“... Is it not our mission to preserve life? Do not humanity and common sense alike prompt us to join hands with the women of neutral countries, and urge the stay of further bloodshed—forever?... There is but one way to do this ... by Wisdom and Reason. Can they begin too soon?... Already we seem to hear ‘A hundred nations swear that there shall be Pity and Peace and Love among the good and free.’”[5] Then a letter from the women of Belgium, from the women of Switzerland, from the women of Italy—five hundred, two thousand names to each. At length the Inger understood. These women who were here to protest against war were speaking for thousands upon thousands of women all over the world. And here were thousands listening, in the nation’s capitol. A little French woman spoke, each sentence translated by another woman. “The humblest cry can sometimes be heard joined to many others.... It is very well for gentlemen banqueting at Guildhall to rejoice at being able to assemble so comfortably during the greatest war in history, thanks to the valor of the British army which defends the coast; but they should think of those who are exposing their lives.... “My two sons are in the trenches since the end of September, and have never slept in a bed since. It would be nothing if the cold had not set in so dreadfully....”[6] Something—no one could have told whether it was a breath, or a look from one to one, went over the hall. More than in a long account of horror, this French mother, who spoke no other tongue, had made them feel what she was feeling. There was a Polish woman of the country about Cracow who told the story of what had happened to her village. She spoke slowly, through an interpreter, and almost without emotion. “We had just three little streets,” she said, “so it was not much to take. But they took them....” And she told how, and how a hundred children in the village had died. “I should be less than a woman in courage if I did not say that I, for one, shall not be silent even one day until my death. Every day I shall be crying, ‘Women of the World. This can not happen again, if we are women of flesh and not of stone.’” There was a woman of Servia, and she was a peasant woman. Her clothes were those which her neighbors had found for her. Even then, so great was the haste at the last, she had crossed the ocean in a skirt and a shawl, but with no waist beneath the shawl. “I had to come,” she said, through her interpreter. “There is only one hell worse than the hell that we have been through: and that is not to cry to the last breath that it shall be stopped. That it shall not come again to other women like us....”