the atrophy of everything that really tends to the elevation of mankind.

Mrs. Blatch has herself rendered a very real service by this appeal that
women should serve, and that men should let them serve.

Theodore Roosevelt




I

OUR FOE


The nations in which women have influenced national aims face the nation
that glorifies brute force. America opposes the exaltation of the
glittering sword; opposes the determination of one nation to dominate
the world; opposes the claim that the head of one ruling family is the
direct and only representative of the Creator; and, above all, America
opposes the idea that might makes right.

Let us admit the full weight of the paradox that a people in the name of
peace turns to force of arms. The tragedy for us lay in there being no
choice of ways, since pacific groups had failed to create machinery to
adjust vital international differences, and since the Allies each in
turn, we the last, had been struck by a foe determined to settle
disagreements by force.

Never did a nation make a crusade more just than this of ours. We were