To you, women of Great and Greater Britain, it has fallen to raise on Richmond Hill this refuge and home for our soldiers and sailors totally disabled. Where thirty-two are now lying there will soon be two hundred more. Nearly all my life I have known the spot on which this home will stand; and truly, no happier choice could have been made. If beauty consoles—and it can, a little—it is there in all the seasons; a benign English beauty of fields and trees and water spread below, under a wide sky. One hundred thousand pounds you need to raise this monument of mercy in tribute to the brave. If it were five hundred thousand you would give it; for is not this monument to be the record and token of your gratitude, your love, and your pity? Each one of you, I think, however poor, must wish to lay one brick or stone of the house that is to prove your ministering. If the misery through this war could be balanced in scales, I do not think men’s suffering would pull down that of wives, and mothers, sisters, daughters; but this special suffering of incurable disablement—this has been spared you, who yet by nature are better at enduring than men. It has been spared you; and in return you have vowed this home for the helpless; a more sacred place than any church, for within it every hour of day and night pain will be assuaged, despair be overcome, actual living tenderness be lavished. When you have built this refuge for the prisoners of Fate—when you have led them there to make out the rest of their lives as best they can—remember this: Men who are cut off in their youth from life and love will prize beyond all things woman’s sympathy, and the sight of woman’s beauty. Give—your money to build, your hands to lead them home; and, when they are there, take them your sympathy, take them your beauty! CARTOON (From _The Nation_, 1916.) . . . I cannot describe the street I turned into, then, like no street I have ever been in; so long, so narrow, so regular, yet somehow so unsubstantial; one had continually a feeling that, walking at the gray houses on either side, one would pass through them. I must have gone miles down it without meeting even the shadow of a human being; till, just as it was growing dusk, I saw a young man come silently out, as I suppose, from a door, though none was opened. I can depict neither his dress nor figure; like the street he looked unsubstantial, and the expression on his shadowy face haunted me, it was so like that of a starving man before whom one has set a meal, then snatched it away. And now, in the deepening dusk, out of every house, young men like him were starting forth in the same mysterious manner, all with that hungry look on their almost invisible faces. Peering at one of them, I said: “What is it—whom do you want?”