious of an enormous menace, they united to destroy it. But every thinking man knows that without the ambitions of a few soldiers, statesmen (so-called), and officials this war had never come about.

I have often compared the position of republics with that of monarchies and have cited the American Republics. The United States live in peace, even the South American States, with their mixed population, their Spanish, Portuguese, German and Italian blood, are seldom found long at strife.

Royalists have spoken to me glibly about the corruption that is said to be inherent in republics. It is about the only charge they can formulate, and the reply is obvious. In republics corruption is hard to hide, it comes to the surface and is visible to all. In monarchies corruption, no less rife, is hard to expose; all the avenues to light and free speech are closed.

Your republic brings character and brains to the top; your monarchy makes statesmen of courtiers and sycophants, men who will bow the knee to the Baal of the hour.

A republic is open to the air of heaven. A monarchy is a garden enclosed, richer in rank weeds than flowers. If Germany had been a republic, the Social Democrats could have learned the truth and acted upon it; had Austria been a republic, giving equal voice to all the interests it affects to represent, sympathy with the Slavs would have kept the rulers from their disastrous attempt to reduce Serbia to the status of a vassal kingdom.

Kings have served their time. The ruler who rode to war at the head of his troops, who could handle the heaviest sword or battle-axe, who was both the ruler and judge of his people, belongs to a bygone era. His last raison d'être passed with the era of industry and rapid transit. He became an anachronism when people began to realise that life is a gift to be wisely used, and that racial antagonisms may be cured or dispersed by close relationship. It is for kings and for kings alone that millions of men who have no real quarrel have slaughtered one another under conditions of horror that make description inadequate. Until we understand that simple truth that the natural inclination of civilised man is to live on friendly terms with his neighbour in spite of all divisions of boundaries, whether of place, blood, or religion, civilisation will be rendered null. Kings have ceased to represent their people; the time has come when the people can represent themselves.

Unhappily they do not yet recognise their own power, and nothing is farther from the wishes of Europe's tottering dynasties than that they should do so. Education, their first aid to emancipation, has been grudgingly conceded. Representation is in its infancy and is hedged round with so many safeguards to royalty that in many countries it is still struggling for effective existence. For all our brave talk Europe is still in its first youth, but the tragedy through which we are passing may yet serve to stimulate its growth as surely as the blood shed on its fields will yield return in the fruits of the earth.

Will democracy rise from the conflict not only strong but determined? Will it carry destruction to the source of destruction? Will it assert its inalienable right to the fruits of peace, progress, and utility? I pray that it may, but I do not disguise from myself the enormous difficulty of the task. Demos is yet so unskilled, so easily flattered, so readily deceived, he will be met by men who have all the traditions of humbug at their finger tips; indeed, these traditions are almost their sole inheritance and equipment.

Yet, "all that a man hath will he give for his life," and the democrat will not only be fighting for his own but for his children's lives and for the well being of the human race. He will have faced death, and will have realised that though man may die but once, the condition of rule that makes war possible makes the doom recurrent with every generation. He should know that the old traditions of rule are in the melting pot, and though all the forces of reaction will labour to shape them again as of old, it is in his power, if it is in his will, to frustrate their action.

The United States looks to have a voice in the making of peace. Doubtless it will do useful work, but I cannot conceive of any better task for the great republicans of to-day than to give the western world the lead that may help it most of all. Most of them have seen monarchies at their best and worst; all of them are patriots; they know what republicanism has done for their own fair land. Will they stand silent now while the western world is faced by the danger of the perpetuation of a régime that has little or nothing to justify it? If they do, they have missed the finest possible chance of spreading the light that shone upon them when the Declaration of Independence was signed one hundred and forty years ago.

With the end of the war, if it does not result in the hegemony of Germany, in which case liberty will be no more than a name, all manner of schemes for the regeneration of Europe will be afoot. Few, if any, will go to the root of the evils that have devastated Belgium, Poland, and a part of France. It is safe to say that the disposition to bring about sweeping reforms will not find ready expression. We are all too close to events over here, the blessing of a clear, serene outlook is denied us. The United States has stood far above the turmoil, it has seen more of the truth than has been visible to any combatant nation, it can survey the whole situation sanely.

It seems to me in these circumstances that the greatest republic of the world has a serious duty, a grave responsibility. It has thriven on a gigantic scale without patronage or privileged classes, without titles, without such honours as are merely honours in name. Freed by the Atlantic from the domination of Europe, it has grown in power and given its citizens a life removed from the worst anxieties that beset the Continent. It knows what kingship in its absolute aspect has cost Europe, and it embraces within its wide domain the children of every European nation; they dwell side by side in peace and amity. The freedom enjoyed by the republic would not be bartered for the wealth of the world, for that freedom is the secret of its eternal youth, its boundless energy, its untrammelled progress.

There are men in the States to-day, men I am proud to number among my friends, who might speak in due season the words that would encourage Europe in the only fight that can rightly engage all nations, the fight against the curse of kingship. We who know how much this fight is needed, who have seen in the great republic how it welds together the most diverse faiths and nationalities, believe that nothing but kingship divides man from man in Europe and fills every frontier line with the instruments of death.

All the sympathy of the best elements in the United States is with suffering Europe to-day, but it cannot be expressed without the use of words that will sound harsh to some, impertinent to others, startling to all. Yet these words will not fall upon deaf ears. They will bring hope to many for whom the future is utterly dark, who believe that the forces of reaction will strive desperately to overcome democracy and that democracy needs prompt help if it is to survive.

Granting that America has the right to be heard when the time comes for the re-establishment of peace, she has the right to deliver the message of her own hundred years of freedom. Is it too much to hope that she will rise to the height of this supreme occasion?

If she will not shrink from this duty, she will ensure a victory beside which the ultimate conquest in this war will appear well-nigh insignificant.

X WOMAN'S WAR WORK ON THE LAND

The cry for woman's service on the land is one I endeavoured nearly twenty years ago to anticipate. It was at a time when the anxiety of girls to earn their own living was making itself manifest in every class, and when the wages paid to those who had broken away from the conventions of purely domestic life were miserably inadequate. I had heard how, in the Dominions overseas, English women had been forced to learn open-air duties as best they could, I had realised the natural instinct of many women for gardening, and I had no doubt that there would be some whose courage would not flinch from an experiment. Looking back to that season, I marvel at the progress feminism has wrought in the world. Then every development that was sought for men was in the case of woman taboo. The only thing that a girl might do in the garden without defying the conventions was the light job that could be accomplished without any fatigue. She might pluck roses; I have grave doubts as to whether she might plant or prune them. She might eat celery, but the digging of a trench or the earthing-up of the plants would have been considered a most "unladylike" occupation. In fact, we suffered, as a sex, under the spell of that horrible word; life for women has not been nearly so futile since it was abolished.

