Briefly then, we see in this record of women’s service, which is coming as a surprise to many, an instance wherein the pragmatic philosophy has come to its own. In the early days of the Crimean War the people who were ‘afraid of experience, afraid of life,’ were shocked at the initiative of Florence Nightingale. No really ‘nice’ women, they said, would want to go out to nurse soldiers. The incredible insults heaped upon the first women doctors are remembered by many to-day. The advocates of the ‘movement’ were charged at every new departure with the desire to change the character of woman herself, whereas all that has been changed is her position in the national life; and that change has undoubtedly been rendered more conspicuous since the war. To all reasonable persons, whether pragmatists or not, the record of experience is worth a great deal of theory. There are many cautious but fair-minded people who have regarded women’s capacity for difficult administrative offices as unproven until now. There are many more who would have hastily judged them unfit for the responsible work which they are doing in the aircraft and munition departments. For all such there is a message in the principle of pragmatism. ‘It preserves,’ says its genial apologist, ‘a cordial relation with facts.... The pragmatist turns towards concreteness and adequacy, towards facts, towards action and towards power.... That means the open air and possibilities of nature as against dogma, artificiality and the pretence of finality in truth.’ And Truth, to quote again from a former passage, can just now be vividly observed ‘in the making’ in the great workshop of the world. She can be caught in the grip of the philosopher, and submitted to the most searching inquiry which the mind of man can desire: she can be traced through the past, as Green desired to trace her, to her eternal source in the ‘ideas’ which are a ‘basis for human effort’: she can be brought to the bar of Reality. In this way, it may be added, the method of Pragmatism may exercise a wholesome bracing effect upon one’s thought. It clears away the cobwebs of abstractions; it watches Truth at its daily work in particulars whence only careful generalisations should be drawn. It brings all theory to the test of experiment. And finally recurring to our starting point, it lays stress upon the power of every idea in action, insisting upon the vital correlation of thought and deed. For in the words of the old Greek dramatist,[5] ‘The word and the deed should be present as one thing, to dispatch that end whereto the counselling mind moveth.’ LESLIE KEENE. FOOTNOTES [5] Aeschylus. _THE BRITISH RED CROSS IN ITALY._ BY LEWIS R. FREEMAN.