tual influence over the awakening women of her race, and then,
when they were approaching the breaking point, had gone quietly and
systematically about making a revolution, there is no question in my
mind as to the outcome.

Just consider for a moment what the German women have suffered during
this war--a war that they were told was forced upon their country by the
aggressive military acts of Russia and France, but which, owing to
Germany's might, would hardly last three months. For nearly three years
they have never known the sensation of appeased hunger, and, having
always been immense eaters, have suffered the tortures of dyspepsia in
addition to hunger. But, far worse, they have listened almost
continuously to the wails of their children for satisfying food,
children who are forever hungry and who often succumb. Karl Ackerman,
whose accuracy no one has questioned, states in his book, _Germany, The
Next Republic?_, that in 1916 sixty thousand children died of
malnutrition in Berlin alone.

These women have lost their fathers, husbands, sons--well, that is the
fortune of any war; but they are beginning to understand that they have
lost them, not in a war of self-defense, but to gratify the insane
ambitions and greed of a dynasty and a military caste that are out of
date in the twentieth century. Their parents, when over sixty, have died
from the same cause as the children. Their daughters, both unmarried and
newly widowed, are "officially pregnant," or the mothers of brats the
name of whose fathers they do not know. The young girls of Lille hardly
have suffered more. The German victims are sent for, then sent home to
bear another child for Germany.

Now, we know what the German men are. These women are the mothers and
wives and sisters of the German men; in other words, they are Germans,
body, and bone and brain-cells, capable of precisely the same ruthless
tactics when pushed too hard--if they have a leader. That, to my mind,
is the whole point. Given that leader, they would effect a revolution
precisely as I have described in my story. Nor would they run the risk
of failure. The German race is not eight-tenths illiterates and
two-tenths intellectuals, emotional firebrands, anarchists and
sellers-out like the Russians. They are uniformly educated, uniformly
disciplined. They will do nothing futile, nothing without the most
secret and methodical preparation of which even the German mind is
capable. It will be like