In the years when I began first to find that the urgency of social problems was a bar to the further serenity of life, I, like other inexperienced people with reform at their hearts, dreamed dreams and saw visions. I had seen at Easton and Warwick the women of the working classes enjoying the hard work of the garden and the fields; I, too, had tried my hand, always to find that I was rewarded with a quickly renewed sense of the joy of life. Even when weather conditions were unfavourable, the rest after labour was in itself atonement for the toil—it was so unlike other rest. Then I began to see an England in which girls and young women, ceasing to be merely "ladylike," would be healthier, happier, and more useful than they had been in the years of which I could take count. I could not help realising that the desire for active physical exercise could not be limited to one sex, save in obedience to a convention that ignored human needs. It seemed to me as though the truth would be apparent to everybody, that nobody who could lend a helping hand would withhold it. Naturally I was soon undeceived.

I was assured that only the children of working farmers and labourers could possibly milk the dairy herd, that gardening work in many of its aspects would be beyond the limits of the capacity of the gently nurtured. The girl market gardener was voted an impossibility; as landscape gardener, I was assured, she could never compete with a man. Poultry-farming and stock-breeding were even voted indelicate! Household management, to enable girls to take posts as housekeepers in public institutions or large private houses, was regarded as something to be acquired without training, and even the commercial side of farm management was vetoed as a study for girls, as though a well-managed farm would be the worse for a competent book-keeper because that book-keeper chanced to be a daughter instead of a son of the house. I could prolong the list of vetoes and taboos that were presented to me, but no useful service would be served in doing so. I am only concerned to remember now—after nearly twenty years—that I was regarded as an unpractical dreamer, and that, as I write, there are letters on my desk asking me if I cannot recommend lady gardeners and agriculturists of all descriptions. I cannot: they are all fully occupied. Many are at work in England, not a few are busy thousands of miles oversea—in Canada, Australia, and the United States. Think of the freedom and the fullness of their lives, never a taboo to stand between them and any sane development!

To-day I see a great expansion of woman's labours under the sun. The trouble is that the demand outstrips the supply. The public, whose apathy has given only a minimum of stimulus to the progress of the girl agriculturist, has become suddenly clamant. It demands the impossible. The girls' agricultural colleges are to improvise the highly trained, skilled article. It is as though they should demand the finished fruits of the orchard before the budding and flowering time of the trees has been fulfilled. I am hoping that this will not lead to a reaction, and that those whose demand for ready-made service brings inevitably unsatisfactory results will not regard woman's work in the light that their own thoughtlessness must shed upon it. Only those of us who understand the curriculum, and the time required to follow it to the appointed end, know that you must be thorough if you would be successful. All the ordinary problems of the open-air life must be faced in training before they can be overcome in the practice of daily life in farm and garden. To us this is a commonplace; to those who do not know the land and its labor it comes as a surprise and an annoyance.

I established the Hostel at Reading, near the great Agricultural College, in the year 1898, and it remained there for nearly four years, when the Reading premises began to prove inadequate to the purposes I had in view. Even when the ridicule ceased, the girls had not been popular at Reading, where the college students thought that they were intruders if they ventured beyond the dairy. There were certain advantages. For example, the heads of the house of Sutton opened their gardens at stated times, and the girls could see the most skilled work in operation. But I could not help thinking that, if the idea was to grow, it must have room and a congenial atmosphere for its development, and so it happened that the change was made. We moved to Studley Castle, in Warwickshire, sixteen miles from Birmingham, a rather modern place, with forty acres of gardens and pleasure grounds, wonderful out-buildings—built originally for racing stables—and nearly two hundred and fifty acres of farm land, with woodlands and water in addition. In many respects this was the ideal place for the work in hand. There are other institutions of similar kind in England to-day, and I am not claiming any special superiority for Studley. If I write of what is done there, it is merely because I know exactly what work is being carried on, and the full measure of success that attends it. Studley is now run by a limited liability company, in which I have no interest whatever. It differs from other agricultural colleges chiefly in the atmosphere, which is that of Girton or Newnham, and is deliberately preserved on grounds of economic policy.

If our victory in the world-war is to have in it the elements of permanence, it can only be by the thorough equipment of those who go out into the world to contend with the most highly trained nation under the sun, and, as far as woman's education is concerned, in whatever aspect, it has the advantage denied to the education of boys—of being free from old and paralysing conventions. There is nothing that must be done merely because it has been done from time immemorial, and the agricultural colleges have been modern from their inception.

The first thing to be considered is so to train the students that they are able gradually to develop a measure of physical strength, and at the same time to teach them how to obtain a maximum of result from a minimum of effort. Many an untrained man could only accomplish with great exertion what a trained woman can do without difficulty. In a little while not only do the spade and the wheelbarrow lose all their terrors, but the comparatively light modern plough can be handled, even on fairly heavy land, without excessive fatigue. Then the balance must be preserved between practice and theory. You will remember that the method of combining the two is not new. Mr. Wackford Squeers taught it at Dotheboys Hall. "W-I-N-D-E-R, a casement. Now go and clean them." Perhaps this was the germ of the idea—who knows? The lecturer in the college is supplemented by the expert in the field, dairy, and garden, and the student is not limited to the grounds of the institution, ample though they be. On outlying farms, in private gardens, market gardens, at country flower shows and exhibitions, the pupils of this and other colleges are expected to demonstrate their efficiency, thereby learning how the familiar problems may vary in their incidents and application. There is no element of secrecy. All that is taught and all that is learned is open to the inspection of the section of the public that is interested. The college has terms similar to those of school and university—thirty-nine weeks of work and thirteen of holiday—and while girls are admitted as soon as their school education is finished, at the age of sixteen or thereabouts, women can join at any age. If they have the energy and determination, they are never too late to learn. For school-girls over twelve years of age who intend to take up agricultural or garden work when school days are over, there are holiday classes at which the 'prentice work may be studied under the most pleasant conditions possible. Most of the school-girls who take this course regard it as an ideal holiday.

