"Why is it," wrote an editor, criticising a view of women that I had put forward, "why is it that woman is actually a war lover at heart, an inciter to and encourager of war? Can you explain why, while some women condemn fighting, the great majority do not shrink from it, and even regard the fighting man as the proper object of their admiration?" It was a challenge, that I will answer to the best of my ability.

In the first place, I must admit that the statement is true about countless women. Only yesterday I had a letter from a friend to whom I had written my sympathy; her only son was killed in the British advance. "I need no more consolation," she wrote. "Harry's colonel has sent me a letter telling me of my poor boy's bravery. I am proud to think that he has lived up to our tradition—ours has always been a fighting family, you know."

I would not criticise a bereaved mother; I can never forget that my eldest son has been in the fighting line, that my other boy gave up Cambridge for the aviation school, and is now flying in France, that my son-in-law is a soldier, and that of many friends and a few relatives only the memory remains. But I feel, from the bottom of my heart, that the death and glory idea is wrong; that the attraction of medals, ribbons, stars, orders, titles and uniforms and brass buttons is false, and that an ever-increasing number of women are conscious of the truth, not only here but in France, Germany, Austria, Russia and Italy.

That consciousness cannot become fully articulate until the war is over. For each belligerent nation the duty at this moment is clear—it must fight for what it holds to be right, must struggle for victory until the end. When that end comes I believe that the reign of the old ideas will end with it, and that all women will recognise the truth that is already clear as daylight to the minority.

Why is woman actually a war lover at heart? The question stings me. I am almost reluctant to answer. Yet though the fault is woman's, the responsibility is man's. Down to only a few years ago woman was no more than man's toy. She existed for his pleasure and convenience. If he covered her with pretty dresses and radiant jewels it was because she was his chattel. It seems only yesterday that a married woman's property became her husband's when he married her; that she could not bring an action at law. It needed the celebrated Jackson case, familiar to students of the feminist movement, to decide that a man might not lock his wife up in his house.

I believe that the law enabling a man to administer "moderate chastisement" to his wife has never been repealed. A woman cannot divorce her drunken, dissolute husband unless he ill-uses her physically; the law, unable to deny that woman has a body, will not grant her the possession of a soul. Trashy novels, trivial amusement, unending decoration, freedom from the development of mentality and personality—these are the things that have been held to suffice women, and though there have always been a few great women in the world, the vast majority has been compelled to accept the conditions offered.

I cannot help thinking that if there had not been a surplus of women over men in countries where monogamy rules, change would have been longer still in coming; but there have always been tens of thousands of women for whom there is neither mate, domestic inactivity nor child-bearing, and the educational progress, though leaden footed, has moved.

From the Garden of Eden to Ibsen's "Dolls' House" is a far cry, but it was left to the great Scandinavian dramatist to open woman's eyes. That is, I think, why he was greeted by male critics with such howls of execration—they saw the foundation of the old order being sapped. Man had appealed to woman's vanity, and had consequently developed it enormously; but the motive was little higher than that which inspires the male baboon when he goes courting. Ibsen showed woman the result of her submission.

Only the historian, looking at our social history when the youngest of us "has lain for a century dead," will realise the strength and progress of the feminist movement in the last decade or two; the barriers it has surmounted or swept away; the barbed wire entanglements of prejudice and convention against which it has flung itself. Yet I am bold enough to declare that had universal war been mooted in 1934 instead of 1914 woman throughout all the countries of potential combatants would have combined instantly to prevent it.

At present the ranks of the thinkers are too thin; woman is divided against herself. The worst foes of feminism are women; it is the anti-feminists who parade the streets in khaki, who band themselves into wholly unnecessary and sometimes disreputable anti-German leagues, who labour as though war were a glory rather than a curse. You will not find militarists or anti-feminists among the glorious sisterhood of the hospitals, for they almost alone among women know what war really is. If the propaganda of feminism could have spread, if it could have invaded Germany, where the Church, the nursery and the kitchen are expected to fill every woman's life, what a very different answer would have been given to the ambitions of rulers and the blundering of politicians! In how many million homes, where sadness reigns supreme, would there have been the simple, harmless happiness that is the birthright of us all?

Is it the irony of fate that man must pay the terrible price for having made woman what she is; for having stifled or sought to stifle her common sense; for robbing her of the rights that she possesses by reason of being a human being; for distracting her with gawds and frivolities, and seeking to keep her merely as a minister to his pleasures and a mother to his children? He has paid for the supreme folly of generations with the price of the lives of millions of his best and bravest, with the ruin of flourishing cities and fair country, with the poverty of the generation to come, and with many another bitter offering of which he is not yet fully aware.

Doubtless there are still in our midst countless women who accept all that is happening as inevitable; who look upon it without realising that had the sex responded to the ideals of feminism and become one sisterhood without boundaries and without a limited patriotism conditioned by the accident of birth, these things could not have been. I say, without hesitation, that the future of the world demands the elimination of some existing types of women, the education of others, and, in the end, the union of all.

Man was not born merely for glorious death, he was born for glorious life, and in the systematic and universally condoned slaughter of man by man there is neither honour nor glory. The world, properly administered, can produce enough food and clothing for all; it has work and a measure of happiness for all. Our enemies are not Englishmen or Germans, Frenchmen or Turks; they are ignorance and poverty, disease and vice. Woman recognises the truth—that is to say, thinking and emancipated woman recognises it—and she knows that all the strife that tears the older world asunder is fratricidal, that a million times Cain strikes down a million times Abel, and in so doing deliberately obscures the Divine Event toward which all creation moves.

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.