mediately
upon our entrance into the war. The suffragists said, We wish to serve
and we are ready for service. The government used their wide-spread net
of local centers for purposes of registrations and war appeals.

Naturally there were many efforts more foolish than effective in the
universal rush to help. America was not peculiar in this, nor for the
matter of that, were women. War!--it does make the blood course through
the veins. Every generous citizen cries aloud, "What can I do?" Perhaps
men are a little more voluble than women, their emotions not finding
such immediate and approved vent along clicking needles and tangled
skeins of wool. On the whole, the initiative and organizing ability of
women has stood out supremely.

Of the two departments of the Red Cross which are still left in the
command of women, the Bureau of Nursing, with Miss Delano at its head,
mobilized immediately three thousand of the fourteen thousand nurses
enrolled. The first Red Cross Medical Unit with its full quota of
sixty-five nurses completely equipped stood on European soil before an
American soldier was there. Of the forty-nine units ready for service,
twelve, with from sixty-five to one hundred nurses each, are now in
France. Two of the five units organized for the navy, each with its
forty active nurses and twenty reserves, are established abroad, and two
hundred and thirty nurses are already in active naval service here. Miss
Delano holds constantly in reserve fifteen hundred nurses as emergency
detachments, a reservoir from which some eight hundred have been drawn
for cantonment hospitals. An inflow of nearly one thousand nurses each
month keeps the reservoir ready to meet the drain.

The Chapter work-rooms sprang up at a call in the night. No one can help
admiring their well-ordered functioning. There may be criticism,
grumbling, but the work-room is moving irresistibly, like a well-oiled
machine. And women are the motive power from start to finish. The
Chapters, with their five million members joined in three thousand units
over the United States, are so many monuments to the ability of women
for detail. Once mobilized, the women have thus far been able to serve
two thousand war hospitals with surgical dressings, and to send abroad
thirteen million separate articles packed carefully, boxed, labelled and
accounted for on their books.

Not only does this directing of manual work stand to the credit of the
Chapters, but they h