For the benefit of adults who desire a special study, short courses can be arranged at all times, but it is, of course, well understood that such courses do not make the student truly representative of the college tuition. It has long been recognised that you cannot make agriculturists or horticulturists in a hurry. The minimum period of complete study is two years, but the complete course that turns out the finished student is a full three years. It is in view of this hard truth that I have eyed askance the suggestion that a course that is to be practical can be crowded into three months. Such a term would hardly avail a genius. As far as I have been able to see, the not very considerable percentage of failures associated with agricultural colleges is due to the inability of students to distinguish between enthusiasm and staying power. They have not realised that work must be done at every season and in nearly all weather, that the sun is not always shining, and that the novelty of association with Nature will wear away from all who are not Nature-lovers at heart and by instinct. That is why I am afraid of short-term training. Two or three years develop not only aptitude, but character; enthusiasms have time to take a fresh and long lease of life. Training brings confidence too. Girls who wish to be gardeners, agriculturists, poultry-farmers, estate managers, and the rest, will do well to remember that the new or the modern methods they are taught in an up-to-date institution are not necessarily followed in the place where they get their first engagement. If they have to control men, they must expect to find a certain intolerance of change, a certain resentment of direction. Unless they are thoroughly sure of themselves they cannot supervise the work of others.

What the student has to remember is that most of the methods she will find outside her training college are wasteful, obsolete, or second rate. Scientific training is unknown to the average gardener, market gardener, dairy-farmer, and poultry-keeper. Our old countryside is run on amasingly inept lines. Foolishness of any kind that has behind it the sanction of a single generation is sacrosanct. If a father has farmed or gardened foolishly, that special manner of foolishness is sacred to his son. We have always relied upon "the foreigner." He sends us fruit, eggs, honey, vegetables, corn, cattle food; while the seas are open, we need never go hungry. I do not pretend that we can do without him for everything, but we can certainly do very much more in the future than we have done in the past, and we have been warned by our Government to do it. That is why I have so much hope for the future of the woman on the land. I feel that her work is no longer concerned with hobbies and private profit; henceforward it is, in effect, a kind of public service. The Government is avowedly anxious for the future of the land, frankly concerned to check the annual outlay of millions of pounds for foodstuffs that we are well able to raise at home.

Why, for example, should we spend forty thousand pounds a year upon honey, to name what our American friends would call "a side line," when we have a wealth of flowers and fruit blossom that would not only yield all that is required, but would even enable us to substitute honey for much of the sugar that is only sold to us when it has been chemically treated to improve appearance at the expense of quality? Why must we gather eggs from the far ends of the earth, and bacon from countries where pigs are fed as they are said to be fed in China? When I think of the thousands of women who are ready, willing, and, if properly trained, able to take a hand in the great task of feeding the people, it seems to me that the seed I sowed in 1898, to the accompaniment of much amusement, derision, and hostile criticism, has grown into a very sturdy and healthy tree. I even venture to think that the fruits will be more refreshing than those of the Insurance Act itself. As far as the records I have been able to examine teach me, there have been very few failures to achieve success among the women who have taken resolutely and completely to this comparatively new walk in life. The students have done more than merely earn a comfortable living. They have been the disseminators of the new ideas, the modern theories of agriculture, horticulture, and apiculture, the introducers of order and method into realms where chaos ruled amiably and ineffectively. In many cases they have even succeeded so far as to disarm prejudice and to persuade omniscient man that a method is not good merely because it is customary or easy to follow. And what they have done is small by the side of what they may hope to do.

What is needed just now, when the Government is really awake to the importance of woman's work on the land, is an extension of the agricultural colleges and a series of State grants. At present the work is costly. The upkeep of a big institution is expensive, because you cannot treat the land precisely as you would for utility farming. It is there to teach pupils, to carry out demonstrations. So it is with the glass, that is so costly to build and to heat. Then, again, professors—the best in the country—must be asked to lecture; and while agricultural colleges are in the heart of the country, the professors are probably living in distant university towns, so that their lectures are bound to be costly. Let us remember, too, quite frankly, that there is not much money for the girl who is not able to start a little establishment of her own or to go into partnership. There is a happy, healthy, useful life, there is valuable service, quite unrecorded, to the public at large, but the monetary reward is of the slightest and the training is long.

It is necessary, then, in view of the growing demand for the work of woman's hands, that the Government should make grants to the established colleges as they make grants to other educational bodies, and it would be well if every County Council that does not conduct an agricultural college of its own would give a few scholarships annually in the college nearest to its county town. These steps are needed to give an impetus to the work that is now being done. Had they been taken when first I pleaded for them, we should have been in quite a different position to-day. There would, at least, have been enough capable workers to meet the most pressing demands. At present they tell me that at Studley every post brings applications for gardeners and dairy workers, for women competent to train others, but there is not a single disengaged pupil. Doubtless a similar state of things obtains at the other colleges in Kent, Worcestershire, Sussex, and elsewhere.

It has been seen that properly trained women can do all the work of farm and garden. Even ploughing is not beyond them, save on very stiff clay soils. They are entirely successful in handling animals; horses, cows, bullocks, sheep, pigs, and goats are all tractable when cared for by women. They are taught at all well-conducted institutions to substitute knack for force, and they have, as is admitted on all hands, the right temperament for tasks that demand not only time, but patience. As beekeepers they do very well, the gift of delicate handling standing them in good stead, and in the glasshouses they are easily first. Dr. Hamilton, the energetic and gifted Warden of Studley, tells me that she finds that the health of girls engaged upon the land, whether in the garden or on the farm, is good, and that many who arrive at the College in a delicate state of health grow very much stronger. She finds that the work makes women not only healthy, but happy—presumably because happiness is largely a product of good health.

Perhaps the needs of the country will be the determining factor in sending women to the land in the summer-times before us; but we may take it for granted that one of the results of war will be the large extension of the realm of the woman-worker of the field and garden. We cannot shut our eyes to the sad truth that there will be war widows in their thousands, and countless girls whose chances of married happiness have been destroyed. To many of these the land will supply the only anodyne that life has to offer. In hard work and the open air they will learn to forget; in the development of garden, or farm, or orchard they will find something to interest them. With their advent we may look to find a great addition to the national food supply, a great saving of money that has gone hitherto across the Channel or the Atlantic Ocean.

