How afraid we are of airing our love of our country! How shame-facedly we rise to the national anthem! How many excuses a man will give for going to war, except the fundamental one that he loves his country and is going to stick by her though the heavens fall! Little boys, these men of ours, hiding their deepest feelings with a gibe! Some things we women must learn, and now is the time to learn them. Sacrifice is an old story to women. They have always known it. But not sacrifice to an abstract ideal. Sacrifice to an ideal, then,—and personal service. _And this personal service, mothers of America, is not rolling bandages for the other woman’s son._ That hurts, but it is true. This is no time for evasion. And it is not because I have made my sacrifice that I say it. It is because, unless we all give, unless our army is large enough, those who have failed in their duty are sending the best youth of the country to death. It will be murder. In return for what we give, we women of America have the right to demand certain things. First of all we can and must demand time that our boys may be trained. We have taken a long time to go into this war. And because the country would not believe that we must eventually be involved, we have lost precious years. When, now nearly two years ago, I came back from the war in Europe, I brought with me two convictions: First, that the German Government had thrown aside its mask of law and order, and was following war along lines so atrocious that it must be checked or civilization dies. Second, after conferring with men high in the Allied Governments, that sooner or later we should inevitably find ourselves involved: it was but a matter of time. I came home terrified. I tried to talk about it. It seemed to me that we could not sit back unarmed, with only our brave little army,—less than a single day’s losses in battle over there,—and do nothing. But I was as a voice crying in the wilderness. I was not alone, of course, in my wilderness. There were many, but the country heard us not. It listened to Belgium, and sent aid. It helped the pathetic little French orphans. It shook its head over the Roll of Honor in the “Illustrated London News,” and it went to church on Sundays and thanked God that we were out of it. An obstructive Congress, instructed from its constituencies, refused to listen to talk of preparation. The Army tried to get a hearing, and the Navy tried, but both failed. It is not the fault of the Democratic Party that we are to-day as we are, although, insomuch as our President is head of the Army and of the Navy, it is the Democratic Party which will control the war. It was, indeed, that stanch old Democrat, Thomas Jefferson, who said:— “We must train and classify the whole of our male citizens and make military instruction a regular part of collegiate education. We can never be safe until this is done.” Later on he went still further:—