.

That is not all, or nearly all, that the women of England did--I skip
their welfare work, recreation work, nursing--but it is enough wherewith
to answer the ignorant, or the fraud, or the fool.

What did England do in the war, anyhow?

On August 8, 1914, Lord Kitchener asked for 100,000 volunteers. He had
them within fourteen days. In the first week of September 170,000 men
enrolled, 30,000 in a single day. Eleven months later, two million had
enlisted. Ten months later, five million and forty-one thousand had
voluntarily enrolled in the Army and Navy.

In 1914 Britain had in her Royal Naval Air Service 64 aeroplanes and 800
airmen. In 1917 she had many thousand aeroplanes and 42,000 airmen. In
her Royal Flying Corps she had in 1914, 66 planes and 100 men; in 1917,
several thousand planes and men by tens of thousands. In the first nine
months of 1917 British airmen brought down 876 enemy machines and drove
down 759 out of control. From July, 1917, to June, 1918, 4102 enemy
machines were destroyed or brought down with a loss of 1213 machines.

Besides financing her own war costs she had by October, 1917, loaned
eight hundred million dollars to the Dominions and five billion five
hundred million to the Allies. She raised five billion in thirty days.
In the first eight months of 1918 she contributed to the various forms
of war loan at the average rate of one hundred and twenty-four million,
eight hundred thousand a week.

Is that enough? Enough to show what England did in the War? No, it is
not enough for such people as continue to ask what she did. Nothing
would suffice these persons. During the earlier stages of the War it
was possible that the question could be asked honestly--though never
intelligently--because the facts and figures were not at that time
always accessible. They were still piling up, they were scattered about,
mention of them was incidental and fugitive, they could be missed by
anybody who was not diligently alert to find them. To-day it is quite
otherwise. The facts and figures have been compiled, arranged, published
in accessible and convenient form; therefore to-day, the man or woman
who persists in asking what England did in the war is not honest but
dishonest or mentally spotted, and does not want to be answered. They
don't want to know. The question is merely a camouflage of their spite,
and were every item given of the gigantic and magnificent contribution
that England made to the defeat