For a minute after that proclamation, you could have heard a pin drop in the great assembly hall of the smashing suffragettes. Then in a burst of applause she had them with her: they would follow their leader. Some few at first drew back in consternation. Had their late leader lost her mind? The girl in the green sweater looked dazed: “I was in the front ranks of her body guard when we stormed Buckingham Palace,” she murmured. A very few were angry: “She’s selling out the cause,” they exclaimed bitterly. But she wasn’t. The greatest little field marshal the woman movement has ever known, was leading it to final victory. When Kitchener announced, “We shall not be able to win this war until women are doing nearly everything that men have done,” it was the woman who had organised raids on Parliament who now organised the woman labour of a nation. On the day that she led 40,000 women down the Strand to man the factories of England and turned Lincoln’s Inn House, her headquarters in Kingsway, into a munitions employment bureau, opponents of the woman’s cause the world over began an orderly retirement from their front line trenches. The next morning the London _Post_ announced: “We stand on the threshold of a new age.” We do. You see, you could not have practically the men of all nations in arms for Democracy without their finding it. And some of them who buckled on their armour to go far crusading for it, are coming to the conviction that there is also Democracy to be done at home. When the history of these days at length is written, it will come to be recorded that the right of women to have a voice in the government to whose authority they submit, was practically assured by the events of 1917. In that year, the women who came to petition the English Parliament for citizenship, got what they had for fifty years been asking in vain. For the women who with Mrs. Pankhurst and Mrs. Fawcett and Mrs. Despard of the Women’s Freedom League now stood at the gates of government were: women shell makers and howitzer makers, pit brow lassies, chain makers, textile workers, railway engine cleaners, women motor lorry drivers in khaki, women letter carriers, women window cleaners, women bus conductors, women engineers, women clerks, women in the civil service, women tailors, women bakers, women bookbinders, women teachers, women army nurses, women army doctors, women dentists, women chemists, and women farm labourers. Among them was the wife of the man with the twisted face and the wife of the man with the blinded eyes and the wife of Sergeant Jones.