he poverty, misery, and rage of battle, throughout
Europe, is simply that you women, however good, however religious,
however self-sacrificing for those whom you love, are too selfish and
too thoughtless to take pains for any creature out of your own immediate
circles. You fancy that you are sorry for the pain of others. Now I just
tell you this, that if the usual course of war, instead of unroofing
peasants' houses, and ravaging peasants' fields, merely broke the china
upon your own drawing-room tables, no war in civilised countries would
last a week. I tell you more, that at whatever moment you chose to put a
period to war, you could do it with less trouble than you take any day
to go out to dinner. You know, or at least you might know if you would
think, that every battle you hear of has made many widows and orphans.
We have, none of us, heart enough truly to mourn with these. But at
least we might put on the outer symbols of mourning with them. Let but
every Christian lady who has conscience toward God, vow that she will
mourn, at least outwardly, for His killed creatures. Your praying is
useless, and your churchgoing mere mockery of God, if you have not plain
obedience in you enough for this. Let every lady in the upper classes of
civilised Europe simply vow that, while any cruel war proceeds, she will
wear _black_;--a mute's black,--with no jewel, no ornament, no excuse
for, or evasion into, prettiness.--I tell you again, no war would last a
week.

And lastly. You women of England are all now shrieking with one
voice,--you and your clergymen together,--because you hear of your
Bibles being attacked. If you choose to obey your Bibles, you will never
care who attacks them. It is just because you never fulfil a single
downright precept of the Book, that you are so careful for its credit:
and just because you don't care to obey its whole words, that you are so
particular about the letters of them. The Bible tells you to dress
plainly,--and you are mad for finery; the Bible tells you to have pity
on the poor,--and you crush them under your carriage-wheels; the Bible
tells you to do judgment and justice,--and you do not know, nor care to
know, so much as what the Bible word 'justice means.' Do but learn so
much of God's truth as that comes to; know what He means when He tells
you to be just: and teach your sons, that their bravery is but a fool's
boast, and their deeds but a firebrand's tossing, unless they are indeed
J