Then shall we be ready to repopulate right. After the battles are won and man’s work of conquest is done, woman’s war work will only have begun. I have stood in the cathedral at Rheims and in the stricken silence looked with sickening dismay on the destruction of the beautiful temple of worship builded with such exquisite art and such infinite labour. But I assure you not all the cathedrals of Europe piled in a single colossal ruin, broken sculptured saint on saint, can stir the beholder with the poignant pain of one war hospital! There in the whitewashed wards with the smell of blood and ether, where the maimed lie stiff and still and the dying moan and the mad rave in wild delirium, stand there and your soul shall shrivel in horror at the destruction of men! It is the agony of it all, and the suffering and the sorrow and the grief of it all—and then something more. You creep with the feeling that every one of these men once was builded with such exquisite art and such infinite labour and such toilsome pain and anguish by God and a woman! It is a stupendous task of creation to be done over again when the armies shall have finished their work. Bone of her bone and flesh of her flesh, God and woman must rebuild the race. You unto whom a child can be born to-day, to you Parliaments make their prayer! Not a captain of industry who assembles the engines of war, not a general who directs the armies, may do for his country what you can do who stand beside its cradles. The cry that rings out over Empires bleeding in the throes of death is the oldest cry in the world. Women wanted for maternity! CHAPTER X THE RING AND THE WOMAN That woman who crossed the threshold of the Doll’s House awhile ago—you would scarcely recognise her as you meet her to-day anywhere abroad in the world. She has put aside yesterday as it were an old cloak that has just slipped from her shoulders. And she stands revealed as the one of whom some of us have for a long time written and some of us have read. For a generation at least she has been looked for. Now she is here. You see when her country called her, it was destiny that spoke. Though no nation knew. Governments have only thought they were making women munition workers and women conductors and women bank tellers and women doctors and women lawyers and women citizens and all the rest. I doubt if there is a statesman anywhere who has leaned to unlock a door of opportunity to let the woman movement by, who has realised that he was but the instrument in the hands of a higher power that is reshaping the world for mighty ends, rough hewn though they be to-day from the awful chaos of war.