week. Yarn is furnished in immense quantities. It has been proved that the women work better when they work in groups. But, in addition to the work done at the Technical College and at the Women's Council House, many women work in their homes. Every facility is given to the people for working. The Ladies' Aid Society has its group of workers. So have the churches. Any organization that so desires can get material with which to work. In the main, the material is cut by machinery without cost. The local manufacturer does this. These women make suits for convalescents. They make surgical suits, pajama suits, compresses. They tailor and they press and they labor as they never did before. The woman of wealth works side by side with the woman who had been a toiler. The women have studied, too, to eliminate waste. They have studied how to pack stuff in boxes so that every inch of space will be utilized. They have studied everything.

Montreal affords the best example, perhaps, of how the families are cared for. There are six thousand families in Montreal that are sustained out of the Patriotic Fund which the women gather. The women see that the children of the soldiers do not neglect their schooling. They are the big sisters of the wives, of the widows, of the children, of the soldiers of the Empire. In the kindest and most friendly of ways they endeavor to make the families approach or start on the way to being self-sustaining.

Necessarily the work is slow in develop ment. Regularly each month these six thousand families get a monetary allowance from the fund. The wife or the mother or whoever has had the care of the dependent family calls at headquarters, is identified, gets her check, goes to the bank, and receives her

money.

To finance their work the women of Canada have been as thorough as in every other thing. In the first burst of patriotic fervor there was a lot of indiscriminate giving. There were concerts, fairs, general entertainments. That was fine as far as it went, but it wasn't anything to rely on through a long period, so these women have devised a system whereby they have a steady income. They have gone, for example, into manufacturing towns and they have stated their case to employers and to workers. In one small city where the pay-roll amounts to $500,000 a month they held a public meeting, and every

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workman in that town signed a pledge whereby one per cent of his wages each month goes to the Patriotic Fund. That is $5,000. Consider what that means when this is multiplied throughout the Dominion of Canada. This is what they have done. They have the money coming regularly for their work. In emergencies they can call on the Dominion at large for more, but out of what they have collected thus far they not only have looked after all Canadians, but they have furnished assistance to the Servians, to the Montenegrins, to the French, and even the British Government has drawn on their supplies.

Every family of every soldier is kept advised regarding the soldier. If he is wounded, his family know how and where and when he was wounded. If he is recovering, they are advised of the state of his improvement. The women have worked throughout the official channels of the British Government a system whereby they are kept in absolute touch with all their boys. They have a headquarters in Tooley Street in London-the Tooley Street about which we have heard so much in connection with the little tailors. They have a hospital headquarters at Cliveden on the estate of William Waldorf Astor. They have a headquarters in Paris for the French to draw from. But they are not satisfied. They want to do more. They cut army red tape just as they have wiped out the barriers between the rich and the poor. They have arranged wherever possible to mark the grave of any soldier of Canada who dies in Europe. They care for the sick of the soldier's family and they bury the dead of the soldier's family.

It is not the rich woman of Canada who does all this, or the woman of the middle class. The work is done just as faithfully in the humblest home, on the farm and in the tenement. There is a widow, Mrs. Archibald, of Wolfville, in Nova Scotia, who has very little of this world's goods, and yet she sent six hundred jars of preserves to the soldiers in France. She did not have the money to buy the fruit. She went into the orchards and gathered that which was left on the trees after the picking. Some one gave the sugar to her. She trudged around the countryside to gather jars. She made a workshop of her cellar. She put up these six hundred jars of preserves, boxed them all herself, and then she sent them on, blessed with her labor of love. That woman has a boy in khaki fighting in Flanders.

Mention has been made of the work that

is done in the city of Halifax. Some idea of its magnitude may be obtained from the statement that thirty-six thousand pairs of hand-made socks went from Nova Scotia alone, and that in the Technical College at Halifax more than forty miles of material was made up in three months of work by the women laboring there. The children, too, help. The children of Canada have their Red Cross Societies. They send all sorts of things to the soldiers. They maintain a motor ambulance of their own in France. In Montreal and some of the other Canadian cities every child contributes cent a week at least to the Patriotic Fund. There is a bank in every school-room in Montreal into which the child makes his deposit. Some of the children give much more than one cent. Before long these banks will be in every school-house throughout the Dominion.

one

The women have done more to awaken Canada to the elimination of waste than the Dominion ever knew before. In every city women of every grade have formed an organization for the collection of material that previously was cast away as useless. They gather the waste paper and bale-it and self it. In one city this brings to them more than $150 a week. They collect old carpets, cast-off kid gloves, shoes, hats-anything or everything. They have established junkshops. They collect bits of iron, steel, copper, all sorts of metal, and sell it. They make over the carpets, wherever possible, into carpet slippers. They take the old kid gloves, strip them, and make them up for the inner lining for coats and trousers and such things for men to wear, and it is reported that the soldiers have known no warmer garments than those kid-lined ones which they have received from Canada. The women have old shoes repaired and soled and put to use. They are teaching the people to save in every way possible.

