Three weeks before this war began I was in one of those East End London parishes whose inhabitants exist from hand to mouth on casual employment and sweated labour; where the women, poor, thin, overworked souls, have neither time nor strength nor inclination for cleanliness and comeliness in person or house; where the men are undersized and underfed, with the faces of those without a future; where pale and stunted children playing in the gutters have a monopoly of any mirthless gaiety there is.

In one household of two rooms they were “free of debt, thank Gawd!” having just come back from fruit-picking, and were preparing to take up family existence again on the wife’s making of matchboxes at a maximum of six shillings a week, the husband not having found a job as yet. In another household, of one room swarming with flies and foul with a sickly acrid odour, a baby was half-asleep on the few rags of a bed bereft of bedclothes, its lips pressed to something rubbery, and flies about its eyes; dirty bowls of messes stood about; an offal heap lay in the empty grate; and at a table in the little window a pallid woman of forty with a running cold was desperately sewing the soles on to tiny babies’ shoes. Beside her was a small dirty boy, who had just been lost and brought home by a policeman, because he had remembered the name of the street he lived in. The woman looked up at us wistfully, and said: “I thought I’d lost ’im too, I did; like the one that fell in the canal.” Though she still had seven, though her husband was out of work, though she only made five to six shillings a week, she could not spare any of the children she had borne.

Prices have gone up. What is happening to such as these? They exist in all countries. You military bureaucrats, who safeguard and pursue “national aspirations,” who open the gates of the kennel and let loose these mad dogs of war; who rive husbands from their wives, sons from their mothers, and send them out by the hundred thousand to become lumps of bloody clay—spare a fraction of time to see the peoples for “whose good” you launch this glorious murder; come and sniff for one moment that sickly, acrid smell in the homes of the poor! And then talk of national aspirations and necessities!

There is only one national aspiration worth the name, only one national necessity—to have from roof to basement a clean, healthy, happy national house. “War the cleanser! Without war—no sacrifice, no nobility!” I refer you to that mother, slaving without hope and without glory, starved and ill, and slaving in a war with death that lasts all her life, for the children she has borne.