apparently, was intended to be in part a fictitious acquirement of kinship, and in part a sacred and solemn undertaking to assume the dead son's liabilities in the matter of offensive and defensive feuds. Akhmet had killed the son-he must therefore take the son's place. When, however, he was brought into the presence of the bereaved mother, she cursed him vindictively, and struggled so violently when compulsion was attempted that this part of the ceremony had to be abandoned.

"She fought like a she-wolf," said Akhmet, "and I was so shamed and humiliated that I was ready to cut my own throat."

On the following day the ceremony of making peace took place in front of the village mosque. At the appointed hour Akhmet removed his outer clothing, wrapped himself in a burial shroud, belted about his waist the long, double-edged kinjal, which was the only weapon he was allowed to carry, and went alone to the open space in front of the village mosque, where, assembled in a semicircle, were all the male members of the hostile family. Taking off his sheepskin hat, so as to show the long hair that signified repentance, he drew his kinjal from its sheath, took it by the point, and presented the hilt to the oldest brother of the man whom he had killed. Then, standing before them unarmed, bareheaded, and in a burial shroud, he bowed low, as an intimation that he gave himself up to the men whom he had injured and was ready to be killed and buried if such should be their will. For a fateful moment the killer and the relatives of the killed gazed at each other in silence. Then the oldest brother of the murdered man returned the kinjal, holding it in turn by the point, and with his other hand stroked gently Akhmet's long hair. From that moment the homicide was safe; but he had become an adopted member of another family and without forming any new ties of family affection he had acquired a new set of family feuds.

I asked Akhmet whether he did, as a mat

ter of fact, assume the feudal liabilities of the family into which he had thus been forced, and whether he and his fictitious kindred ever became really reconciled; but he would talk no more about blood revenge that day. This particular episode in his turbulent life was apparently very bitter to him in retrospection, and I think he regretted being drawn on to admit that he had ever put on a burial shroud, surrendered his weapons, and made a plea for mercy.

In the two weeks that I spent with Akhmet I had abundant proof that Captain Cherkassof was speaking within bounds when he said that the state of society in Daghestan was that of the tenth century. Not only did I see personally some of the tenth-century methods, but I heard in many places stories of purgation, compurgation, the wager of law, the wager of battle, the ordeal, and other mediæval customs and ceremonies, which showed that in the wild, long-isolated mountains of the eastern Caucasus there still existed a stage of culture through which western Europe passed many centuries ago.

My association with Akhmet Avarski terminated upon our arrival at Timour-khanshura, the headquarters of the Russian. territorial administration. When we parted, he showed me a warmth of personal regard and respect which I had not anticipated and which took me by surprise. He did not kneel nor press his face to my hand, but he made a courteous pretense-a haif suggestion of doing both, and when we united our thumbs, in Daghestan fashion, he swore that if I would come back to the Caucasus the next year he would again act as my guide and would show me wilder mountains and stranger aouls than any I had yet seen. Fighter, marauder, blood-avenger, and tenth-century barbarian he undoubtedly was, but my experience with him showed that one can get along with, and to some extent understand, almost any kind of man if one deals with him on terms of equality and tries to look at things from his point of view.

A

S I dropped down New York Bay last summer, bound for Europe, my mind was busy with such questions as-Shall I find women pushed back into conditions of primitive toil? will they be crushed under the idea that physical force rules the world? shall I find that the ever-increasing preponderance of women is making men more and more reluctant to part with their advantages? Though I half expected affirmative answers to all such questions, I genuinely wanted to see things exactly as they were.

The first Englishwoman I met upset my preconceived ideas. She was a well-set-up young woman acting as ticket-puncher at the railway station at Yarmouth, and was alert, efficient, helpful in giving information, and, above all, cheerful. There were two capable young women at the bookstall too. One had lost a brother at the front, the other her lover. I felt that they spoke of their loss as one item in the big national accounting. There was not a tear, not a quaver in the voice, and they were cheerful in " doing their

As I journeyed to London through Cornwall, Devonshire, Berkshire, I noticed that the highroads were cut up and unmended, the hedgerows untrimmed; but the cottages looked as neat as I had always known them, the little gardens as gay as ever with flowers. I made the mental note-women are still carefully tending their special vineyards. From the young women at the railway stations en route, just as at Yarmouth, I received the unexpected impression of a genuine spirit of content. There were tears in the eyes of mothers saying good-by to their soldier boys, but the women at work were full of joy.

