through Christmas and New Year, to repair the losses to our fleet of innocent merchant ships which, full of food, are put down without warning, in the solitudes of the sea. But that is what they are doing now, and thousands of Scottish women are working at this great task also, and must continue to work, if our bread is to be sure, and we are to preserve what Cromwell called "our mastery of the sea."
Such then, in general, will be the Christmas of 1916. It makes a tremendous, almost a terrible picture. That such, and of such kind, should be the activities of Great Britain on the eve of the festival of Him Whom we agree to call the Prince of Peace, and that women with their tenderness should be in the midst of them, is a paradox of almost perplexing mystery. If another Moses ascending another Pisgah on the Christmas Eve of 1916 could look down on our islands from Cape Wrath to Land's End, and from King's Lynn to Carnarvon, not knowing that all
