Another thing that we must look to with some hope for the future is the
influence of Women. Profoundly shocked as they are by the senseless
folly and monstrous bloodshed of the present conflict, it is certain
that when this phase is over they will insist on having a voice in the
politics of the future. The time has gone by when the mothers and wives
and daughters of the race will consent to sit by meek and silent while
the men in their madness are blowing each other's brains out and making
mountains out of corpses. It is hardly to be expected that war will
cease from the earth this side of the millennium; but women will surely
only, condone it when urged by some tremendous need or enthusiasm; they
will not rejoice--as men sometimes do--in the mere lust of domination
and violence. With their keen perception of the little things of life,
and the way in which the big things are related to these, they will see
too clearly the cost of war in broken hearts and ruined homes to allow
their men to embark in it short of the direst necessity.

And through the women I come back to the elementary causes and roots of
the present war--the little fibres in our social life which have fed,
and are still feeding, the fatal tree whose fruits are, not the healing
but the strife of nations. In the present day--though there may be other
influences--it is evident enough that rampant and unmeasured commercial
greed, concentrating itself in a special class, is the main cause, the
tap-root, of the whole business. And this, equally evidently, springs
out of the innumerable greed of _individuals_--the countless fibres that
combine to one result--the desire of private persons to get rich quick
at all costs, to make their gains out of others' losses, to take
advantage of each other, to triumph in success regardless of others'
failures. And these unworthy motives and inhuman characteristics again
spring obviously out of the mean and materialistic ideals of life which
still have sway among us--the ideals of wealth and luxury and
display--of which the horrors of war are the sure and certain obverse.
As long as we foster these things in our private life, so long will they
lead in our public life to the embitterment of nation against nation.
What is the ruling principle of the interior and domestic conduct of
each nation to-day--even within its own borders--but an indecent
scramble of class against class, of individual against individual? To
rise to nois