I am inclined to think that women are more likely than men to take advantage of the homeland opportunities. Men who have lived strenuously and dangerously may not be found content with a handful of acres and a cartload of restrictions at home, when the far-flung Dominions overseas have so much more with which to tempt them. I see that Sir Harry Verney's Committee, appointed to consider the question of land settlement for soldiers and sailors, suggested holdings of twenty-five acres for dairy-farming, and four-acre holdings for pigs, poultry, fruit, etc. These last are to cost £24 per annum. Consider as against this the one hundred and sixty acre grant of the Canadian Government, the additions made by the Canadian Pacific Railway and, perhaps, other great corporations, whereby a settler finds a house, farm buildings, fifty acres broken up and planted with wheat. There the rent is part payment of the purchase price. I do not think the Government is going to hold soldiers and sailors with anything Sir Harry Verney and his committee-men propose to offer, but I do think that if the Government will make a like offer to the women of England, and will arrange to do for them what it proposes to do for the men, this latest scheme of small holdings might well be a success. Women could and would make an agricultural colony. They delight in doing small things well; they are frugal and temperate; they can make much out of very little. Whatever their war experiences and suffering, it will not have developed in them the spirit of unrest. Their ambitions do not seek the particular kind of achievement that appeals most to men; they find happiness where a man might find boredom. They love the sense of independence, the freedom and simplicity that country life affords and enjoins.

Above all else that concerns woman's career on the land, it has clearly been shown now that in times of crisis the men who work on the land may be called away, and our home food supplies may be jeopardised by their absence. In these circumstances the movement must spread. The flower and market garden, the field, the conservatory, and the outhouse must be recognised as providing a pleasant sphere of activity for girls and women, and there is more than enough land in these islands to provide small holdings for many years to come for all who have the will and the capacity to develop them. In conclusion, let me utter a warning that demands the attention of all who love their country. At the present time we only produce about twenty per cent. of the food we eat. For the rest we depend upon our mercantile marine and our power to hold, not only the seas, but the skies above and the depths beneath. Without any comment, it seems to me that this simple and undeniable statement should suffice to settle the career of many a sturdy country-loving English girl.

XI GERMAN WOMEN AND MILITARISM

Reading the record of Germany's war methods, even those of us who are endeavouring to think sanely through these evil days must be impressed by the overwhelming evidence of their complete ruthlessness.

We who have travelled in Germany not once, but many times, know full well that harshness and cruelty are not associated with the majority. There are countless Germans who could only be cruel in obedience to orders, and, of course, every German will do what he is told, just as the Children of Israel did when Joshua, who appears to have invented "frightfulness," was carrying out his merciless campaign. If we admit that the simple German of the south is not cruel at heart, that he is rather a dreamer and a sentimentalist with strong love for domestic pleasures, we find that the policy of "frightfulness" must be ascribed to the military party, consisting for the most part of Prussians, with headquarters in Berlin.

These men are the organisers of war, and speak through the mouths of writers like Treitschke, Bernhardi, and the rest. It is they who have torn up the treaties and conventions that were, humanity hoped, to decide the conduct of war. They are responsible for the curious outburst of national hatred against this country that is at once so startling and so silly, a revelation of the sad truth that Germany is suffering from neurosis.

I have been trying to trace "frightfulness" to its source, not through the medium of books or papers, but in the light of my own knowledge of the country and my past acquaintance with some of its leading men, and I think that the philosophic historian of the times to come, whose vision is not obscured by the smoke of battle or the fury of combatants, will not hesitate to declare that the worst and saddest features of war as waged by the Germans are due to the fact that in their country women are kept more in the background than in the country of any other great Power.

The fault, as I will point out later on, is not that of the women, but of the leaders of German faction who have deliberately suppressed woman, and of nearly all the leaders of German thought who, being dependent on Government favour, have subscribed to their policy of deliberate suppression. Here and there an independent thinker has arisen nearly always from the ranks of Social Democracy. Bebel's book on women, for example, is a standard work, but the few lights do no more than emphasise the surrounding darkness.

Look round Europe for a moment. Russia is a backward empire and the spirit of progress moves over it with slow feet, but Russia is making vast strides, and the plough that will trace deep furrows in the virgin soil of its social life is drawn by man and woman together. All the professions are open to women, even those in which women are not found here. The Russian engineer who planned the newest bridge over the Neva was a woman. Men and women students work side by side on terms of absolute equality, and compete for honours that often fall to the gentler sex.

Russian women of the educated classes are more than merely well informed, they are brilliant. Linguists, women of affairs, they have a grip of actualities of the empire of which they form a significant part. In spite of autocratic rule and limited freedom there is such a full life for the Russian woman as her German sister has never known, except in dreams of emancipation. In Finland, be it remembered, women sit in Parliament.

Turn to France, and it may be declared emphatically that woman rules. Women are doctors, barristers, and scientists; they are members of the Goncourt Academy; they are the heads of some of the most important business institutions; they give the most exclusive salons their distinction. Public opinion is moulded by them; their influence makes and breaks Cabinets. Feminism is one of the strongest forces in France. Quiescent to-day or working in quietness, this force will dominate a France released from war.

Even in Belgium, of whose progress we hear little, women have been largely responsible for the organisation of the middle and working classes, an organisation that was well-nigh complete before war broke out, and in the slow rebuilding that is to come we may look with confidence to the Belgian woman to play a leading rôle. Turn to a group of neutral countries—Denmark, Norway, Sweden—and it will be seen that feminism is moving with vast strides along the path of national progress. Woman is asserting herself in all of them, contributing her thought to her country's problems, taking an ever important place in its councils.

Alone of the great Powers Germany has elected to forget or to disregard as a negligible quantity the opinion of woman, and the reason is not far to seek. For years past the German has forgotten the respect and reverence he owes to his own womenfolk. Küche, Kinder, Kirche—he calls alliteration to his aid to express a growing contempt for the sex and the narrowest possible view of its world function. Intoxicated with the vision of imperial domination, he has regarded his own sex as the one motive force in the universe.

He has not watched the slow awakening of women in the countries around him; he has not noted how bonds of sympathy, light as gossamer, yet strong as steel, have stretched from country to country, binding our sex in a large and ever widening sisterhood, inarticulate now, or at least hardly coherent, but only waiting for their appointed hour to assume a fuller share of the glories, the burdens and the responsibilities of life. Woman's influence, silent, world-wide, pervasive, has been treated by the evangels of Kultur as though it were nonexistent, and in the hour of crisis woman as a united force has avenged herself for years of neglect, scorn and brutality. She is everywhere a belligerent.

