Reading the record of Germany's war methods, even those of us who are endeavouring to think sanely through these evil days must be impressed by the overwhelming evidence of their complete ruthlessness.

We who have travelled in Germany not once, but many times, know full well that harshness and cruelty are not associated with the majority. There are countless Germans who could only be cruel in obedience to orders, and, of course, every German will do what he is told, just as the Children of Israel did when Joshua, who appears to have invented "frightfulness," was carrying out his merciless campaign. If we admit that the simple German of the south is not cruel at heart, that he is rather a dreamer and a sentimentalist with strong love for domestic pleasures, we find that the policy of "frightfulness" must be ascribed to the military party, consisting for the most part of Prussians, with headquarters in Berlin.

These men are the organisers of war, and speak through the mouths of writers like Treitschke, Bernhardi, and the rest. It is they who have torn up the treaties and conventions that were, humanity hoped, to decide the conduct of war. They are responsible for the curious outburst of national hatred against this country that is at once so startling and so silly, a revelation of the sad truth that Germany is suffering from neurosis.

I have been trying to trace "frightfulness" to its source, not through the medium of books or papers, but in the light of my own knowledge of the country and my past acquaintance with some of its leading men, and I think that the philosophic historian of the times to come, whose vision is not obscured by the smoke of battle or the fury of combatants, will not hesitate to declare that the worst and saddest features of war as waged by the Germans are due to the fact that in their country women are kept more in the background than in the country of any other great Power.

The fault, as I will point out later on, is not that of the women, but of the leaders of German faction who have deliberately suppressed woman, and of nearly all the leaders of German thought who, being dependent on Government favour, have subscribed to their policy of deliberate suppression. Here and there an independent thinker has arisen nearly always from the ranks of Social Democracy. Bebel's book on women, for example, is a standard work, but the few lights do no more than emphasise the surrounding darkness.

Look round Europe for a moment. Russia is a backward empire and the spirit of progress moves over it with slow feet, but Russia is making vast strides, and the plough that will trace deep furrows in the virgin soil of its social life is drawn by man and woman together. All the professions are open to women, even those in which women are not found here. The Russian engineer who planned the newest bridge over the Neva was a woman. Men and women students work side by side on terms of absolute equality, and compete for honours that often fall to the gentler sex.

Russian women of the educated classes are more than merely well informed, they are brilliant. Linguists, women of affairs, they have a grip of actualities of the empire of which they form a significant part. In spite of autocratic rule and limited freedom there is such a full life for the Russian woman as her German sister has never known, except in dreams of emancipation. In Finland, be it remembered, women sit in Parliament.

Turn to France, and it may be declared emphatically that woman rules. Women are doctors, barristers, and scientists; they are members of the Goncourt Academy; they are the heads of some of the most important business institutions; they give the most exclusive salons their distinction. Public opinion is moulded by them; their influence makes and breaks Cabinets. Feminism is one of the strongest forces in France. Quiescent to-day or working in quietness, this force will dominate a France released from war.

Even in Belgium, of whose progress we hear little, women have been largely responsible for the organisation of the middle and working classes, an organisation that was well-nigh complete before war broke out, and in the slow rebuilding that is to come we may look with confidence to the Belgian woman to play a leading rÔle. Turn to a group of neutral countries—Denmark, Norway, Sweden—and it will be seen that feminism is moving with vast strides along the path of national progress. Woman is asserting herself in all of them, contributing her thought to her country's problems, taking an ever important place in its councils.

Alone of the great Powers Germany has elected to forget or to disregard as a negligible quantity the opinion of woman, and the reason is not far to seek. For years past the German has forgotten the respect and reverence he owes to his own womenfolk. KÜche, Kinder, Kirche—he calls alliteration to his aid to express a growing contempt for the sex and the narrowest possible view of its world function. Intoxicated with the vision of imperial domination, he has regarded his own sex as the one motive force in the universe.

