philanthropies was the canteen at the St.
Lazarre station in Paris. I am tempted to single it out because its
organizer, Countess de Berkaim, told me that in all the months she had
been running it--and it was open twenty-four hours of the day--not a
single volunteer had been five minutes late. The canteen was opened in
February, 1915, with a reading and rest room. Six hundred soldiers a day
have been fed. The two big rooms donated by the railway for the work
were charming with their blue and white checked curtains, dividing
kitchen from restaurant and rest room from reading room. The work is no
small monument to the reliability and organizing faculty of
French women.

It was in France, too, that I found the group of women who realized that
the permanent change which the war was making in the relation of women
to society needed fundamental handling. Mlle. Valentine Thomson, founder
of La Vie Feminine, held that not only was the war an economic struggle
and not only must the financial power of the combatants rest on the
labor of women, but the future of the nations will largely depend upon
the attitude which women take toward their new obligations. Realizing
that business education would be a determining factor in that attitude,
Mlle. Thomson persuaded her father, who was then Minister of Commerce,
to send out an official recommendation to the Chambers of Commerce to
open the commercial schools to girls. The advice was very generally
followed, but as Paris refused, a group of women, backed by the
Ministry, founded a school in which were given courses of instruction in
the usual business subjects, and lectures on finance, commercial law and
international trade.

Mlle. Thomson herself turned her business gifts to good use in a
successful effort to build up for the immediate benefit of artists and
workers the doll trade of which France was once supreme mistress.
Exhibitions of the art, old and new, were held in many cities in the
United States, in South America and in England. The dolls went to the
hearts of lovers of beauty, and what promised surer financial return, to
the hearts of the children.

To do something for France--that stood first in the minds of the
initiators of this commercial project. They knew her people must be
employed. And next, the desire to bring back charm to an old art
prompted their effort. Mlle. Thomson fully realizes just what "Made in
Germany" signifies. The peoples of the world have had their