I do not know the country in Europe where women are treated as they are in Germany. Not many countries can vie with the United States in the attention bestowed upon the gentler sex, but as I have endeavoured to show, they are respected more in every belligerent country than they are in the one that sought to rest supreme in Europe. Even in Italy, Spain, and Portugal, where women must often work as hard as men, they stand upon a secure footing of affection and respect. The smaller courtesies, the greater services of life are theirs. In some definite measure they complete the home. But you cannot bring an indictment against a whole nation, and I do not seek to do so.

In tens of thousands of German homes the wife and daughters are loved and honoured, but in the rank and file of military circles, even among the men who hold official positions and boast a certain standing, woman has been dethroned—she is regarded as an incumbrance necessary for the production of further generations of supermen, who shall inherit the earth. This attitude of mind reveals itself in the action that speaks louder than words. The toleration and the contempt to which I refer are everywhere apparent. No good-looking woman is safe in Germany from the ill-bred stares and comments of the men with whom she must travel in train or tram.

If women enter a theatre or restaurant their own friends and relatives do not rise to receive them. They are liable to be elbowed into the road if men walking abreast can occupy the whole of the pavement. The politeness of the few cultured Germans (pardon the discredited adjective) merely emphasises the boorishness of the vast majority. It might be that the German is waiting for women to be officially recognised as human beings to whom some measure of courtesy or even decency is due. Only when rudeness is "verboten" will rudeness cease.

The country is governed by men for men and women, but according to the marriage rubric woman is actually man's servant. The effect of these conditions upon the morals of the country is deplorable. They give a cachet to vices, even the most odious, and the rate of illegitimacy, about 10 per cent. for the whole empire, is about doubled in Berlin, where the military caste is supreme. The morals of the army are the morals of Berlin, and account not only for the hideous stories published about what took place in Belgium and northern France, but for the recitals not less appalling that one gathers from officers home on leave who have seen sights in the area of German occupation that cannot be set down in print.

Undoubtedly these recitals, if they could reach the heart of Germany, would thrill tens of thousands of honest men with indignation and disgust. I do not believe for a moment that they represent the inclinations of the whole nation. They are rather the action of that section of the nation which, while war endures, must have the upper hand, and during all the years of war-like preparations has reigned supreme. Against this aspect of German national life the women of belligerent and neutral countries alike are arrayed. Whatever their resources or their influence in the councils of their husbands, sons, and brothers, it will be devoted without cease to the destruction of a militarism that degrades and shames womankind. The German woman knows in her heart that her men have in countless instances become perverts, but she is dumb because she is forbidden to speak. In Prussia no woman may organise a union that has political aims; she may not even join one.

It is the purpose of the dominant caste to keep woman in subjection, to restrict her activities to the kitchen, the cradle and the Church, even to deny her the mental and the physical development that might tend to lead her to revolt. Woman may find a limited salvation in the conduct of a business; throughout the German Empire not far short of a million women conduct commercial enterprises of one kind or another, and collectively they strive with some success to better the physical and moral conditions under which their sisters live. No effort of which they have yet been capable has accomplished more than this, their condition of tutelage remains complete.

I do not pretend to be satisfied with the position of women in England: far from it; but here, as in the countries already enumerated, it is better far than in Germany. Women mould public opinion to an appreciable extent; they are able to modify the life of their sex in many important particulars, the best of them exercise sane influence, and all are sufficiently well treated to establish a definite attitude of mind in men. We know that no British or French troops would behave in Germany as Germans behaved in Belgium; we know that the honour of honourable women and of helpless children would be safe in the keeping of the French and British officer, and that he would not be called upon to restrain his men from acts of lust and savagery.

We know that there is a public opinion the wide world over among free women and women struggling to be free that will not submit to the domination of any race that does not hold woman in respect. It is on this account, in my opinion, that the unbridled and tolerated savagery of the worst class of German conscript in Belgium and France has cost Germany more than the loss of half a dozen pitched battles. Whatever the irritation caused by the incidents of the war, the Allies know that women the world over are and will remain on their side, for the hegemony of a nation that treats women in peace with contempt and in war with "frightfulness" cannot be contemplated by our sex. We know that in fighting for the cause of the Allies we are fighting for the most downtrodden of the highly civilised women in Europe. At present they would resent our aid—they are patriotic—they have suffered terribly, and in the hour of their trials they mourn and forgive those who treated them ill.

Later on, when peace returns, when the world is purged of violence and its wounds begin their slow and painful process of healing, the German women will recognise that we have been fighting for a larger cause than our own; that we helped to force the doors that have remained barred so long and to break the chains that bound the women of a great but erring nation. Only the ultimate triumph of the Allies can free the women of Germany, and in time they will realise the truth.

The views of the wisest men are narrow, and few among them will realise or admit even now the truth that woman is now a factor in the world's affairs. When this war is over we shall tell in no uncertain words what is in our hearts. At present we must needs be silent. If those dreamers of world empire had but remembered that women, too, have minds and are learning to use them, the story of the great world tragedy, even if it had to be set down, would have been widely different in many of its incidents.

It was Germany's fatal mistake that, not content with dominating its own womankind and suppressing them whenever and wherever possible, it believed that the rest of the world was equally indifferent to the treatment of its mothers, wives, and daughters.

Every known outrage has raised fresh fighters, has strengthened the Allies with the sure force of moral sympathy and encouragement, has thinned the ranks of those whose sympathies were with a country whose marvellous progress provides so much material for admiration. Who can measure the responsibility of those guides and teachers who taught the German to develop along material lines and to forget that woman is the proper spiritual guide, and that as man loves and reverences her he sees farther and deeper into the heart of things—sees life sanely and sees it whole?

Whatever the limitations of our knowledge we know that the one sex completes the other; that man enlarges the vision of woman and woman enlarges the vision of man, and that it is the peculiar gift of our sex to control man's passions, to stimulate his humanity, to direct his ambitions away from dangerous paths. We do not all strive as we might; we do not always succeed as we deserve, but man is woefully incomplete without us, and the spectacle of a nation that has despised womanhood waging war shows that this contempt corrodes his moral fibre, leaves him at the mercy of his worst instincts and raises up against him all the spiritual forces against which none may strive victoriously.

