the petition? Only this: War murders you, and ruins us.
War—Its Effects on Woman.
The solemn sentence speaks too much for them not to deliberate over it, and at last they recognize that, be what loss or gain it may to men, to women war never is nor can be anything but incalculable ill. I tell the women of this generation that they may take sides, as pleases the passion of their unthinking sympathy, with this or that masculine war, but there is no war, especially no great or long-continued or expensive war, that does not grind a stratum of the feminine community to powder, and, by just so much, lower all the rest; and that not alone the women of the country which happens to be the scene of the contest,—their miseries and degradation are too fearful for contemplation,—but the women of the unscathed, of the winning side, Ruskin spoke even deeper than he meant, when he said that on the breaking out of a war all the women should go into black. They should go into mourning, yea, into sackcloth and ashes, for into worse than this must the war, before it ends, bring many a now innocent wife and maiden.
The separating of the hitherto jumbled interests and responsibilities of the two sexes would make these truths so apparent, that one great result of feminine co-operation and consultation would be the abandoning the national system of warfare, which is as senseless, as wasteful, and more wicked than the private wars of the old feudal barons which kept the world back for six hundred years. For they were ignorant, but we say "we see," therefore we "have no cloak for our sin." An international court where the disputes of nations could be adjusted, and an international police of married soldiers to enforce its decisions, are the only agencies whereby the extravagance and demoralization of war can be prevented, and the problem of the applicatipu of brute force in government solved for the world at large, as law and courts of justice and constables have solved it for the world's separate communities.
