stitution of war, and wish that as many women could be
spared its brutal impositions as possible.

Nobody has ever accused me of being a Pacifist. Personally, I think
that every self-respecting nation on the globe should have risen in
1914 and assisted the Allies to blast Prussia off the face of the
Earth, but after this war is over if the best brains in these nations
do not at once get to work and police the world against future wars,
it will be a matter for regret that they were not all on the German
ship when she foundered.

III

It is to be remembered that woman has, in her subconscious
brain-cells, ancestral memories of the Matriarchate. It is interesting
to quote in this connection what Patrick Geddes and G. Arthur
Thompson have to say on the mooted question of the Mother-Age:

"Prehistoric history is hazardous, but there is a good case to be made
out for a Mother-Age. This has been reconstructed from fossils in the
folk lore of agriculture and housewifery, in old customs, ceremonies,
festivals, games; in myths and fairy tales and age-worn words.

"Professor Karl Pierson finds in the study of witchcraft some of the
fossils that point back to the Matriarchate. In the older traditions
'the witch resumes her old position as the wise-woman, the medicine
woman, the leader of the people, the priestess.' 'We have accordingly
to look upon the witch as essentially the degraded form of the old
priestess, cunning in the knowledge of herbs and medicine, jealous of
the rights and of the goddess she serves, and preserving in spells and
incantations such wisdom as early civilization possessed.'

"The witch's weather wisdom is congruent with the fact that women were
the earliest agriculturists; her knowledge of herbs with that of the
ancient medicine women; her diablerie with that of the ancient group
relations of the sexes so different from what we call marriage to-day;
her nocturnal dances with the ancient choruses of marriage-ripe
maidens. The authority and magic circle kept by the broom are those of
the hearth and floor in her primeval roundhut; and her distaff and
pitchfork, her caldron, her cat and dog, are all in keeping with the
role of woman in the Mother-Age.

"But there is another way, and that certainly not less reliable, by
which we can arrive at some understanding of the Mother-Age, and how
it naturally came about, namely, by a study of our 'contemporary
ancestors,' of people who linger on the matriarcha