elds about your necks; you must write them on the
tables of your hearts. Though it be not exacted of you, yet exact it of
yourselves, this vow of stainless truth. Your hearts are, if you leave
them unstirred, as tombs in which a god lies buried. Vow yourselves
crusaders to redeem that sacred sepulchre. And remember, before all
things--for no other memory will be so protective of you--that the
highest law of this knightly truth is that under which it is vowed to
women. Whomsoever else you deceive, whomsoever you injure, whomsoever
you leave unaided, you must not deceive, nor injure, nor leave unaided
according to your power, any woman of whatever rank. Believe me, every
virtue of the higher phases of manly character begins in this;--in truth
and modesty before the face of all maidens; in truth and pity, or truth
and reverence, to all womanhood.

And now let me turn for a moment to you,--wives and maidens, who are the
souls of soldiers; to you,--mothers, who have devoted your children to
the great hierarchy of war. Let me ask you to consider what part you
have to take for the aid of those who love you; for if you fail in your
part they cannot fulfil theirs; such absolute helpmates you are that mo
man can stand without that help, nor labour in his own strength.

I know your hearts, and that the truth of them never fails when an hour
of trial comes which you recognise for such. But you know not when the
hour of trial first finds you, nor when it verily finds you. You imagine
that you are only called upon to wait and to suffer; to surrender and to
mourn. You know that you must not weaken the hearts of your husbands and
lovers, even by the one fear of which those hearts are capable,--the
fear of parting from you, or of causing you grief. Through weary years
of separation, through fearful expectancies of unknown fate; through the
tenfold bitterness of the sorrow which might so easily have been joy,
and the tenfold yearning for glorious life struck down in its
prime--through all these agonies you fail not, and never will fail. But
your trial is not in these. To be heroic in danger is little;--you are
Englishwomen. To be heroic in change and sway of fortune is little;--for
do you not love? To be patient through the great chasm and pause of loss
is little;--for do you not still love in heaven? But to be heroic in
happiness; to bear yourselves gravely and righteously in the dazzling of
the sunshine of morning; not to forget the Go