Is such enthusiastic participation in organized effort but one manifestation of that desire for liberty and for a larger participation in life, found in great women’s souls all over the world? In pursuance of such a desire the working women have the enormous advantage of constant association with each other, an advantage dimly perceived even by pioneer women two hundred years ago. The hostesses of the famous drawing-rooms of the eighteenth century laid great stress on human intercourse as the individual’s best means of cultivation. Certain French women gave as a _raison d’etre_ for their brilliant salons that “people must come together in order to exercise justice,” and they became enormously proud of the fact that by the end of the century “all Europe was thrown into a state of agitation if injustice were committed in any corner of it.” This hypothesis was gallantly laid down a hundred years before the industrial revolution which, in its consummation, has congregated millions of women into factories all over the world. These myriad women, most of them young and untrained and all of them working under new industrial conditions, are gradually learning to “exercise justice” if only because they have “come together.” Their association has been accomplished under the stress of a common necessity, and they have been tutored in a mass at the hard school of bitter experience. Were the sheltered drawing-room ladies the forerunners of such contemporary advocates of industrial justice or do we find a better prototype in those simple old women who, having reared their own children and having come to be regarded as a depository for domestic wisdom, dispense sound advice to bewildered mothers which always contains the admonition, “Never be partial to any one of them, always be as just as you know how.” Possibly women’s organizations of all types are but providing ever-widening channels through which woman’s moral energy may flow, revivifying life by new streams fed in the upper reaches of her undiscovered capacities. In either case, we may predict that to control old impulses so that they may be put to social uses, to serve the present through memories hoarding woman’s genuine experiences, may liberate energies hitherto unused and may result in a notable enrichment of the pattern of human culture. CHAPTER V WOMEN’S MEMORIES--CHALLENGING WAR I was sharply reminded of an obvious division between high tradition and current conscience in several conversations I held during the great European war with women who had sent their sons to the front in unquestioning obedience to the demands of the State, but who, owing to their own experiences, had found themselves in the midst of that ever-recurring struggle, often tragic and bitter, between two conceptions of duty, one of which is antagonistic to the other.