Man was not born merely for glorious death, he was born for glorious life, and in the systematic and universally condoned slaughter of man by man there is neither honour nor glory. The world, properly administered, can produce enough food and clothing for all; it has work and a measure of happiness for all. Our enemies are not Englishmen or Germans, Frenchmen or Turks; they are ignorance and poverty, disease and vice. Woman recognises the truth--that is to say, thinking and emancipated woman recognises it--and she knows that all the strife that tears the older world asunder is fratricidal, that a million times Cain strikes down a million times Abel, and in so doing deliberately obscures the Divine Event toward which all creation moves.
Woman falters, she is young in mental growth and still very weak, though growing stronger hour by hour. She sees nothing of war, but she hears of moving incidents by flood and field and hairbreadth 'scapes in the imminent deadly breach, and her sense of romance so largely fostered by pernicious or trivial literature is stirred to its depths. She wants for her son or her husband or her lover some of the dust of praise, some of the ribbons and medals, some of the glory in which she will discern some pale reflection of herself.
She falls in love with war because she has not the least inkling of its realities; her mourning garments are edged with pride. It has been left to this terrible struggle to tear some of the bandages from her eyes and to rob her of an unworthy ideal. What a supreme misfortune that world tragedy has supervened while she is growing up, before she has learned to grasp the power that lies to hand! In instances beyond numbering she has passed the feminist movement by, quite content to hug her chains as long as they are heavily gilded. She does not realise and does not believe in her own powers, and in Central Europe, at least, she has been kept under surveillance all the time.
England, France, and America are the great Powers that have given feminism a chance. Russia was beginning to follow suit, but the oak that will in years to come defy so many storms and shelter so many lives is as yet a sapling. We must face the bitter truth that had all our sisters accepted feminism we would have saved man from his worst enemy, we could have saved him from himself.