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.
We could have said—
"We brought you into the world, we fed you at the breast, we guarded your tender years. When you grew older we gave you inspiration and the love that is the romance of life. We bore you children through agonies of which you know nothing; we loved you with the love that is woman's whole existence. You shall not destroy yourself, for you are ours and we are yours, and we are placed on this earth to lift it nearer to heaven, not to drag it down into hell. Your bits of shining metal or ribbons, your uniforms, your personal bravery are as nothing to us, if to earn the one or prove the other you are to kill and maim our husbands and sons, our fathers and brothers. There are greater fights to be fought, nobler victories to be won, and in the only war worth waging we can move by your side. Love and not hate must rule the world."
The time will come when woman will speak to man in this wise, and he will listen because he must, even though in listening he remove the strange, obscene gods of strife from his Pantheon. That the truth is known already to noble-minded women throughout the world is to me the most vitalising comfort that these days can yield. That so many women still pass it by, that they praise war and magnify personal courage and "martial glory," that they still foster and encourage the meanest hatreds born of war, is I think worse than many a disaster. But the lesson it enforces is plain. The time is not ripe; before she can handle the power to which she lays claim woman must abjure her idols, she must follow the path of pain and suffering a little longer, she must learn for herself through bitter experience how great a curse war is. I believe she is learning her lesson; I believe that the hosts of the unthinking are melting, and that as the real meaning of glory, heroism and the rest is brought home to her she will understand.
Even men in the lands of death and desolation have been vouchsafed a glimpse of the truth. There is nothing quite so pathetic in modern history as that mingling of foes on Christmas Day, 1914, in a brief truce of God. Truly the light was brief and soon withdrawn, not to be rekindled a year later, but it was strong enough to testify to the brotherhood of man obscured so long by kings and statesmen.
Women can rekindle the light so that it will not be suddenly put out; they have no nobler purpose under heaven. And in the days when they are come to their full stature the memory of those who applauded strife and were dazzled by some of its exterior aspects will be utterly and happily forgotten.