with poisoned bombs, will make the present conflict seem like a Lilliputian effort.

To condemn the plan of a unified League as Utopian because of its lack of precedent is to discount the exceptional achievements of nations and men in the past. The freeing of the slaves by Lincoln was without precedent. Against the advice of his councillors, Lincoln issued the Emancipation Proclamation, in war time. The United States did not look for a precedent when it returned its indemnity to China, after the Boxer Rebellion an altogether unprecedented precedent in diplomatic circles. Great occasions create their own historic warrant. That the veins of humanity have been opened by a voracious autocracy, that the life of humanity has been ebbing and will continue to ebb past rehabilitation if conditions are not changed and that the overthrow of old autocracies has precipitated new forms of governments that demand immediate co-operative protection should be precedent enough for to-day.

"He who waits to have his task marked out
Shall die and leave his errand unfulfilled."

Every new idea is called Utopian by heavily weighted materialists until it functions. Then it is pronounced "practical" and "inevitable," even by the very reactionaries who most bitterly opposed it. The laying of the Atlantic cable, the magic of

capturing power from cataracts, the gift of wings to man, all were scientifically demonstrated to be impossible upon paper. But Cyrus Field kept his faith, Robert Fulton experimented, and Wilbur Wright quietly built new planes as old ones failed to rise from the earth. In the lexicon of truth there is no such word as fail. The imagination of great men feeds upon difficulties and exercises itself upon overcoming them. The ant finds his food in anthills near the earth, but the elephant bends forest trees and with his trunk reaches for nourishment in the topmost branches.

Again, to call the ideal of an inter-dependent, organized world without war impractical is not only to acknowledge oneself crassly uncreative, but also it is to applaud wastefulness, since it ignores the unused administrative faculty of women. No one knows what is possible or impossible for governments to accomplish until the vast, creative, political possibilities of women have been fully liberated and have functioned upon all planes of the executive. Then we may talk of success or failure in governments, not before. The unused political strength of women is the great unmined asset of the future. We may not look for stability among nations until we have worked this intersecting vein and until women are upon all the frontiers of civilization, officially guarding humanity with men. As the war has taught states that their economic output may be immeasurably

increased by the services of women, so it is to be hoped that governments may yet glimpse the fact that the state, in its political security, may be immeasurably strengthened by the inherent guardianship of women.

It may be that the fate of a democratic League of Nations lies in this unused reservoir of human strength. It may be that world unity waits upon the consciousness of women to help attain it. It may be that only as ethically-minded women add their constructive energy to the energies of ethically-minded men and work for a world league that it will be possible to build a Temple of Justice for humanity and not a bristling Arsenal of Destruction.

When women familiarize themselves with this ideal and fully comprehend what it means to them and to posterity; when they realize that only by propagating and supporting an organized, unified world plan may they themselves hope to approximate for their children a civilization without warfare it is inconceivable that women in large numbers will not rally to its support and overcome all opposition. Nothing is more certain than that unless women throw the weight of their new influence upon the side of a broader liberalism in reconstruction, the ruling element, naturally conservative and desiring to re-establish old sanctions and old privileges rather than to think out new ones, will triumph as it has triumphed in the past.

Then we shall have, not a new world founded upon a new spirit of universal justice, but a shabby, slightly-edited version of the old one- and world chaos must be faced again. Then we shall not have defeated Prussianism, and the war, even though military victory has been overwhelmingly on the side of the Allied cause, will have failed in its supreme purpose the defeat of war itself, and the organization of a stabilized world peace.

In the countries recently at war, the tired nerves of statesmen are worn with war problems and burdened with a weight of material questions. It is difficult to see how they are to spring to this initial task of reconstruction, to the creation of a world without war, a world built upon unifying human principles, unless they are practically upheld and supported by envisioned, idealistic men and women. The hope of a world, liberated from the iron yoke of the ages, may fail through lack of a strong enduring will to sustain it in the face of reactionary resistance.

To ask women to help supply this sustaining power may seem to be a heavy burden to lay upon women, also war-worn, many of them still politically unconscious, but it is surely not so grievous a burden as the weight of sustaining future wars. Moreover, women, through maternity, have a genuine race consciousness that enables them to rise to a real race call, and certainly no cry from an outraged humanity was ever so deep and so

agonized as this one. Other wars have been fought for a principle, such as slavery, or individual rights - the principle of liberty in some form of application to life. This war was waged for the principle of life itself: whether wars forever are to cease and men in reality are to possess themselves — as freedom is of little use if it does not carry with it the guarantee of life to enjoy it or whether some ambitious over-lord, some subtle, future Kaiser or some predatory interest, forever is to have the power to conscript them. Surely an age capable of producing women who can form a Battalion of Death to fight side by side with men in battle, is also capable of producing women able to organize a Battalion of Life, in peace, and of working constructively side by side with men in governments, to protect life and sustain it.

Is there any foundation for believing that the entrance of women into public affairs will supply a new and enduring idealism? Comparisons continue to be odious but sometimes are necessary though it is to be hoped that the war, as it has destroyed so many traditions, will also lift the activities of men and women above the region of comparison. If men are more intellectual than women, we now frankly admit that they have had longer mental opportunities. If women are more chaste than men, we acknowledge (reluctantly) that it may be because men have insisted upon greater virtue in women, since intellect and moral