nd hand to hand, would now
little or at all affect her. If intent on training for war, she might
acquire the skill for guiding a Maxim or shooting down a foe with a
Lee-Metford at four thousand yards as ably as any male; and undoubtedly,
it has not been only the peasant girl of France, who has carried latent
and hid within her person the gifts that make the supreme general. If
our European nations should continue in their present semi-civilised
condition, which makes war possible, for a few generations longer, it
is highly probable that as financiers, as managers of the commissariat
department, as inspectors of provisions and clothing for the army, women
will play a very leading part; and that the nation which is the first to
employ its women so may be placed at a vast advantage over its fellows
in time of war. It is not because of woman's cowardice, incapacity, nor,
above all, because of her general superior virtue, that she will end war
when her voice is fully, finally, and clearly heard in the governance
of states--it is because, on this one point, and on this point almost
alone, the knowledge of woman, simply as woman, is superior to that of
man; she knows the history of human flesh; she knows its cost; he
does not. (It is noteworthy that even Catharine of Russia, a ruler and
statesman of a virile and uncompromising type, and not usually troubled
with moral scruples, yet refused with indignation the offer of Frederick
of Prussia to pay her heavily for a small number of Russian recruits in
an age when the hiring out of soldiers was common among the sovereigns
of Europe.)

In a besieged city, it might well happen that men in the streets
might seize upon statues and marble carvings from public buildings and
galleries and hurl them in to stop the breaches made in their ramparts
by the enemy, unconsideringly and merely because they came first to
hand, not valuing them more than had they been paving-stones. But one
man could not do this--the sculptor! He, who, though there might be no
work of his own chisel among them, yet knew what each of these works of
art had cost, knew by experience the long years of struggle and study
and the infinitude of toil which had gone to the shaping of even one
limb, to the carving of even one perfected outline, he could never so
use them without thought or care. Instinctively he would seek to throw
in household goods, even gold and silver, all the city held, before he
sacrificed its works o