But I am finding some things to cheer me. There is, for instance, the knowledge that the scandals of the Southern camps during the Spanish War will not be repeated. There we lost ten boys from disease to every one killed in battle. Think of it! We learned nothing from that war, but we have learned greatly from the war in Europe. There will be no cruel and useless waste of life from disease. On the Mexican border there was practically no sickness, although the natural conditions were in favor of it. We have sanitarians, now, and water supplies will be watched. The inoculation against typhoid, too, has eliminated the disease, both in the European armies and here. Because it is waste that we fear. We are trying to feel, we women, that no cost is too great, if needful to preserve our country. But we will never be reconciled to waste of life through negligence. And this I promise, now. Let such negligence occur, and let me know of it, duly investigated, and I will make the press of the country ring with it, to the eternal shame of those who are responsible. I have been to war, and I know this: that men living in fearful surroundings may be kept healthy by proper care. This care is what we demand, those of us who cannot fight, but who are bearing our own burdens, nevertheless. One or two things have helped to make our decision hard for us. Perhaps the most important is this: there is no great hatred of the enemy, however much we abominate the things the German Government has driven an acquiescent people into doing. We all know Germans here whom we like and respect. We see them, family folk, sober and industrious and God-fearing, all about us. They are not Huns or vandals. And all the knowledge we have of a nation gone mad to order hardly counteracts the effect of the friendly human contacts of our daily lives with the Germans we know. We forget that the German we know has come here to escape the very thing that has wrecked the old world; that in coming to this land of the free he has followed an ideal as steadily as back in the fatherland his kindred are following after the false gods of hate and war. He is German, but he is not Prussian, although he may be Prussian-born. Then, too, women know too much now of war to enable them to make the sacrifice easily. War has become more than a word. It is become reality, and only its horrors live for them. And so far but little emphasis has been laid on the great things for which we will fight. We talk in numbers. We stress the fine points of international law. We think of bond issues and submarines and guns—and the women sit and roll bandages and brood, and care little for all these things. Why not something of the real reason for this war, of the hatred for ruthless cruelty, the contempt for our rights, the scorn of the little nations, and of the privilege of helping to bring back to a world that is destroying itself the priceless boon of peace?