not that: it is that they are held of
such small value in the eyes of this man-made world. This is the
sorest thought of all!

Even as I write these words, I hear the bugle calling, and down the
street our brave boys in khaki are marching. Today I passed on the
street a mother and her only son, who is now a soldier and going away
with the next contingent. The lad was trying to cheer her as they
walked along. She held him by the hand:--he was just a little boy to
her.

"It was not for this that I raised him," she said to me bitterly. "It
was not for this! The whole thing is wrong, and it is just as hard on
the German women as on us!"

Even in her sorrow she had the universal outlook--the very thing that
so many philosophers declare that women have not got!

I could not help but think that if there had been women in the German
Reichstag, women with authority behind them, when the Kaiser began to
lay his plans for the war, the results might have been very different.
I do not believe women with boys of their own would ever sit down and
wilfully plan slaughter, and if there had been women there when the
Kaiser and his brutal war-lords discussed the way in which they would
plunge all Europe into bloodshed, I believe one of those deep-bosomed,
motherly, blue-eyed German women would have stood upon her feet and
said: "William--forget it!" But the German women were not there--they
were at home, raising children! So the preparations for war went on
unchecked, and the resolutions passed without a dissenting voice. In
German rule, we have a glorious example of male statecraft,
uncontaminated by any feminine foolishness.

No doubt, it is because all our statecraft has been one-sided, that we
find that human welfare has lagged far behind material welfare. We
have made wonderful strides in convenience and comfort, but have not
yet solved the problems of poverty, crime or insanity. Perhaps they,
too, will yield to treatment when they are better understood, and men
and women are both on the job. As it is now, criminals have only man's
treatment, which is the hurry-up method--"hang him, and be done with
him," or "chuck him into jail, and be quick about it, and let me forget
him." Mothers would have more patience, more understanding, for they
have been dealing with bad little boys all their lives.

The little family jars which arise in every home, are settled nine out
of ten times by the mother, unless she is the sort