ugh
our Empire during my time, or yet through any other empire of which I
have any knowledge. Everybody, or almost everybody, doing something for
England, and few or none idle who are of military age except such as
have heavy burdens or secret disabilities into which I dare not pry.

It is not alone in Flanders or on the North Sea that our country's
battle is being fought, and when I think I hear the hammering on ten
thousand anvils in the forges of Woolwich, Newcastle, and Glasgow, and
the thud of picks in the coal and iron mines of Cardiff, Wigan, and
Cleator Moor, where hundreds of thousands of men are working long shifts
day and night, half-naked under the fierce heat of furnaces, sometimes
half choked by the escaping fumes of fire-damp, I tell myself it is
not for me, too old for active service and only able to use a pen, to
dishonour England, and her Empire, in the presence of her Allies, or
weaken her in the face of her enemies, by one word of complaint against
the young manhood of my country.

THE PART PLAYED BY WOMAN

The latest and perhaps the most vivid of the flashes as of lightning
which have revealed the drama of the past 365 days has shown us the
part played by woman. What a part that has been! Nearly always in
the histories of the great world-wars of the past the sympathy of the
spectator has been more or less diverted from the unrecorded martyrdom
of the myriads of forgotten women who have lost sons and husbands by
the machinations of the few vain and selfish women who have governed
continents by playing upon the passions of men. Thank God, there has
been nothing of that kind in this case. On the contrary, woman's part
in this red year of the war has been one of purity, sacrifice, and
undivided glory.

Towards the end of it we saw a procession through the streets of London
of 30,000 women who had come out to ask for the right to serve the
State. I do not envy the man who, having eyes to see, a heart to feel,
and a mind to comprehend, was able to look on that sight unmoved. Every
class of woman was represented there, the gently-born, the educated, and
the tenderly-nurtured, as well as the humbly-born, the uneducated, and
the heavily-burdened, the woman with the delicate, spiritual face, as
well as the woman with the face hardened by toil. And they were marching
together, side by side, with all the barriers broken down. It was not
so much a procession of British women as a demonstration of Briti