Pray, children, for the world’s unreconciled!
Ye are our only lilies undefiled—
The others are incarnadined too red.
The Rising Value of a Baby
By Mabel Potter Daggett
(From “What the War Really Means to Women” in “Pictorial Review.”)
Thus is explained quite simply over the world to-day the rising value of a baby. Civilization is running short in the supply of men. We don’t know exactly how short. There are Red Cross returns that say in the first six months alone of the war there were 2,146,000 men killed in battle and 1,150,000 more seriously wounded. Figures, however, of cold statistics, as always, may be challenged. There is a living figure that may not be. See the woman in black all over Europe, and to-morrow we shall meet her in Broadway. There are so many of her in every belligerent land over there that her crêpe veil flutters across her country’s flag like the smoke that dims the landscape in a factory town. It is the mourning emblem of her grief, unmistakably symbolizing the dark catastrophe of civilization that has signaled Parliaments to assemble in important session. Population is being killed off at such an appalling rate at the front that the means for replacing it behind the lines must be speeded up without delay. To-day registrar-generals in every land, in white-faced panic, are scanning the figures of the birth-rates that continue to show steadily diminishing returns. And in every house of government in the world, above all the debates on aeroplanes and submarines and shipping and shells, there is the rising alarm of another demand. Fill the cradles! In the defense of the State, men bear arms. It is women who must bear the armies.