an flesh, that next year's grass or poppies or
karoo bushes may spring up greener and redder, where they have lain, or
that the sand of a plain may have a glint of white bones!" And we cry,
"Without an inexorable cause, this should not be!" No woman who is a
woman says of a human body, "It is nothing!"

On that day, when the woman takes her place beside the man in the
governance and arrangement of external affairs of her race will also
be that day that heralds the death of war as a means of arranging human
differences. No tinsel of trumpets and flags will ultimately seduce
women into the insanity of recklessly destroying life, or gild the
wilful taking of life with any other name than that of murder, whether
it be the slaughter of the million or of one by one. And this will be,
not because with the sexual function of maternity necessarily goes in
the human creature a deeper moral insight, or a loftier type of social
instinct than that which accompanies the paternal. Men have in all ages
led as nobly as women in many paths of heroic virtue, and toward the
higher social sympathies; in certain ages, being freer and more widely
cultured, they have led further and better. The fact that woman has
no inherent all-round moral superiority over her male companion, or
naturally on all points any higher social instinct, is perhaps most
clearly exemplified by one curious very small fact: the two terms
signifying intimate human relationships which in almost all human
languages bear the most sinister and antisocial significance are both
terms which have as their root the term "mother," and denote feminine
relationships--the words "mother-in-law" and "step-mother."

In general humanity, in the sense of social solidarity, and in
magnanimity, the male has continually proved himself at least the equal
of the female.

Nor will women shrink from war because they lack courage. Earth's women
of every generation have faced suffering and death with an equanimity
that no soldier on a battlefield has ever surpassed and few have
equalled; and where war has been to preserve life, or land, or freedom,
unparasitised and labouring women have in all ages known how to bear an
active part, and die.

Nor will woman's influence militate against war because in the future
woman will not be able physically to bear her part in it. The smaller
size of her muscle, which would severely have disadvantaged her when
war was conducted with a battle-axe or sword a