As a light in deep darkness she has arisen--woman, pure womanly, with all the God-given attributes of her highest nature at last acknowledged by her self-styled “lord and master,” Man! She has shaken off the trammels which for many centuries he had fastened about her--as heroic maid and mother she has roused the better spirit in him. Out of the gloom and blood and slaughter of this world war--the most wicked war that ever devastated the earth--she has radiated upon him like an angel, clothed in a glory of love and pity; and, moving by his side through the poisonous smoke of battle and the thunder of the guns, she has cheered him on his way. When wounded and fallen she has been swift to rescue him, and first to soothe. Who will, who _can_, ever justly estimate the saving work of women in this terrific holocaust of nations!--this mad hurtling of man against brother--man without thought for the consequences of such wholesale murder! To Woman, in her mother-love and mercy, friend and foe are alike indifferent; all that her pitying eyes see are the gaping wounds, the flowing blood, the torn and disfigured limbs--her province is to save, heal, and comfort if she can. She knows that with God there are no nations, but that all men are human beings, subject to the same sufferings, the same deaths; she knows by the teaching of Christ that not a sparrow shall fall to the ground without Our Father, and that men are of “more value than many sparrows.” So, placing herself in tenderest unison with that “quality of mercy” which “Is not strained, But droppeth, like the gentle rain from heaven, Upon the place beneath,”