were written expressly for
our enlightenment.

Mrs. Ward had marvellous qualifications for this patriotic task. The
granddaughter of Doctor Arnold and the niece of Matthew Arnold, from
childhood up she has been as deeply interested in politics and in public
affairs as she has been in literature, by which she has attained such
world-wide fame, and next to English politics, in American politics and
American opinion. She has been a staunch believer in the greatness of
America's future, and has maintained close friendship with leaders of
public thought on both sides of the water. Her only son is a member of
Parliament, and is fighting in the war, just as all the able-bodied men
she knows are doing.

She has received from the English government special opportunities of
seeing what England has been doing in the war, and has been allowed to go
with her daughter where few English men and no other women have been
allowed to go, to see the very heart of England's preparedness. She has
visited, since the war began, the British fleet, the very key of the whole
situation, without whose unmatched power and ever-increasing strength the
Allies at the outset must have succumbed. She has watched, always under
the protection and guidance of that wonderful new Minister of Munitions,
Lloyd George, the vast activity of that ministry throughout the country,
and finally in a motor tour of five hundred miles, through the zone of the
English armies in France, she has seen with her own eyes, that marvellous
organization of everything that goes to make and support a great army,
which England has built up in the course of eighteen months behind her
fighting line. She has witnessed within three-quarters of a mile of the
fighting line, with a gas helmet at hand, ready to put on, a German
counter attack after a successful English advance something which no
other woman, except herself and her daughter, who accompanied her, has
ever had the opportunity to see.

Mrs. Ward admits that at the beginning England was unprepared, which
itself demonstrated that as a Nation she never wished for war with
Germany, and never expected it. Her countrymen had no faith in Lord
Roberts's ten-year-long agitation for universal national service, based on
the portentous growth of the German army and navy. She never knew of any
hatred of Germany in the country. On the contrary, she realized what
England and all the rest of the world owed to Germany in so many ways.

Engl