When the boys come home they want to come back to women who have been born again into high and noble patriotism. “Not only hats off to the flag. Sleeves up for the flag.” That slogan, adopted by the men in the steel industries who are speeding up the building of ships, ships, and more ships, is the patriotism our men are living every day in France, and it is the kind they have a right to expect of the women at home. CHAPTER XXVII WHAT KIND OF WAR WORK Mrs. Rothschild, of Kensington Palace Green, a street in an exclusive residence district of West London, is president of a society for the distribution of Jewish literature among English Jews serving at the front, or wounded in hospitals. Not long ago the society held a large mass meeting in a seaside resort where many wealthy Jewish people go in summer. The object of the meeting was to raise money, and Mrs. Rothschild made a special journey from her country home, a distance of twenty or thirty miles, to the resort. She did this in her zeal to make her pet war work a success, but--in so doing she broke a law of Great Britain, got herself arrested and was fined sixty shillings, about fourteen dollars and fifty cents. For Mrs. Rothschild, ignoring the fact that gasoline is so scarce in England that most pleasure motor-cars have been retired and automobiling, except for war purposes, has been practically eliminated, deliberately hired a car to take her from her home to the meeting. The zealous Mrs. Rothschild knew the law. She could not help knowing it, because every private car in Great Britain and almost all taxi-cabs have huge gas bags on top, and are driven by gas instead of petrol, as they call it there. But all she thought of was her war work and her mass meeting. There are not many such women in Great Britain, but every once in a while they are caught and fined. Marie Corelli, the novelist, an ardent patriot on the surface, was heavily fined for food hoarding. At a time when food was terribly scarce in England, when even the rich went without meat, butter or sugar, and many working people ate dry bread and canned salmon, Miss Corelli’s secret larder was found to be stocked with hams, bacon, butter, sugar, tea, and all manner of delicacies to last for nearly a year. I remember another woman of prominence who had seventeen Persian cats for whom she managed somehow to buy cream. When she was arraigned she pleaded in extenuation that the cats were used to cream, and that she gave three days every week to canteen work at one of the railroad stations. The flinty-hearted judge fined her nevertheless and threatened her with a prison sentence unless the cats’ diet was placed on a war footing.