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 in the forging of barbaric forces which have only been blown into the air, leaving nothing behind but the wreckage of the homes which women have made beautiful; how the dear and precious lives, which women have produced in labour and fear, have been destroyed in the same devilish carnival; how women all over our own country are weeping the long nights through the scorching tears that will never be dried, for the sons they bore, the husbands who lay in their bosoms; and again, when we think that half the wealth we have been compelled to waste in this war, if it could have been spent in the enterprises of peace, in fighting down ignorance and disease, would have made our islands for the next hundred years just such a paradise as good women dream about, where no poor widow lies down uncomforted, and no orphan goes to bed hungry, and the cry of women and children is never heard—when we think of all this we ask ourselves, with quivering hearts, why we have ever allowed woman