He has not watched the slow awakening of women in the countries around him; he has not noted how bonds of sympathy, light as gossamer, yet strong as steel, have stretched from country to country, binding our sex in a large and ever widening sisterhood, inarticulate now, or at least hardly coherent, but only waiting for their appointed hour to assume a fuller share of the glories, the burdens and the responsibilities of life. Woman's influence, silent, world-wide, pervasive, has been treated by the evangels of Kultur as though it were nonexistent, and in the hour of crisis woman as a united force has avenged herself for years of neglect, scorn and brutality. She is everywhere a belligerent.

I do not know the country in Europe where women are treated as they are in Germany. Not many countries can vie with the United States in the attention bestowed upon the gentler sex, but as I have endeavoured to show, they are respected more in every belligerent country than they are in the one that sought to rest supreme in Europe. Even in Italy, Spain, and Portugal, where women must often work as hard as men, they stand upon a secure footing of affection and respect. The smaller courtesies, the greater services of life are theirs. In some definite measure they complete the home. But you cannot bring an indictment against a whole nation, and I do not seek to do so.

In tens of thousands of German homes the wife and daughters are loved and honoured, but in the rank and file of military circles, even among the men who hold official positions and boast a certain standing, woman has been dethroned—she is regarded as an incumbrance necessary for the production of further generations of supermen, who shall inherit the earth. This attitude of mind reveals itself in the action that speaks louder than words. The toleration and the contempt to which I refer are everywhere apparent. No good-looking woman is safe in Germany from the ill-bred stares and comments of the men with whom she must travel in train or tram.

If women enter a theatre or restaurant their own friends and relatives do not rise to receive them. They are liable to be elbowed into the road if men walking abreast can occupy the whole of the pavement. The politeness of the few cultured Germans (pardon the discredited adjective) merely emphasises the boorishness of the vast majority. It might be that the German is waiting for women to be officially recognised as human beings to whom some measure of courtesy or even decency is due. Only when rudeness is "verboten" will rudeness cease.

The country is governed by men for men and women, but according to the marriage rubric woman is actually man's servant. The effect of these conditions upon the morals of the country is deplorable. They give a cachet to vices, even the most odious, and the rate of illegitimacy, about 10 per cent. for the whole empire, is about doubled in Berlin, where the military caste is supreme. The morals of the army are the morals of Berlin, and account not only for the hideous stories published about what took place in Belgium and northern France, but for the recitals not less appalling that one gathers from officers home on leave who have seen sights in the area of German occupation that cannot be set down in print.

Undoubtedly these recitals, if they could reach the heart of Germany, would thrill tens of thousands of honest men with indignation and disgust. I do not believe for a moment that they represent the inclinations of the whole nation. They are rather the action of that section of the nation which, while war endures, must have the upper hand, and during all the years of war-like preparations has reigned supreme. Against this aspect of German national life the women of belligerent and neutral countries alike are arrayed. Whatever their resources or their influence in the councils of their husbands, sons, and brothers, it will be devoted without cease to the destruction of a militarism that degrades and shames womankind. The German woman knows in her heart that her men have in countless instances become perverts, but she is dumb because she is forbidden to speak. In Prussia no woman may organise a union that has political aims; she may not even join one.

It is the purpose of the dominant caste to keep woman in subjection, to restrict her activities to the kitchen, the cradle and the Church, even to deny her the mental and the physical development that might tend to lead her to revolt. Woman may find a limited salvation in the conduct of a business; throughout the German Empire not far short of a million women conduct commercial enterprises of one kind or another, and collectively they strive with some success to better the physical and moral conditions under which their sisters live. No effort of which they have yet been capable has accomplished more than this, their condition of tutelage remains complete.

I do not pretend to be satisfied with the position of women in England: far from it; but here, as in the countries already enumerated, it is better far than in Germany. Women mould public opinion to an appreciable extent; they are able to modify the life of their sex in many important particulars, the best of them exercise sane influence, and all are sufficiently well treated to establish a definite attitude of mind in men. We know that no British or French troops would behave in Germany as Germans behaved in Belgium; we know that the honour of honourable women and of helpless children would be safe in the keeping of the French and British officer, and that he would not be called upon to restrain his men from acts of lust and savagery.

