If the women in this country reinforce the elements that tend to a softening of the moral fibre, to a weakening of the will, and unwillingness to look ahead or to face hardship and labor and danger for a high ideal--then all of us alike, men and women, will suffer. But if they show, under the new conditions, the will to develop strength, and the high idealism and the iron resolution which under less favorable circumstances were shown by the women of the Revolution and of the Civil War, then our nation has before it a career of greatness never hitherto equaled. This book is fundamentally an appeal, not that woman shall enjoy any privilege unearned, but that hers shall be the right to do more than she has ever yet done, and to do it on terms of self-respecting partnership with men. Equality of right does not mean identity of function; but it does necessarily imply identity of purpose in the performance of duty. Mrs. Blatch shows why every woman who inherits the womanly virtues of the past, and who has grasped the ideal of the added womanly virtues of the present and the future, should support this war with all her strength and soul. She testifies from personal knowledge to the hideous brutalities shown toward women and children by the Germany of to-day; and she adds the fine sentence: "Women fight for a place in the sun for those who hold right above might." She shows why women must unstintedly give their labor in order to win this war; and why the labor of the women must be used to back up both the labor and the fighting work of the men, for the fighting men leave gaps in the labor world which must be filled by the work of women. She says in another sentence worth remembering, "The man behind the counter should of course be moved to a muscular employment; but we must not interpret his dalliance with tapes and ribbons as a proof of a superfluity of men." Particularly valuable is her description of the mobilization of women in Great Britain and France. From these facts she draws the conclusion as to America's needs along this very line. She paints as vividly as I have ever known painted, the truth as to why it is a merit that women should be forced to work, a merit that _every one_ should be forced to work! It is just as good for women as for men that they should have to use body and mind, that they should not be idlers. As she puts it, "Active mothers insure a virile race. The peaceful nation, if its women fall victims to the luxury which rapidly increasing wealth brings, will decay." "Man power must give itself unreservedly at the front. Woman power must show not only eagerness but fitness to substitute for man power."