We women who have never handled weapons, whose only place in the area of strife is among the maimed and helpless, know even better than men that the race is not always to the swift nor the battle to the strong. When history has recorded the story of the world war that darkens our lives to-day, future generations will ask how it was that Germany could find no friends among the neutral nations. Her Ambassadors, official and unofficial, her publicists and those of neutral countries who were not ashamed to accept her subsidies, worked with true German thoroughness. Truth was never allowed to stand in the way of propaganda. No lie that might serve a useful purpose went unsanctioned, for the great end was to sanctify all means, however vile, and yet in the hour when even moral support and silent sympathy would have been of the greatest value, Germany looked for it in vain.

It was easy to declare that the whole world was jealous and misinformed; such an excuse could hardly deceive the responsible people who fathered it. My own view is that the women of Europe and the United States turned against Germany when the manner in which she waged war was first revealed to a disgusted world. Their hostility was not merely sentimental—it was psychological. The German attitude toward women, already questioned, was revealed as in the glare of searchlight, and womanhood from London to Petrograd and from Copenhagen to New York was completely, irrevocably antagonised.

XII YOUTH IN THE SHAMBLES

It becomes increasingly difficult to speak one's mind in England to-day, even though one has no peace scheme to propound and no efficient public servant to criticise.

Liberty has vacated her throne, or as much of it as Privilege would ever allow her to occupy, and the Defence of the Realm Act has taken her place.

Consequently it is very hard to express opinions unless they are sufficiently platitudinous to gain universal and immediate acceptance. Roughly speaking we are all of one mind about the conduct of this war; the minority in opposition is so small that it can be disregarded, but we are all at variance as to method, and on the Ship of State that steers such an erratic course through the hurricane of strife there is hardly a passenger who is not convinced that he could reach the goal much more rapidly than the man at the wheel is likely to.

Those who criticise the steering are suspect, for the national temper is a little upset, our situation is without precedent, and an Englishman dislikes novelty. I cannot help my belief that it is the novelty rather than the tragedy of the hour that troubles him most. He is giving, to the best of his capacity, blood, labour, treasure, but he is not thinking as deeply as he should, perhaps because he understands that when you begin to think and believe you see a great truth clearly, you are morally bound to communicate that truth to others. Then the Defence of the Realm comes in and you are likely to be hailed a traitor to all good causes by the first person who—with or without understanding your views—disagrees with them!

Yet for all the prejudices with which the expression of opinion is beset, it is hard to keep silent when something presents itself to the mind in the guise of a vital truth, and now, after more than two years of war have forced reflection and taught us to see the world tragedy as a whole, there are things that must needs be said, protests that must needs be made.

Of all the iniquities that are associated with war, war as distinct from murder I would add, there is nothing quite so horrible as the sacrifice of young life. It is common to all the nations at war. We read of boys of fifteen fighting in the ranks of our enemies, and, at home, of boys who have added a year or two to their proper age to deceive a not too inquisitive recruiting sergeant. To raw lads in their utter ignorance, war is a great joy and adventure; they are proud to help their country and to be redeemed from the charge of being "slackers." So when the cup of life is hardly at their lips they go, some to die, some to be maimed, some to return prematurely old and broken down.

While the plots and counter plots that made for war were being hatched, these young warriors were in the nursery, or at school. Even now they have reached no perception of the real forces for which men strive; until war broke out their lives were still supposed to be under the protection of their parents.

But as soon as the State is beset it calls for aid, not alone upon matured men, who understand and have a sense of responsibility, but upon the lads whom it ought to be protecting as the one irreplaceable asset of the next generation.

Wise old gentlemen with a very tolerable imitation of the spirit of prophecy in their hearts, pens in their hands, and bees in their bonnets, wrote indignant articles in the best read organs of the press that our downfall, if we did not introduce conscription, is merely a matter of months. Sometimes it was weeks. The time given to us varied according to the measure of the writers' chronic dyspepsia.

Yet if these people would only think, they would have little difficulty in admitting that the lads who have been well educated, well trained and prepared with infinite labour for life are just those who should not be surrendered to death under any normal conditions until they have fulfilled their primary function toward the State.

I will go farther and suggest that their elders have no right to rob them of the few years in which they taste the joys of life. I was told recently by a man who knew what he was talking about that under the Mosaic Code the Jews did not allow their married men to go to war until they had spent one year with their wives. A man who was betrothed was instructed to marry, and even if a man married a second time he had to remain for one year at home. In this way the continuity of the race was assured and the Jews, eminently a fighting nation, preserved their virility.

There was no question of sentiment involved—it was hard, common sense applied to war. And, horrible irony, the British Government recognises the simple truth, but has only learned down to the present to apply it to farm stock. I saw last year a printed notice in the country post-offices issued to farmers by the Board of Agriculture, telling them not to kill lamb and veal because whatever the price offered the removal of immature stock is dangerous wastefulness which the country cannot afford.

Here is a copy of the notice:

BOARD OF AGRICULTURE AND FISHERIES

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Special Notice to Farmers

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Preserve our Flocks and Herds!
Maintain our Meat Supply!

The Board of Agriculture and Fisheries strongly urge all Farmers to RAISE AS MUCH STOCK AS POSSIBLE during the war.

Their advice to you is:

Do not send breeding and immature stock to the Butcher simply because prices are attractive now.

Do not Market half-finished animals; it is wasteful of the country's resources and is against your own interests.

Do not kill Calves—rear them; it is well worth it.

Do not reduce your stock; when you cannot buy stores, buy calves.

Maintain your flocks and breed your sows; it will pay you to do so.

The Board of Agriculture and Fisheries make the above recommendations not only for the National Welfare but because they believe them to be for the ultimate benefit of British Agriculture.

It seems almost too ridiculous to be true that the Government has more concern for lambs or calves than for boys on the threshold of manhood, but the facts convict them.

For myself I would rather see a thousand of the bloodthirsty old gentlemen who preached conscription sent to the front from their club smoke-rooms and editorial chairs, than five hundred lads from whom their country has something to expect!

I do not think I am a sentimentalist, certainly I do not plead for the exemption of mere boys from the battlefield in order that they may have what is called a good time, though I hold that they should not be deprived deliberately of the few halcyon years that are in one fashion or another the reward of one and all. I would work them to the last ounce of their capacity in seasons like these. They should have long hours, Spartan fare, and spells of physical drill, they should put in eight hours of labour for the Government in the factory, in the munition works, wherever their services could be best employed.

They might be under military rule, amenable to the same discipline as the soldier, but they should not go into the firing line, because they belong to the next generation.

They are to sire it; no nation can afford to leave that responsibility to the physically unfit, and to those who have passed fighting age.

