‘Whenever he sees one of the new citizens or whenever he hears fresh stories of their ability Mr. Punch is proud and delighted. “It is almost worth having a war,” he says, “to prove what stuff our women are made of. Not,” he adds gallantly, “that it wanted proof.”’ On the other hand, it must, we think, be admitted that proof was in fact the one essential thing which the world needed. On November 2, 1915, the Prime Minister, referring in the House of Commons to the death of Nurse Cavell, said: ‘She has taught the bravest men among us a supreme lesson of courage.... In this United Kingdom there are thousands of such women, and a year ago _we did not know it_.’ At first sight the saying was a strange one, for the supreme crises of life are commonly those which call forth the highest response in human nature; but on reflection the words are just: we do not practically ‘know’ what we have not had an opportunity of proving. We had to wait for the experience furnished by a national crisis in opening the gates of industry to over three hundred thousand new recruits, bringing up the total of women workers, according to Mr. Sidney Webb’s calculation, to six million and a half: figures and results which forced the Prime Minister at a later date into the acknowledgment that women’s claim to the privileges of full citizenship was now ‘unanswerable.’ ‘They have been put to many kinds of work,’ said Mr. Webb, ‘hitherto supposed to be within the capacity of men only, and they have done it on the whole successfully.’ Now, both these figures and these achievements must surely be recognised as a result of the trend of the last forty or fifty years. Without long preparation it could not have sprung into being. As the ripple is sustained by the weight of ocean, so the self-respecting work of the modern woman in the higher department of service has only been made possible by the education and tradition at her back; while even the factory worker has imbibed a sense of responsibility which is not the mark of the unfree. The new type is therefore, as is usual in the evolutionary process, found to be suited to its age. It was not enough that the women of the country should be, as always, eager to help, willing for sacrifice: it was necessary that they should have had the training in work, in business habits, and in self-control which gives to inherent good-will its market value.