Massachusetts sent a nurse to France, Miss Alice Fitzgerald, in memory of Edith Cavell, which shows the unity of your feeling and ours on that tragic execution, and her work under our War Office in Queen Alexandra’s Imperial Army Nursing Service with the British Expeditionary Force, as well as the work of all the American nurses we have had helping us, is another link in the great chain.  Our own great Commonwealth of Nations are nearer to each other than ever before.  There were even people among us who thought a little as the enemy did that our Dominions would not stand by us—­stupid and blind people.

It is their fight as well as ours—­the common fight of all free peoples, and all our united nations stand together, including those who only a few years ago were fighting us as brave foes.

We have learned so much in great ways and in small ways, in economies and in the care of all our resources, too.  We women are more careful in Britain now.  We save food, and grow more, and produce more, and maids and mistresses work together to economize and help.  We gather our waste paper and sell it or give it to the Red Cross for their funds, give our bottles and our rags, waste no food and save and lend our money.  We could not have been called a thrifty nation before the war—­we are much more thrifty now, in many ways, though there are still things we could learn.

In the Women’s Army and in so much of our work we are learning discipline and united service—­learning what it means to be proud of your corps and to feel the uniform you wear or the badge is something you must be worthy of—­and it goes back to being worthy of your own flag and of the ideals for which we all stand in these days.

And the young wives who are married and left behind, who bear their children with their husbands far away in danger, who have had no real homes yet, but who wait and hope, they are very wonderful in their courage and pluck—­and, most of all, everywhere, our women, like our men, wisely refuse to be dreary.  There are enough secret dark hours, but in our work we carry on cheerfully, the women know the soldiers’ slogan, “Cheero,” and to Britain and to “somewhere on the fronts,” the same message goes and comes.

Of the great spiritual worths and values, it has brought to women very much what it has brought to men.  All eternal things are more real, all eternal truths more clearly perceived.  When the whole foundations of life rock under us, in where “there is no change, neither shadow of turning,” the heart rests more surely in these days.

It has brought us agonies and tears, weariness and pain, self-denial and great sorrows, but it has brought such riches of self-sacrifice, such service, such love, has shown us such peaks of revelation and vision to which the soul and the nation can attain, that we count ourselves rich, though so much has gone.