Throughout my stay in England I searched

She

for, but could never find, the self-effacing spinster of former days. In her place was a capable woman, bright-eyed, happy even when bearing personal bereavement. was occupied and bustled at her work. She jumps on and off of moving vehicles with the alertness, if not the unconsciousness, of the expert male. She never let me stand in omnibus or subway, but quickly gave me her seat, as indeed she insisted upon doing for elderly gentlemen as well. The British woman has found herself and, her muscles. England is a world of women-women in uniforms; there is the army of nurses, and then the messengers, porters, elevator hands, tram conductors very conscious in badge and brass buttons, and the un-uniformed host of bank clerks, bookkeepers, shop attendants, in whom the sense of importance has not yet worn away. They each seem to challenge the humble stranger: "Superfluous? I'm a recruit for national service!" Even a woman doing time-honored womanly work moves with an air of distinction; she dusts a room for the good of her country. Just one glimpse was I given of the old-time daughter of Eve, when a ticket-collector at Reading said: "I can't punch your ticket. Don't you see I'm eating an apple?"

Not I,

"This war is 'eaven-twenty-five shillings a week and no 'usband bothering about!" That is the remark Punch" has a soldier's wife make in a cartoon. We have always credited "Punch" with knowing England. Certain it is that there is no discipline in the system of pensions for wives of soldiers. No work is required. The case of a girl I met in a country town is common. She was working in a factory earning eleven shillings a week. A day or two later I saw her, and she told me she had stopped work, as she

had "married a soldier, and 'e's gone to France, and I get twelve and six separation allowance' a week." Never did the strange English name, "separation allowance," seem more appropriate for the wife's pension than in this girl's story. Little wonder was it that in the early months of the war there was riotous living among soldiers' wives! And the comments of women of influence on the drunkenness and waste of money on foolish finery were as striking to me as the sordid condition itself. For instance, the woman chairman of a Board of Poor Law Guardians in the north of England told me that when her fellow-members suggested that Parlia

ment ought to appoint committees to disburse the separation allowances, she opposed them with the heroic philosophy that women can be trained in wisdom only by freedom to err, that a sense of responsibility had never been cultivated in them, and the country would have to bear the consequences. In reply to my timid inquiry as to how the Guardians received these theories, I learned that "they knew she was right and dropped their plan." and dropped their plan." That the position taken by the lady Guardian was representative seems to be borne out by the fact that every suggestion to limit woman's right to drink unless man's right is also curtailed

meets with instant protest from organizations

of women.

The faith of leading women that experience would be the best teacher for the soldier's wife has perhaps been largely justified. The orgy of self-indulgence passed. A labor leader in the Midlands told me that an investigation by his trade union showed that only one hundred women in the ten thousand cases covered in September last were misspending their allowances. In October, when I was visiting a board school in a poor district of London, I remarked to the head teacher that the children looked well cared for. She told me that never had they been so well fed and clothed. There seemed no doubt in her mind that it was best to have the family budget in the hands of the mother. In the sordid surroundings, then, of the mean streets of great cities there are developing in women practical wisdom and a fine sense of individual responsibility.

Perhaps of greater significance than just how separation allowances are being spent is the fact that women are discovering that their work as housewives and mothers has a value recognized by governments in hard cash. It makes one speculate as to whether wives in the warring nations will step back without a murmur into the old-time dependence on one

485

man at the end of the conflict. These simple, average women may make their contribution towards the changed Europe which the prophets foretell!

