their social positions.  And this new order, this making the world safe for democracy, as you call it, will rob civilization of its most perfect flower—­the cultivated woman who has developed under the shelter of our economic system.  I might as well shock your bourgeois morals now as later.  So listen to this.  Here is one of the ways the women of Europe are suffering.  I talked to a French mother this morning.  Her income is gone—­part of it taxed away, and the rest of it wiped away by the Germans in Northern France.  Her son has only a second lieutenant’s income.  In this chaos she can find no suitable wife for him.  One who is rich today, tomorrow may be poor, so the dear fellow may not marry.  And he is looking for a mistress, and his mother fears he will pick up a fool; for only a fool would take him on a lieutenant’s salary.  And the weeping mother told me she would almost as soon that her son should have no mistress as to have a fool!  For a man’s mistress does make such a difference in his life!  My friend is almost willing to let him marry some bright poor girl and go to work!  The world never will know the suffering the women of Europe are enduring in this war!”

Now we may switch off that record with the snort of woe which Henry gave when he heard it.  He was trying to tell a Duchess about prohibition in Kansas, who had never heard of either Kansas or prohibition and who was clearly scandalized at what she heard of both.  But Henry’s other ear was open to what the embassy ornament was saying to me.  On the other side of this record of the swan song of the lady of the embassy is this record.  It is a man’s voice.  The man has risen from an American farm, hustled his way into a place where as manager of the London factory of an American concern, he works several hundred employees.

“Say, let me tell you something—­never again!  Never again for mine do the men come back into our shop.  We may let a dozen or so of ’em back to handle the big machines.  But the next size, which we thought that only men could handle—­never again.  And when they come back these men will have to work under women foremen.  We thought when the war took our men bosses away that we should have to close the shop.  But say—­never again, I tell you.  And let me give you a pointer.  You wouldn’t know them girls.  When the war broke out they were getting ten shillings—­about $2.50 a week, the best of ’em, and they were mean and slovenly and kind of skinny and dirty, and every once in awhile one would drop out, and the other girls had a great joke about her—­you know.  And they would soak the shop whenever they got a chance!  The boss had to keep right after ’em, or they’d soldier on the job or break a machine, or slight the product, and they’d lie—­why, man, the whole works would stand up and lie for each other against the shop.  It took five men to boss them where we have one woman doing it now.  And say, it ain’t the woman boss that’s done it.  We pay ’em more.  Them same girls is getting