“A grateful country must care for our heroes,” they’d say.  “What—­ teach a man blinded in his country’s service a trade that he can work at without his sight?  Never!  Give him money enough to keep him!”

And then, as time goes on, they forget his service—­and he becomes just another blind beggar!

Is it no better to do as my Fund does?  Through it the blind man learns to read.  He learns to do something useful—­something that will enable him to earn his living.  He gets all the help he needs while he is learning, and, maybe, an allowance, for a while, after he has learnt his new trade.  But he maun always be working to help himself.

I’ve talked to hundreds and hundreds of such laddies—­blind and maimed.  And they all feel the same way.  They know they need help, and they feel they’ve earned it.  But it’s help they want not coddling and alms.  They’re ashamed of those that don’t understand them better than the folk who talk of being ashamed to make them work.

CHAPTER XXVI

In all the talk and thought about what’s to be, noo that the war’s over with and done, I hear a muckle of different opinions aboot what the women wull be doing.  They’re telling me that women wull ne’er be the same again; that the war has changed them for good—­or for bad!—­ and that they’ll stay the way the war has made them.

Weel, noo, let’s be talking that over, and thinking about it a wee bit.  It’s true that with the war taking the men richt and left, women were called on to do new things; things they’d ne’er thought about before 1914.  In Britain it was when the shells ran short that we first saw women going to work in great numbers.  It was only richt that they should.  The munitions works were there; the laddies across the Channel had to have guns and shells.  And there were not men enough left in Britain to mak’ all that were needed.

I ken fine that all that has brocht aboot a great change.  When a lassie’s grown used to the feel of her ain siller, that’s she’s earned by the sweat of her brow, it’s not in reason that she should be the same as one that has never been awa’ frae hame.  She’ll be more independent.  She’ll ken mair of the value of siller, and the work that goes to earning it.  And she’ll know that she’s got it in her to do real work, and be really paid for doing it.

In Britain our women have the vote noo’ they got so soon as the war showed that it was impossible and unfair to keep it frae them longer.  It wasna smashing windows and pouring treacle into letter boxes that won it for them, though.  It wasna the militant suffragettes that persuaded Parliament to give women the vote.  It was the proof the women gave that in time of war they could play their part, just as men do.

But now, why should we be thinking that, when the war’s over, women will be wanting tae go on just as they did while it was on?  Would it not be just as sensible to suppose that all the men who crossed the sea to fight for Britain would prefer to stay in uniform the rest of their lives?