to stand ready with first aid for him. Day by day, week after week, now year after year, they have been feeding the nation's defenders, clothing them, nursing them, passing up ammunition to them. To-day there isn't an army that could hold the field but for the women behind the men behind the guns.
In England Mrs. Millicent Garrett Fawcett, president of the National Union of Women's Suffrage Societies, had been a member of the committee that in 1866 sent up to Parliament the first petition for the enfranchisement of women. She had been a girl of twenty then. It was a cause, you see, to which she had given a lifetime, that she now laid aside. With the summons, "Let us show ourselves worthy of citizenship," she turned 500 women's societies from suffrage propaganda and Parliamentary petitioning to hospital and relief work.
But it was when Mrs. Pankhurst, the dramatic leader of the Woman's Social and Political Union who had first smashed suffrage into the front page of the newspapers of all nations, lay down her arms to give her country's claims precedence above her own, that the world realised that there was a new formation in the lines of the woman movement.
Emmeline Pankhurst was on parole from Holloway jail recuperating from a hunger strike, when there came to her from her government the overtures for a peace parley. When the authorities offered her release for all of the suffragettes in prison and amnesty for those under sentence, she ran up the Union Jack where her suffrage flag had been. In
