Page:Our Girls.pdf/81

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TOMMY'S SISTER
67

settle his disputes with his fellow-man by the barbaric expedient of seeing which of them can kill most men. Although not naturally more inhuman than woman, he is capable of beating his drums and his kettle-drums over a battlefield covered with ten thousand dead, if only they are the enemy's dead. But woman is the life-giver, not the life-destroyer, and in her heart of hearts ten thousand slain, whether friend or foe, are ten thousand mothers' sons, each of them a man born of a woman and suckled at her breast. What, then, brings women into the munition factories?

To find an answer to that question I must ask you to spend an hour with me in the office of a lady-superintendent when she is taking on hands. Here they come to "sign on," a various and talkative queue. Rose and Alice, and Annie and Mabel, the young woman who has left a home of comfort and luxury, the daughter of the mechanic, the girl out of domestic service, and perhaps the girl