There are men in the States to-day, men I am proud to number among my friends, who might speak in due season the words that would encourage Europe in the only fight that can rightly engage all nations, the fight against the curse of kingship. We who know how much this fight is needed, who have seen in the great republic how it welds together the most diverse faiths and nationalities, believe that nothing but kingship divides man from man in Europe and fills every frontier line with the instruments of death.
All the sympathy of the best elements in the United States is with suffering Europe to-day, but it cannot be expressed without the use of words that will sound harsh to some, impertinent to others, startling to all. Yet these words will not fall upon deaf ears. They will bring hope to many for whom the future is utterly dark, who believe that the forces of reaction will strive desperately to overcome democracy and that democracy needs prompt help if it is to survive.
Granting that America has the right to be heard when the time comes for the re-establishment of peace, she has the right to deliver the message of her own hundred years of freedom. Is it too much to hope that she will rise to the height of this supreme occasion?
If she will not shrink from this duty, she will ensure a victory beside which the ultimate conquest in this war will appear well-nigh insignificant.
X WOMAN'S WAR WORK ON THE LAND
The cry for woman's service on the land is one I endeavoured nearly twenty years ago to anticipate. It was at a time when the anxiety of girls to earn their own living was making itself manifest in every class, and when the wages paid to those who had broken away from the conventions of purely domestic life were miserably inadequate. I had heard how, in the Dominions overseas, English women had been forced to learn open-air duties as best they could, I had realised the natural instinct of many women for gardening, and I had no doubt that there would be some whose courage would not flinch from an experiment. Looking back to that season, I marvel at the progress feminism has wrought in the world. Then every development that was sought for men was in the case of woman taboo. The only thing that a girl might do in the garden without defying the conventions was the light job that could be accomplished without any fatigue. She might pluck roses; I have grave doubts as to whether she might plant or prune them. She might eat celery, but the digging of a trench or the earthing-up of the plants would have been considered a most "unladylike" occupation. In fact, we suffered, as a sex, under the spell of that horrible word; life for women has not been nearly so futile since it was abolished.
In the years when I began first to find that the urgency of social problems was a bar to the further serenity of life, I, like other inexperienced people with reform at their hearts, dreamed dreams and saw visions. I had seen at Easton and Warwick the women of the working classes enjoying the hard work of the garden and the fields; I, too, had tried my hand, always to find that I was rewarded with a quickly renewed sense of the joy of life. Even when weather conditions were unfavourable, the rest after labour was in itself atonement for the toil—it was so unlike other rest. Then I began to see an England in which girls and young women, ceasing to be merely "ladylike," would be healthier, happier, and more useful than they had been in the years of which I could take count. I could not help realising that the desire for active physical exercise could not be limited to one sex, save in obedience to a convention that ignored human needs. It seemed to me as though the truth would be apparent to everybody, that nobody who could lend a helping hand would withhold it. Naturally I was soon undeceived.
I was assured that only the children of working farmers and labourers could possibly milk the dairy herd, that gardening work in many of its aspects would be beyond the limits of the capacity of the gently nurtured. The girl market gardener was voted an impossibility; as landscape gardener, I was assured, she could never compete with a man. Poultry-farming and stock-breeding were even voted indelicate! Household management, to enable girls to take posts as housekeepers in public institutions or large private houses, was regarded as something to be acquired without training, and even the commercial side of farm management was vetoed as a study for girls, as though a well-managed farm would be the worse for a competent book-keeper because that book-keeper chanced to be a daughter instead of a son of the house. I could prolong the list of vetoes and taboos that were presented to me, but no useful service would be served in doing so. I am only concerned to remember now—after nearly twenty years—that I was regarded as an unpractical dreamer, and that, as I write, there are letters on my desk asking me if I cannot recommend lady gardeners and agriculturists of all descriptions. I cannot: they are all fully occupied. Many are at work in England, not a few are busy thousands of miles oversea—in Canada, Australia, and the United States. Think of the freedom and the fullness of their lives, never a taboo to stand between them and any sane development!