_Gains from War_ But we can set out some great gains from war. 1. Not the least of these is the fact that the fears entertained by the more pessimistic that we had become enervated and decadent have been falsified on many a stricken field; and not less in the strenuous work of those who have worked remote from the battlefield. Our men and many women also have shown themselves willing to give their lives for great impersonal ends. Their lives have been sacrificed—for our children, for liberty, for peace, for security against military barbarism, and for high ideals of life. The emergence of such a high proportion of our total population from selfishness and self-centred life to a sacrificial position, raises hope that rightly directed appeal to the collective self of the community during peace time for aid against the horrors of peace—especially those caused by disease—will also succeed in enlisting the assistance of the majority of the population and thus removing the vast mass of removable disease and disablement which now prevails. 2. The war has knitted together in active comradeship the Old Country and its younger and more energetic children in the Dominion of Canada and in other parts of the British Empire, in bonds of mutual indebtedness and gratitude and in admiration of great deeds, in a manner and to an extent which must forever preclude misunderstanding or separation. In these two respects especially—and in others which I shall dwell on more fully—we can, as Wordsworth put it, when commenting on the wars of the French Revolutionary period: Though doomed to go in company with Pain, And Fear and Bloodshed, miserable train! Turn our necessity to glorious gain. _The Work of Women_ 3. The war has revealed to us the great extent to which women in emergencies can replace men. I need not repeat the story of how women in a few months mastered mechanical intricacies in munition works, for which previously a long training was thought necessary; nor how educated women after a few months’ intensive training were able, under war conditions, to undertake the work of fully trained nurses. We cannot ignore these facts; and in regard to nursing, they should lead us to consider whether, under modern conditions of life, it is necessary that the great body of nurses, like the great majority of medical practitioners, need to be experts in major operations, and whether they should not be trained chiefly from the standpoint of the ordinary illnesses of the household. Particularly, it is important to recognize that the training of the health visitor or public health nurse must diverge at an early period of training from that of the clinical nurse.