Dire have been the disillusionment and bitterness among our fighting men, upon returning to the homes and wives or loves they had long dreamed of--to find the wife or love a shattered wreck, or a strenuous, graceless, half-male creature; the home a place of nerve-racking unrest. It is consoling to know that a number of those who have been de-sexed merely, and not disabled, will continue to find useful and contented outlet for their masculine developments in filling still the places of our fallen heroes. Cruelty lies in the fact, however, that the womanhood of many will have been wrecked quite needlessly; by strain of superfluously strenuous drill and marchings, scoutings, signallings, and other such vain and fruitless imitations of the male. The greatest care should have been exercised to have selected the strong and able-bodied, the older women and the women of the characteristic worker-type (corresponding to the sterile female-worker of the bee-hive), for the rougher and the more exhausting tasks. The young wives and mothers and the young girls should have been rigorously excluded from such. Of all human prerogatives, the greatest is that of being preserved, by class, by ability, by means, or by privilege, from gravitating to levels of work that coarsen and debase; or that, at all events, do not exercise and foster the development of higher tastes and faculty. And this human privilege is, in proportion to their degrees of civilisation, accorded to women by all civilised peoples. As men have stood between them and the perils of battle and shipwreck, the slaying of wild beasts, pioneering, exploring, and the like, so they have stood between them and the coarsest, ugliest, and most debasing industrial functions. Nevertheless, Feminist anger at restriction whatsoever in the matter of employment ignores all cause for gratitude on the part of the sex, that, being at man's mercy as she is, civilised woman is no longer (as the woman of inferior civilisations is still) a beast of heavy burden. Far otherwise, indeed, Feminism aims at nothing so much as to repudiate her established privileges, abolish all distinctions, and to make woman once again that beast of burden the chivalry of man--at first instinctive, later magnanimous--has progressively rescued her from being. And yet the degree to which sex is defined in Labour (as in Life) is at the same time the gauge and the cause of human development. Wheresoever are found low intelligence, crude morale and lack of progress, there the women are employed in men's work. Wheresoever women are employed in men's work, there are low intelligence, crude morale and lack of progress. "Thank Heaven for the War!" Feminists have said, however, "because it has enabled our sex to prove its worth--by enabling us to quit ourselves like men. The world knows now that women can conduct omnibuses, drive ploughs, clean stables, kill chickens, ring and slaughter pigs, quite as well as men can."