The women of Canada do not propose to have human waste material either. They are establishing schools in which the maimed and the crippled soldiers are being taught useful employments. From two to three hundred men come back each week invalided and broken. The man who has lost an arm may not be able to do the work at which he formerly was employed. They are preparing to teach him to do something else that will make him self-sustaining, and by which he can maintain his self-respect and not become

a burden upon the people. The man who has lost a leg may be unfitted for the task in which he had been trained. He is taught some other line of work by which he can sustain himself. And the blind-and many of the men who come back are blindare being taught. Instructors from blind asylums are being drawn in to aid in this branch.

These women, with the wonderful vision that they have, possibly have seen what Canada might face if the destruction to human life or the crippling of many thousands of men should bring the burden of a huge pension system upon the Dominion. They are going to avoid that, if possible. They are going to try and have Canada demonstrate to the world that its men and its women, working together, fighting together for the Empire, can care for itself with the minimum of a pension system.

For a

The women of Canada surely have broad sympathies. One illustration will serve for this demonstration. There are some German prisoners in the Dominion. In one of the cities there are two hundred of them. time their lives were dull and their days were dreary. The women pitied them. They thought of their own men in the prison camps of Europe. They did what they could to bring a little light into the dark days. Some of these men were musicians. They asked for permission to have the instruments they played. In a short time there was a band formed in their prison camp, and after a while the German prisoners began to give concerts. The concerts were given in the public square, and they grew and grew in popularity. A Sunday night concert became a regular thing, but it was stopped at the request of the church authorities. The concert was so good and so popular that the churches were deserted. Now the band concerts are confined to week-days.

It would seem that the women of Canada are doing all that could be expected of them, but they are not content. They have been asked to aid in recruiting, and they are volunteering for that work. They are the great patriots of this war. It would be a joy to give the names of all those who are doing valiant service for the Empire, but to do so would require a larger number than The Outlook ever has printed.

Some one has expressed their whole mission, their whole ideal, fittingly as follows:

not seem to have really been awakened until this war began. The immortal fruits of life are not material well-being and physical content, but integrity, courage, reverence, and willingness to serve and to sacrifice; and true patriotism means unselfish public service. The volunteer workers are working for the Canada of to-morrow as well as for the Canada of to-day, because they are trying to minimize the fearful waste of infant and child life and because they are affording opportunity-not charity-to the soldiers' families for the fruitful development of the five essentials of normal life: health, education, recreation, employment, and spiritual development. The work is welfare work of the truest patriotic

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character. Rarely in the history of the world does such a direct call to service come as comes in time of war. In times of peace material things blind us to the needs of others and to our own individual responsibilities and opportunities. If the call to higher service and away from self reaches the many as a result of this war, it will in some degree atone for the ghastly loss of life and the ruin of homes and countries which a misguided brute force has entailed upon mankind. For our soldiers' families, for our King and country, and for humanity we dedicate ourselves, praying for strength and courage to continue to the end, eager to learn, ready to serve, and willing to sacrifice.”

E

Now

XTENDING a decade beyond a full century, the lives of Dr. Samuel G. Howe and his wife, Julia Ward Howe, were fruitful in doctrine and deed, and are known to the reading public in unusual detail. Mrs. Howe's Reminiscences" appeared when she was eighty, in 1899. we have two large volumes prepared by three of her daughters, containing copious extracts from her letters and journals, and adding the story of the remaining eleven years that brought Mrs. Howe's long life to its peaceful close.1 Born and brought up in a large circle of intelligent relatives, with sufficient wealth to compass the desires of the dweller in New York during the early part of the nineteenth century, Mrs. Howe's girlhood might easily be paralleled in the homes of our grandmothers in the North. She, with others, was an exponent of the truly cultural results of the high moral and intellectual standards held by our forebears.

