s, businesses, clerical positions, and even in agriculture and
cattle raising. They are brilliant aviators, yachtsmen, automobile
drivers, showing failure of nerve more rarely than men, although, as
they are not engaged in these pursuits in equal numbers perhaps that
is not a fair statement. Suffice it to say that as far as they have
gone they have asked for no quarter. It is quite true that in certain
of the arts, notably music, they have never equaled men, and it has
been held against them that all the great chefs are men. Here it is
quite justifiable to take refuge in the venerable axiom, "Rome was not
made in a day." It is not what they have failed to accomplish with
their grinding disabilities but the amazing number of things in which
they have shown themselves the equal if not the superior of men.
Whether their success is to be permanent, or whether they have done
wisely in invading man's domain so generally, are questions to be
attacked later when considering the biological differences between men
and women. The most interesting problem relating to women that
confronts us at present is the effect of the European War on the whole
status of woman.

If the war ends before this nation is engulfed we shall at least keep
our men, and the males of this country are so far in excess of the
females that it is odd so many American women should be driven to
self-support. In Great Britain the women have long outnumbered the
men; it was estimated before the war that there were some three
hundred thousand spinsters for whom no husbands were available. After
the war there will be at best something like a proportion of one whole
man to three women (confining these unwelcome prophecies to people of
marriageable age); and the other afflicted countries, with the
possible exception of Russia, will show a similar dislocation of the
normal balance. The acute question will be repopulation--with a view
to another trial of military supremacy a generation hence!--and all
sorts of expedients are being suggested, from polygamy to artificial
fertilization. It may be that the whole future of woman as well as of
civilization after this war is over depends upon whether she concludes
to serve the State or herself.

While in France in the summer of 1916, I heard childless women say:
"Would that I had six sons to give to France!" I heard unmarried
women say: "Thank heaven I never married!" I heard bitterness
expressed by bereft mothers, terror an