This duty done, they would be free to join the fighting forces for which their drill, their labour and their self-denial would have prepared them. My soldier relatives and friends tell me that the lad in his teens is of little value in a prolonged campaign. He may have all the necessary courage, but he lacks the essential stamina. He is fitter to march and endure when he is twenty-five than when he is nineteen, fitter still at thirty.

But, asks my critic, where will you recruit your fighting men? I look round at my men friends, and I find them, up to the age of fifty, taking their chance in the forefront of things. The outcry against the married man as combatant is valid only in so far as his family depends upon him for support. My friends chance for the greater part to belong to the comfortable classes. They have enjoyed the best that England has to offer; they are prepared to pay the price, with their lives if need be. Above all they are articulate, they have the franchise, they can speak their mind. Collectively they support in one form and another the conditions that make war possible. They are conscious of a certain responsibility.

Where, for example, on the other hand, is the responsibility of the midshipman on the torpedoed battleship? I take his bravery for granted. I am quite convinced that could he read my plea he would disavow any shadow of sympathy with it, but I am concerned for the country and not for him. He has a duty toward civilisation, he is well-bred, highly trained, efficient. I say that the State owes him at least a few years of manhood and should see that he is allowed to reach maturity, although he is neither veal nor lamb!

It is false economy that raises the outcry against married men as soldiers. They alone in the community can be spared, they have fulfilled, or partly fulfilled, the function upon which civilisation depends. Potentially, if not always actually, they are fathers. Economists insist that pensions and allowances are an extravagance that the nation cannot afford. I reply that war is a still greater extravagance, the wickedest form of indulgence known to mankind, and that worse than war is the destruction of the fairest hopes of the future, the race to come. Again, if those who light the fire were compelled to feed the flames I believe there would be fewer conflagrations.

I feel that I do but set down facts that are known to thinkers, who, as a rule, prefer to keep silence at times like these lest their patriotism be suspect. After the war they will deplore the ruin; trustees for the generation to come, they will see that they have failed in their trust. They will shift the responsibility on to the nature of things, they will declare that war was inevitable and that destruction of all we hold most dear must follow in its wake.

Here I join issue with them. The world is for all practical purposes ruled by mankind. Nothing but the catastrophes like the tidal wave and the earthquake escape man's control. Famine, disease, and mortality he can arrest; he can increase his stature morally, mentally, physically. If he elect to play the prodigal he does so at his own risk, but he has no right to tamper with the vital resources of the generations that must follow. War is delirium, or he would bear this fundamental truth in mind. I think it has escaped him. He is immersed in the pursuit of the end, and no means are spared. Thus we hear the outcries because the fat money bags are growing thin, but nothing is said of the great asset that no trading, however successful, can restore.

We can find in some barbarous land wealth only comparable to that which Sindbad discovered in the Valley of Diamonds, but what will that profit a race that must depend upon old and exhausted stock to renew its vitality? The desire for wealth is at least one of the contributory causes of war, the thought of wealth wasted makes men forget they are wasting what no wealth can replace.

I am sure that women feel this eternal truth in their hearts, but all too many fear to be thought afraid. They fear their own mankind, those for whom they would gladly sacrifice all that life holds for them of good. They fear to be thought jealous for their own boys, while if the truth be told their fear is all for the young sons of all women quite irrespective of nationality. At least this is how the situation appeals to me, and I dare not keep silent if there be any medium of appeal to those who think with me that will set my thoughts down. There is a slumbering conscience of humanity only waiting the call that will break through its dreams. I am not so bold as to believe that I can utter it, but I may perchance stimulate some more gifted pen.

In any case, I cannot hide my thoughts merely because they may meet no response, for after all there is not in all the world a single great belief that was not once the unregarded possession of a single mind.

XIII THOUGHTS ON COMPULSION

While I am firmly opposed to conscription in any form that does not embrace national wealth and resources as well as men, or that singles out one class of men to the exclusion of others, while I believe that, even subject to this view of national obligation, conscription should be treated as a war measure and blotted out of the statute book in the month that sees the restoration of peace, I am not writing to protest or to complain. We are told that every cloud has its silver lining, and when the Government decided to demand the services of those unmarried men who, far more by reason of apathy than cowardice, had remained to be taken, I could not help thinking that much good might come of it. Against the hideous doctrine that the end justifies the means we may set the equally old saying that necessity knows no law, and against the compulsory making of soldiers which is an evil, I set the waking of the national consciousness, and that is a gain.

For centuries England led the vanguard of the workers for freedom. Against the will of the people the power of the great barons and of their Kings bent and broke. There were generations in which the people as a people were articulate, they stood up for their rights and privileges and were a force that few dared defy. The discovery of steam, the growth of factories, the increase of population and the struggle for life combined to make a large section of the working classes helpless. The hideous poverty and ugliness of life in the great centres of wealth drove men, and women too, to shut out the ugliness of their lives with the aid of brief spells of dissipation. Strong drink became alike a source of revenue to the country, a source of "honours"—generally paid for in hard cash—to the prosperous brewer and distiller, and the source of brief forgetfulness, misery, disease, crime and savage punishment to those who sought its dangerous solace. National expenditure and party funds alike clamoured for the maintenance of the evil, and those who are most concerned with what is euphemistically called "keeping the working classes in their places" turned a deaf ear to schemes that sought to make the places of leisure for the worker more attractive and less dangerous. Pure Beer Bills and legislation to restrict the sale of spirits to such spirit as is matured, met with no effective support. Give the worker the nineteenth and twentieth century substitutes for his old time panem et circenses and he would continue until strength failed him to sow that others might reap and to earn the opprobrium and contempt of those he enriched.

Parliament, immersed in politics to the exclusion of government, cared little for the real welfare of the people. It contrived by skilful electioneering to stimulate their interests in things that do not matter, and when they were not wanted at the polls their representatives—save the mark—left them severely alone. So it happened, as time passed, that the old interest in vital questions was passing from a large section of the proletariat. Powerful through the medium of their Unions they supported these great organisations for little better than the right to live. It was so hard to improve the conditions of a trade or a group of allied industries that the effort to this end left them with no energies to enter into larger fields. Those leaders of the people who have the gift of clear vision could meet with no adequate response, they alone could see the wood, their followers had their gaze riveted on one particular tree. England tended more and more to become the paradise of the capitalist and the purgatory of the working man, and because he was always protesting against conditions that will fill future generations with wonder and shame, conditions improved beyond recognition by the country with which we are now engaged in a life-and-death struggle, it became the practice of the comfortable classes to denounce the workman and all his ambitions. He was, in their view, sent into this world to create wealth, not to enjoy what it creates; that was the privilege of his betters. The Englishman's natural sense of fair play has been obscured by the newspapers that pander to him and give him all his thoughts ready made; if anybody thinks this is an extreme statement, let him turn to the files of the reactionary press from the time when John Burns led the Dockers' Strike down to the outbreak of war (and since) and see whether he can find anywhere a solitary favourable verdict for the worker as against the employer. He will search in vain.

