This cheerfulness is somewhat gruesomely voiced in a cartoon in _Punch_ touching on the allowance given to the soldier's wife. She remarks, "This war is 'eaven--twenty-five shillings a week and no 'usband bothering about!" We have always credited _Punch_ with knowing England. Truth stands revealed by a thrust, however cynical, when softened by challenging humor. There was no discipline in the pension system. No work was required. The case of a girl I met in a country town was common. She was working in a factory earning eleven shillings a week. A day or two later I saw her, and she told me she had stopped work, as she had "married a soldier, and 'e's gone to France, and I get twelve and six separation allowance a week." Never did the strange English name, "separation allowance," seem more appropriate for the wife's pension than in this girl's story. Little wonder was it that in the early months of the war there was some riotous living among soldiers' wives! And the comments of women of influence on the drunkenness and waste of money on foolish finery were as striking to me as the sordid condition itself. The woman chairman of a Board of Poor Law Guardians in the north of England told me that when her fellow-members suggested that Parliament ought to appoint committees to disburse the separation allowances, she opposed them with the heroic philosophy that women can be trained in wisdom only by freedom to err, that a sense of responsibility had never been cultivated in them, and the country would have to bear the consequences. In reply to my inquiry as to how the Guardians received these theories, I learned that "they knew she was right and dropped their plan." The faith of leading women that experience would be the best teacher for the soldier's wife has been justified. A labor leader in the Midlands told me that an investigation by his trade union showed that only one hundred women in the ten thousand cases inquired into were mis-spending their allowances. And when I was visiting a board school in a poor district of London, and remarked to the head teacher that the children looked well cared for, she told me that never had they been so well fed and clothed. There seemed no doubt in her mind that it was best to have the family budget in the hands of the mother. In the sordid surroundings of the mean streets of great cities, there is developing in women practical wisdom and a fine sense of individual responsibility. Perhaps of greater significance than just how separation allowances are being spent is the fact that women have discovered that their work as housewives and mothers has a value recognized by governments in hard cash. It makes one speculate as to whether wives in the warring nations will step back without a murmur into the old-time dependence on one man, or whether these simple women may contribute valuable ideas towards the working out of sound schemes of motherhood pensions.