en and not heard. I'm not one of those, maself--I like to meet a
bairn that's able and willing to stand up and talk wi' me. And all I
can say is that those who are discouraged about the future of the race
because of the degeneration of childhood during the war do not know
what they're talking about.

Women and children! Aye, it's well that we've talked of them and
thought of them, and fought for them. For the war was fought for
them--fought to make it a better world for them. Men did not go out
and suffer and die for the sake of any gain that they could make. They
fought that the world might be a better one for children yet unborn to
live in, and for the bairns they'd left behind to grow up in.

Was there, I wonder, any single thing that told more of the difference
between the Germans and the allies than the way both treated women and
children? The Germans looked on their women as inferior beings. That
was why they could be guilty of such atrocities as disgraced their
armies wherever they fought. They were well suited with the Turks for
their own allies. The place that women hold in a country tells you
much about it; a land in which women are not rated high is not one in
which I'd want to live.

And if women wull be better off in Britain and America than they were,
even before the war, that's one of the ways in which the war has
redeemed itself and helped to pay for itself. I think they wull--but
I've no patience wi' those who talk as if men and women had different
interests, and maun fight it out to see which shall dominate.

They're equal partners, men and women. The war has shown us that; has
proved to us men how we can depend upon our women to tak' over as much
of our work as maun be when the need comes. And that's a great thing
to have learned. We all pray there need be no more wars; we none of us
expect a war again in our time. But if it comes one of the first
things we wull do wull be to tak' advantage of what we've learned of
late about the value and the splendor of our women.

CHAPTER XXVII

I've been pessimistic, you'll think, maybe, in what I've just been
saying to you. And you'll be wondering if I think I kept my promise--
to prove that this can be a better, a bonnier world than it was before
yon peacefu' days of 1914 were blotted out. I have'na done sae yet,
but I'm in the way of doing it. I've tried to mak' you see that yon
days were no sae bonny as we a' thocht them.

But noo! Noo we've come