by long hours of steady application to monotonous factory work--what temptations she has to resist--what bribes--yes!--bribes of cash and comfort she has to forgo. For the enemy is busy elsewhere than on the field--insidious and indefatigable in stirring up strife in this country and sowing the seeds of disloyalty and discontent, and it says much for our women that they are awake and alert to the fact. Of the contemptible few who “make love” to “Fritz” in his prison camp, one can only be sorry that they are so “weak in the upper story!” The real women of the Empire--the women who, in the after-war days that are coming, will have so much of the country’s destiny in their guidance, are in the majority sound, sane, and loyal--we can trust them with work even more momentous than the making of shells! Meanwhile, we can try to be grateful to them for their steadiness and perserverance, their pluck and patience, and let us not forget at any time what we owe to them. It should be graven deep on the records of the nation that--_Without Women’s Work the War Could Not Be Won!_ And in the hour of victory let us not fail to pay them our debt of Honour! DARKNESS AND LIGHT (_Written at the request of Sir Arthur Pearson as the Prologue to an Entertainment on behalf of St. Dunstan’s Hostel for Soldiers and Sailors Blinded in the War_) “Oh, dark, dark, dark amid the blaze of noon, Irrecoverably dark! Total eclipse Without all hope of day!” Samson Agonistes. You, whose eyes are able to read these tragic lines of blind John Milton, can you realise what they mean? Do you feel to the innermost core of your heart the blackness of that “eclipse without all hope of day,” which like a never-lifting cloud envelopes those from whom the blessing of sight has been taken for ever! Can you, even by the utmost exertion of your imagination, truly grasp what it would mean to you if all light and colour were blotted out from your consciousness, and you had to rely on a merciful guiding hand to lead you to and fro, to hold you lest you stumbled, and conduct you from places of business or pleasure safely back to your home? If you could not see beloved faces?--if the sunlight could never again reach those poor closed channels of the vision you once enjoyed?--if the skies, the lovely country, the woods and the ocean were all glories that should never again gladden your sight?--if this were so, would you not pray to God that being thus handicapped He would at least give you _friends_? Friends who would be eyes to you, hands to you--who would cheer you in dreadful moments of depression blacker than blindness, and who would help you to find occupation and train you to do useful work, although sightless, so that the days and years should not be so fraught with monotony and dull regret; and that life, after all, should not seem a barren and empty thing?