Now, this may sound fantastic but it is indisputably probable.  Much has been said of the patriotic exaltation of young women during war and just after its close, which leads them to marry almost any one in order to give a son to the state, or even to dispense with the legal formality.  But although I heard a great deal of that sort of talk during the first months of the war I don’t hear so much of it now.  Nor did I hear anything like as much of it in France as I expected.  To quote one woman of great intelligence with whom I talked many times, and who is one of the Government’s chosen aids; she said one day, “It was a terrible distress to me that I had only one child, and I consulted every specialist in France.  Now I am thankful that I did have but one son to come home to me with a gangrene wound, and then, after months of battling for his life, to insist upon going back to the Front and exposing it every day.  I used to feel sad, too, that Valentine Thompson” (who is not only beautiful but an Amazon in physique) “did not marry and be happy like other girls, instead of becoming a public character and working at first one scheme or another for the amelioration of the lot of woman.  Now, I am thankful that she never married.  Her father is too old to go to war and she has neither husband nor son to agonize over.  Far better she live the life of usefulness she does than deliberately take upon herself the common burdens of women.”  No Frenchwoman could be more patriotic than the one who made this speech to me, and if she had had many sons she would have girded them all for war, but she had suffered too much herself and she saw too much suffering among her friends daily, not to hate the accursed institution of war, and wish that as many women could be spared its brutal impositions as possible.

Nobody has ever accused me of being a Pacifist.  Personally, I think that every self-respecting nation on the globe should have risen in 1914 and assisted the Allies to blast Prussia off the face of the Earth, but after this war is over if the best brains in these nations do not at once get to work and police the world against future wars, it will be a matter for regret that they were not all on the German ship when she foundered.

III

It is to be remembered that woman has, in her subconscious brain-cells, ancestral memories of the Matriarchate.  It is interesting to quote in this connection what Patrick Geddes and G. Arthur Thompson have to say on the mooted question of the Mother-Age: 

“Prehistoric history is hazardous, but there is a good case to be made out for a Mother-Age.  This has been reconstructed from fossils in the folk lore of agriculture and housewifery, in old customs, ceremonies, festivals, games; in myths and fairy tales and age-worn words.