Very soon after reaching England I discovered that more than one war had been going on. The most active center of this contest of which we hear so little was in industry, and the combatants were the British Government, trade unions, and

The unions were doing battle because of fear of unskilled workers, especially when intelligent and easily trained; the Government, in sore need of munition hands, was bargaining with the unskilled for long hours and low pay. Finally, the Government and the unions reluctantly agreed that women must be employed; both wanted them to be skillful, but not too skillful, and, above all, to remain amenable. It has been made clear, too, that women enter their new positions "for the war only." At the end of hostilitiesinternational hostilities-women are to hand over their work and wages to men and go home and be content. Will the programme be fulfilled?

The wishes of women themselves may play some part. How do they feel? Obviously, every day the war lasts they get wider ex

perience of the sorrows and pleasures of

independence. The soldier's wife has not only painfully learned how to spend the separation allowance, but has felt the joy of being the court of final appeal. Women are called the practical sex, and I certainly found them in England facing the fact that peace will mean an insufficient number of breadwinners to go around and that a maimed man has low earning power. The women I met were not dejected at the prospect; they showed, on the contrary, a spirit of elation in finding new opportunities of service. After I had sat and listened to speech after speech at the annual Conference of the Union of Women Workers, with delegates from all parts of the country, presided over by Mrs. Creighton, widow of the late Bishop of London, there was no doubt in my mind that Englishwomen desired to enter paid fields of work, and regarded as permanent the great increase in their employment. I noted, too, that the boundary-line in each speaker's mind between a desire to render national service and a longing to seize a feminist opportunity was quite faint and vague. No regrets, apologies, or hesitations were expressed in a single speech, and the solutions of the problems of the new situation all lay in the direction of equality of preparation and equality of pay with men. The strongest element in the women's trade unions speaks in the same sense. The great rise in the employment of women is not regarded as a "war measure," and all the suggestions made to meet the hardships of readjustment, such as "a minimum wage for all unskilled workers, men as well as women," are based on the idea of the new workers being permanent factors in the labor market. The same conclusion was reached in the interim report presented to the British Association on September 9, 1915, at Manchester, by the committee appointed a year ago to investigate the "Replacement of Male by Female Labor." The committee found itself in entire disagreement with the idea that the increased employment of women was a passing phase, and made recommendations such as improved technical training for girls as well as for boys, a minimum wage for unskilled men as well as women, equal pay for equal work, and abolition of "half-timers."

But while it had become obvious that the greatest asset of belligerent nations was the labor of women, while learned societies and organizations of women were laying down rules for their safe and permanent employ. ment, the British Government showed marked

opposition to the new workers. Under pressure it included women in the registers made in March and again in August, 1915, showing the available labor force of the country, but it did not classify, and so could not make use of the information so far as it concerned women. If the Cabinet did not believe the war would be brief, it certainly acted as if Great Britain alone among the belligerents would have no shortage of male industrial hands. When Germany had five hundred thousand women in munition factories, England had fifty thousand; when Great Britain was on the eve of conscription, the women's lists of the August registry were still an unclassified mass; when England adopted conscription, a vast number of men were exempted from service to do work which women could have performed.

And everything that has been done to fi women into the industrial scheme has beer carried through, not by the Government, buc by private firms. The heads of factories I visited where the employment of women ad been successful recognized that they were capable of a high degree of training, and that it would pay in the end to take of skilled men to teach the new hands. The desire of the women to learn made them rea ly pupils. In a week's time, I was told, their output was "good," and they soon became adepts." So far as I could find, women had zest for the munition work and were performing miracles of endurance. The employees from the working class looked well, and are said to be gaining in strength. Not so much can be said for the "ladies," who, never having done a hard day's work in their lives, often break under the strain. Their part in the deadly work of shell-making seemed to me questionable; they will probably add nothing to the credit of their sex, and they may cut down the wages of sturdy working-class women, who, with the machinery especially adapted to their strength, are leading lives very far removed from the drudgery of primitive. times.

In the war service of middle-class and aristocratic women, philanthropic endeavors form the major part. But even here the Government was so reluctant to co-operate that every achievement seemed amateurish as compared with the splendid feats of administrative ability displayed by the women of France. The work of Englishwomen is hedged in. They started immediately, for instance, to deal with the problem of the