Devoted to the study of languages, literature, and music even before her marriage, the accomplished girl attracted attention and admiration from the literary and artistic folk of that period. Charles Sumner was Dr. Howe's alter ego, and wrote a warm note of congratulation when he became engaged to Miss Ward. Longfellow sent a similar letter. The bright letters written from abroad, where the first year of married

Julia Ward Howe, 1819-1910. By Laura E. Richards

and Maud Howe Elliot. Houghton Mifflin Company,

Boston. 2 vols. $4.

life was passed, are filled with girlish fun and comments upon the notable people who welcomed the pair. Dr. Howe's reputation had preceded him, and his irreverent young wife tells stories of "Big " Sydney Smith, Rogers, Monckton Milnes, Basil Montagu, Moore, Landseer, Mrs. Norton, and the Duchess of Sutherland. They spent "a strange but pleasant" evening with Carlyle, and, Mrs. Carlyle being out, the young American lady "poured tea for him." They dined merrily with Dickens. Of Sydney Smith she says, "Very like old Mrs. Prime, three chins and such a corporosity." They called on Maria Edgeworth, "gay and bright as a young girl, though seventy-five."

Wordsworth she dismisses as a crabbed old sinner." Mrs. Wordsworth and her daughter received them very coldly and "whined about their recent losses in Louisiana investments," at which they were smartly told," Why did you not keep your money at home? If we should speculate in your country we should no doubt be ruined also." "They held their tongues and we departed," leaving doubtless a pair of outraged Englishwomen. A gay winter was spent in Rome, with many delightful acquaintances. They returned to Boston by way of England, renewing friendships everywhere. She and Dr. Howe were, as every one knows, strongly influential wherever they appeared. journals reflect the development of her eager

mind and the growth of her intense interest in public affairs. Her witty comments on men and measures tempt to frequent quotation.

In a letter she writes: "Mr. Alger seized upon my left ear metaphorically and emptied mto it all the five-syllable words that he knew, and the result was a mingling of active and passive lunacy, for I almost went mad and he had not far to go in that direction." In wayward mood she exclaimed, having dined with the Ticknors, a family of monumental dignity: "Oh, I am so cold! I have been dining with the Tête Noir, the Mer(e) de Glace, and the Jungfrau !”

She was fond of repeating a reply of Thomas Garrett's, whose house was for years a station of the Underground Railroad. "How did you manage it?" she asked. Many incidents in her later years show that his words sank deep into her mind: "It was borne in upon me at an early period that if I told no one what I intended to do I should be enabled to do it." This bit of Quaker wisdom guided her and filled her with mischievous glee when, in her great age, she eluded the tender surveillance of her daughters in order to go to some club or public meeting, where she was received like a royal personage. Though for years the idea of woman's suffrage was repugnant to her, she became a powerful advocate of the cause, was one of the founders of the Woman's Journal," of Boston, and played a leading part in the story of the "advance of woman." She was glad to be present whenever, during forty years, the subject was presented to the Massachusetts Legislature. Once, in reply to the argument that the indifference and opposition of most women proved the movement wrong, she flashed back: "May I ask one question? Were the Apostles wrong in trying to bring about a better social condition when almost the whole community was opposed to them?"

She was a devoted friend and follower of James Freeman Clarke, a devout Unitarian, and frequently occupied the pulpit in that church. Her early revolt from the rigid Calvinism of her girlhood, her excursions into philosophy, her broadening vision of the world's needs and the demands of suffering humanity, brought her to very beautiful expression of her faith. In 1908 she wrote: "I do not desire ecstatic, disembodied sainthood, because I do not wish to abdicate any one of the attributes of my humanity." Later she wrote: "Quite suddenly it occurred to me to consider that Christ understood that spiritual life would not end with death, and that his expressed certainty as to the future life was founded upon his discernment of spiritual things. So, in so far as I am a Christian, I must believe in the immortality of the soul, as our Master surely did. I cannot understand why I have not thought of that before I think now that I shall nevermore lose sight of it."

Amid all her rare gifts Mrs. Howe perhaps had deepest faith in and was most sensitive about her poetry, which is reminiscent of Thackeray's conviction that his art was that of the brush, not of the pen. Doubtless in future years the "Battle Hymn of the Republic," struck off at white heat, will constitute Mrs. Howe's greatest claim to patriotic literary fame, but her genius was really more that of personality, a woman whose aim in life was "to learn, to teach, to serve, to enjoy."

It is not necessary to recall the great philanthropic efforts in which the Howes were central figures. An admirable little book, "Two Noble Lives," by Laura E. Richards, will introduce younger readers to these notable figures, and the later detailed volumes will serve to inspire hundreds of older readers. The volumes are profusely illustrated with portraits of Mrs. Howe and her family.