Page:The Future of the Women's Movement.djvu/148

 and third, for their lack of united effort in demanding a change in the intolerable conditions as they now exist." If ignorance and indifference in the mass of citizens are the ultimate causes, may we not find in the fact that only men are citizens one of the causes of this ignorance and indifference? You can rouse the country on an election cry of "slavery," if it is the slavery of men. The far worse slavery of women is no profitable election cry. Do our anti-suffrage politicians never think of the reason for this? It is a fine commentary on the "Chivalry" of which they prate.

And, lastly, we come to the traffic in war. The recent exposure in Germany of such traffic among armament manufacturers—an international traffic like that in women—has reminded us of the extraordinary folly of allowing private firms to manufacture the actual implements of war. Of course there are many other necessities of war over which it is impossible to have control, but at least the manufacture of warships and guns and ammunition should not be let out of the hands of the government. Here again the sovereign remedy, as in so many other matters, is light, knowledge. When the working man, who is regarded as food for powder, knows in whose interests wars are made, how contrived, financed, and timed, it will not be so easy to catch him with the bait of rhetoric. It will be still less easy to catch women. In the Labour Leader of 24th July 1913 there appeared an article giving a list of thirty-five aviation companies,