We know that there is a public opinion the wide world over among free women and women struggling to be free that will not submit to the domination of any race that does not hold woman in respect. It is on this account, in my opinion, that the unbridled and tolerated savagery of the worst class of German conscript in Belgium and France has cost Germany more than the loss of half a dozen pitched battles. Whatever the irritation caused by the incidents of the war, the Allies know that women the world over are and will remain on their side, for the hegemony of a nation that treats women in peace with contempt and in war with "frightfulness" cannot be contemplated by our sex. We know that in fighting for the cause of the Allies we are fighting for the most downtrodden of the highly civilised women in Europe. At present they would resent our aid—they are patriotic—they have suffered terribly, and in the hour of their trials they mourn and forgive those who treated them ill.

Later on, when peace returns, when the world is purged of violence and its wounds begin their slow and painful process of healing, the German women will recognise that we have been fighting for a larger cause than our own; that we helped to force the doors that have remained barred so long and to break the chains that bound the women of a great but erring nation. Only the ultimate triumph of the Allies can free the women of Germany, and in time they will realise the truth.

The views of the wisest men are narrow, and few among them will realise or admit even now the truth that woman is now a factor in the world's affairs. When this war is over we shall tell in no uncertain words what is in our hearts. At present we must needs be silent. If those dreamers of world empire had but remembered that women, too, have minds and are learning to use them, the story of the great world tragedy, even if it had to be set down, would have been widely different in many of its incidents.

It was Germany's fatal mistake that, not content with dominating its own womankind and suppressing them whenever and wherever possible, it believed that the rest of the world was equally indifferent to the treatment of its mothers, wives, and daughters.

Every known outrage has raised fresh fighters, has strengthened the Allies with the sure force of moral sympathy and encouragement, has thinned the ranks of those whose sympathies were with a country whose marvellous progress provides so much material for admiration. Who can measure the responsibility of those guides and teachers who taught the German to develop along material lines and to forget that woman is the proper spiritual guide, and that as man loves and reverences her he sees farther and deeper into the heart of things—sees life sanely and sees it whole?

Whatever the limitations of our knowledge we know that the one sex completes the other; that man enlarges the vision of woman and woman enlarges the vision of man, and that it is the peculiar gift of our sex to control man's passions, to stimulate his humanity, to direct his ambitions away from dangerous paths. We do not all strive as we might; we do not always succeed as we deserve, but man is woefully incomplete without us, and the spectacle of a nation that has despised womanhood waging war shows that this contempt corrodes his moral fibre, leaves him at the mercy of his worst instincts and raises up against him all the spiritual forces against which none may strive victoriously.

We women who have never handled weapons, whose only place in the area of strife is among the maimed and helpless, know even better than men that the race is not always to the swift nor the battle to the strong. When history has recorded the story of the world war that darkens our lives to-day, future generations will ask how it was that Germany could find no friends among the neutral nations. Her Ambassadors, official and unofficial, her publicists and those of neutral countries who were not ashamed to accept her subsidies, worked with true German thoroughness. Truth was never allowed to stand in the way of propaganda. No lie that might serve a useful purpose went unsanctioned, for the great end was to sanctify all means, however vile, and yet in the hour when even moral support and silent sympathy would have been of the greatest value, Germany looked for it in vain.

It was easy to declare that the whole world was jealous and misinformed; such an excuse could hardly deceive the responsible people who fathered it. My own view is that the women of Europe and the United States turned against Germany when the manner in which she waged war was first revealed to a disgusted world. Their hostility was not merely sentimental—it was psychological. The German attitude toward women, already questioned, was revealed as in the glare of searchlight, and womanhood from London to Petrograd and from Copenhagen to New York was completely, irrevocably antagonised.