“One thing that emerges from this war, I feel absolutely convinced,” (it is Mr. Lloyd George, Premier of England, who is speaking in a public address), “is the conviction that women must be admitted to a complete partnership in the government of nations. And when they are so admitted, I am more firmly rooted than ever in the confident hope that they will help to insure the peace of nations and to prevent the repetition of this terrible condition of things which we are now deploring. If women by their enfranchisement save the world one war, they will have justified their vote before God and man.” There is a story that the anti-suffragists started. But it’s our best suffrage propaganda now. A farmer’s wife in Maine, who had cooked the meals and swept the house, and washed the children and sent them to school, and hoed the garden and fed the chickens, and worked all the afternoon in the hayfield, and was now on her way to the barn to finish her day’s work with the milking, was accosted by an earnest agitator, who asked her if she didn’t want the vote. But the farmer’s wife shook her head: “No,” she answered, “if there’s any one little thing the men can be trusted to do alone, for heaven’s sake, let ’em!” But is there? From the rose bowered cottage, the cottage red roofed and the blue trimmed cottage and the ikon blessed cottage, and the plain little white house somewhere off Main Street, there is a rising to the question. Lest we forget, this war was made in the land where woman’s place was in the kitchen! And the mere housewifely mind asks, Could confusion be anywhere worse confounded than in the government houses of the world to-day? Hark! You cannot fail to hear it! The cry of the nations is now sharp and clear. It is the cry of their distress: “Women wanted in the counsels of state.” CHAPTER IX THE RISING VALUE OF A BABY You unto whom a child is born to-day, unto you is this written. I bring you glad tidings. Blessed are you among the nations of the earth. Wise men all over the world are hurrying to bring you gifts. Only lift your eyes from the baby at your breast and in your mirror I am sure you shall see the shining aureole about your head. Exalted are you, O, woman among all people. Know that you have become a Most Important Person. Governments are getting ready to give your job a priority it never had before. For you, why you are the maker of men! The particular commodity that you furnish has been alarmingly diminished of late. It is clear what has happened with the present world shortage of sugar: we pay 11c and 16c a pound where once we paid four. The world shortage in coal has increased its cost in certain localities almost to that of a precious metal, so that in Paris within the year it has sold for $80 a ton. It is just as the political economists have always told us, that the law of supply and demand fixes prices. That which becomes scarce is already made dear.