women have been doing ardent yet disciplined service—­giving long hours in crowded canteens or Y.M.C.A. huts to just those small kindly offices, which bring home to the British soldier, more effectively than many things more ambitious, what the British nation feels towards him.  The war has put an end, so far as the richer class is concerned, to the busy idleness and all the costly make-believes of peace.  No one gives “dinner-parties” in the old sense any more; the very word “reception” is dying out.  The high wages that munition-work has brought to the women of the working class, show themselves, no doubt, in some foolish dressing.  “You should see the hats round here on a Saturday!” said the Manager of a Midland factory.  But I am bound to say he spoke of it proudly.  The hats were for him a testimony to the wages paid by his firm; and he would probably have argued, on the girls’ part, that after the long hours and hard work of the week, the hats were a perfectly legitimate “fling,” and human nature must out.  Certainly the children of the workers are better fed and better clothed, which speaks so far well for the mothers; and recent Government inquiries seem to show that in spite of universal employment, and high wages, the drunkenness of the United Kingdom as a whole is markedly less, while at the same time—­uncomfortable paradox!—­the amount of alcohol consumed is greater.  One hears stories of extravagance among those who have been making “war-profits,” but they are less common this year than last; and as to my own experience, all my friends are wearing their old clothes, and the West End dressmakers, poor things, in view of a large section of the public which regards it as a crime “to buy anything new” are either shutting down till better days, or doing a greatly restricted business.  Taxation has grown much heavier, and will be more and more severely felt.  Yet very few grumble, and there is a general and determined cutting down of the trappings and appendages of life, which is to the good of us all.

Undoubtedly, there is a very warm and wide-spread feeling among us that in this war the women of the nation have done uncommonly well!  You will remember a similar stir of grateful recognition in America after your War of Secession, connected with the part played in the nursing and sanitation of the war by the women of the Northern States.  The feeling here may well have an important social and political influence when the war is over; especially among the middle and upper classes.  It may be counter-balanced to some extent in the industrial class, by the disturbance and anxiety caused in many trades, but especially in the engineering trades, by that great invasion of women I have tried to describe.  But that the war will leave some deep mark on that long evolution of the share of women in our public life, which began in the teeming middle years of the last century, is, I think, certain.