Page:"The next war"; an appeal to common sense (IA thenextwarappeal01irwi).pdf/102

 war by machinery, is one of those situations which one can prophesy in advance with mathematical accuracy. The vital statistics of the young and adolescent in the years between 1918 and 1938, compared with those between 1894 and 1914, are going to prove the point in cold figures.

So far, wars in general have struck at the strength of the male strain alone. However much the women have been massacred, there has been no scientific selection in the choice of victims. The strength of woman has been left to war-depleted nations to renew their blood. But in the next war we shall probably do away with that archaic check on the purpose of the great god Mars. Women, as I have already shown, have proved their value for indirect military purposes, and so put themselves within the circle of destruction. Already, the general staffs of Europe are saying that the recruiting of women in the late war was irregular, hit-and-miss, wasteful. In a struggle between national resources as well as national armies, it would be far more efficient and economical to mobilize them all and select the war-workers by scientific methods, according to national convenience and necessity. All of which is true and logical. And if women are put under conscription for munitions work, for ambulance and truck driving, for the thousand and one varieties of light labor which they can perform in the rear areas of an army zone, we must proceed by the same methods which we use in selective conscription of the male