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which each people can make to the advancement of the human
race. It is only the general goodwill of the citizens that makes
the magistrate effective for the punishment of what is practically
recognized by all as wickedness and vice. The burglar knows
he is a felon. England and Germany both believe that the other
fulfils that réle. And it is only as we renounce war, which is
still the normal relation of one nation to another even when no
gun is fired, that the end, which we profess to reach by its means,
can really be attained. It will be criminal folly if, with the
bitter experience before us of its incredible and ridiculous
waste, we do not start upon our schemes of reconstruction, the
sad but glorious necessity which is now laid upon our shoulders,
with a fixed determination to banish, I do not now say the
institution but the spirit of war, and an unwavering faith that the
work is not impossible.
And it is just here that you women can help us. I
believe women can break the bow and knap the spear in
sunder. At last you are coming into your inheritance. Who
knows but that you are come to the kingdom for such a time
as this? No one now doubts your heroism, not merely that
heroism which has always been a marked characteristic of your
sex, but a heroism such as that which wins the Victoria Cross.
No one henceforth can accuse you of desiring peace merely
because the horrors of war are shocking to your sensibility, or
because you shrink from wounds and blood. But you know and
understand out of the fulness of your own experience the
meaning of that principle which goes deeper into the heart of
existence than any other, and which finds its fullest human
expression in motherhood. It is now many years since the late
Henry Drummond insisted with the wonderful charm of his
graceful eloquence that the ascent of man was not based, as the
superficial observers of the evolutionary process had carelessly
come to believe, on the merciless struggle for existence which
human ingenuity might mitigate, but could never prevent. On the
contrary, the final and ultimate law was self-surrender for the good
of others, the sacrifice of life in order that others might live, the
maternal instinct which was the noblest expression of the eternal
love of God. Some of us remember how this reading of the
history of development, based as it was upon the recognition
of those silent facts, whose voices were too readily drowned by
the turbulence heaving upon the surface of change, rekindled
hope and gave a new stimulus to unselfish devotion. Love was
after all the greatest thing in the world, in the light of which
pain and conflict and even evil must ultimately be read. “I am
come that they might have life, and that they might have it more
abundantly.”
This is the spirit of the true hero, and even though, as,
thank God, during these terrible months, it has been commonly