ose which require strength, skill, and endurance.
Pulling on the steel rope of an elevator and closing the steel gates for
eight hours a day require strength and endurance; and yet in all the big
department stores the lifts are worked by girls. Women also drive the
vans, and dragging on the brake of a brewery-wagon and curbing two
draft-horses is a very different matter from steering one of the cars
that made peace hateful. Not that there are no women chauffeurs. They
are everywhere. You see them driving lorries, business cars, private
cars, taxicabs, ambulances.

In men's caps and uniforms of green, gray, brown, or black, and covered
to the waist with a robe, you mistake them for boys. The other day I saw
a motor-truck clearing a way for itself down Piccadilly. It was filled
with over two dozen Tommies, and driven recklessly by a girl in khaki of
not more than eighteen years. How many indoor positions have been taken
over by women one can only guess; but if they are in proportion to the
out-of-door jobs now filled by women and girls, it would seem as though
half the work in London was carried forward by what we once were pleased
to call the weaker sex. To the visitor there appear to be regiments of
them. They look very businesslike and smart in their uniforms, and
whatever their work is they are intent upon it. As a rule, when a woman
attempts a man's work she is conscious. She is more concerned with the
fact that she is holding down a man's job than with the job. Whether she
is a lady lawyer, lady doctor, or lady journalist, she always is
surprised to find herself where she is. The girls and women you see in
uniform by the thousands in London seem to have overcome that weakness.
They are performing a man's work, and their interest is centred in the
work, not in the fact that a woman has made a success of it. If, after
this, women in England want the vote, and the men won't give it to them,
the men will have a hard time explaining why.

[Illustration: _From a photograph by Brown Bros._

"They have women policemen now."]

During my few days in England, I found that what is going forward in
Paris for blind French officers is being carried on in London at St.
Dunstan's, Regent's Park, for blind Tommies. At this school the classes
are much larger than are those in Paris, the pupils more numerous, and
they live and sleep on the premises. The premises are very beautiful.
They consist of seventeen acres of gardens, lawns