There is a certain psychological aspect of the labour question that has, I think, been overlooked. A generation or two of oppressive conditions tends to produce a race that loses national consciousness. The worker learns to take the view that he is no longer a part of Great Britain, that his interests are exclusively personal, like those of his employers, that he has no status in the country and that his business is to get the most tolerable conditions of life that he can secure by combination and agitation, and to ignore the trend of politics, religion, social progress, and the rest of the life forces of civilisation. He knows himself for one who hews wood and draws water, it suffices him to carry a minimum of logs to the pile and buckets from the spring. He knows that there is for him no glimpse of the larger life and that because he is collectively a multitude there will be keen competition to batten on his small savings or surpluses. He has the feeling that if he loses his job he will take his place in the ranks of a submerged tenth, ranks easy to slip into, almost impossible to rise from. My long intercourse with those who fast that others may feast has revealed this attitude to me in a hundred shapes, all tragic, some dangerous. It has been the despair of those who are working for the people and know that if they would but combine to grasp the sorry state of things environing them they could "shatter it to pieces and remould it nearer to the heart's desire." Unhappily it is impossible to fight what is called vis inertiæ, you cannot bruise a feather pillow or hurt a sack of sand by striking it, and while long hours, scanty holidays, mean pleasures and continual anxiety dogged the footsteps of the working classes, it seemed impossible to secure the unity of action, the collective wisdom that would not only enable labour to find its place in the sun, but would destroy the parasites that thrive upon it. I think that the careful observer who noted the social condition of England down to the late summer of 1914 will be disposed to agree that I have not overstated the case or put the ugly lighting unfairly on the foreground of the picture.

Then came war with its strange, unmistakable revelation to the working man and working woman. In the blinding light born of battle they saw their country assaulted by an enemy completely trained and organised. Women saw that their own rulers had been too immersed in the great games of party politics and business development to give proper thought for the safety of the country. They saw, too, that the limitations of capitalism and capitalist were visible in the eyes of the world. They could help, they could leaven the dough of profit-making with the yeast of personal sacrifice, some have done so, but for the salvation of the country they appealed to the working man. Government adopted some of his own panaceas, they accepted schemes of pure socialism as props for the pillars of the State, they taxed riches and laid sacrilegious hands upon the Dagon of wealth to the infinite rage of certain Philistines who are still grieving for the god's lost hands and feet, but it was to the working classes Government turned in the hour of their distress, and Labour responded nobly. Those into whose souls the iron of corruption, disappointment and indifference had not entered, set themselves to labour seven days a week for long hours in evil atmosphere, or left their sweethearts and wives to strike a blow for the country that had displayed to them more of the qualities of a step-mother than a mother. Many have laid down their lives, and in the hearts of those who survive national consciousness has been re-born.

The democratic comradeship of the battlefield, embracing all classes, has taught the working man that his foe in times of peace is not so much the class whose representatives are of his own blood brotherhood, but the system that dominates those who serve and those who accept service. This lesson learned exclusively on the fields of war will permeate the factories when war is over. One stumbling-block to progress remained. It was, I venture to say, the presence in our midst of hundreds of thousands of men who have been rendered listless and apathetic by life conditions too easy or too hard. Now compulsion has reached this class it will give them in return for unsought risks and labour a sense of their place in the body politic. It will teach them that whether they will or no they have a part to play in shaping the destinies of Great Britain and that the reward will be in proportion to the sacrifice. We must not forget that a new Britain, a new Empire, a new Imperial outlook is being shaped over the far-flung area of war. It will not be only to the British Empire that change will come, but to all belligerent nations. The upheaval, sure as the succession of day and night, is one we dare hardly contemplate, not by reason of fear, but by reason of hope. To take advantage of the change as it will affect our nation, all classes of the community must prepare, and nothing could have clogged the wheels of progress in the near future than the presence in our midst of so many thousands of men whose inactivity would have been bitterly resented by those who have borne the heat and burden of the day. Unity of action is a condition precedent to the close and merciless revision of existing conditions, the ending of privilege, the widening of the powers of democracy, the whole peaceful solution of a question that two years ago promised to develop into a war worse than this we are waging, a war of brother against brother.

I repeat that I am opposed to conscription, particularly to a conscription that picks and chooses, and does not demand capital as freely as it demands life; equally am I opposed to the action of the young and unattached men who shrink from assuming their proper responsibilities. That they would have held back if the conditions of their life, whether favourable or unfavourable, had been the true conditions of an enlightened citizenship, I sincerely doubt, that they should have been forced to undertake as a duty what they should have embraced as a privilege is matter for regret. Happily they will not go unrewarded, they will see their errors, and they will come back to a country they have helped to save with the keenest determination to make it worth living in as well as worth fighting for.

XIV WOMEN AND WAR

"Why is it," wrote an editor, criticising a view of women that I had put forward, "why is it that woman is actually a war lover at heart, an inciter to and encourager of war? Can you explain why, while some women condemn fighting, the great majority do not shrink from it, and even regard the fighting man as the proper object of their admiration?" It was a challenge, that I will answer to the best of my ability.

In the first place, I must admit that the statement is true about countless women. Only yesterday I had a letter from a friend to whom I had written my sympathy; her only son was killed in the British advance. "I need no more consolation," she wrote. "Harry's colonel has sent me a letter telling me of my poor boy's bravery. I am proud to think that he has lived up to our tradition—ours has always been a fighting family, you know."

I would not criticise a bereaved mother; I can never forget that my eldest son has been in the fighting line, that my other boy gave up Cambridge for the aviation school, and is now flying in France, that my son-in-law is a soldier, and that of many friends and a few relatives only the memory remains. But I feel, from the bottom of my heart, that the death and glory idea is wrong; that the attraction of medals, ribbons, stars, orders, titles and uniforms and brass buttons is false, and that an ever-increasing number of women are conscious of the truth, not only here but in France, Germany, Austria, Russia and Italy.