Blood, blood--the world is drenched with
blood! To kill each other, with all sorts of expensive and perfected
instruments, that is the most brilliant thing they have been able to
invent. It seems to me that we might stop it, we might invent something
better. The cruelty--the cruelty; there is so much, so much! Why
shouldn't tenderness come in? Why should our woman's hearts be so full
of it, and all so wasted and withered, while armies and prisons and
helpless miseries grow greater all the while? I am only a girl, a simple
American girl, and of course I haven't seen much, and there is a great
deal of life that I don't know anything about. But there are some things
I feel--it seems to me as if I had been born to feel them; they are in
my ears in the stillness of the night and before my face in the visions
of the darkness. It is what the great sisterhood of women might do if
they should all join hands, and lift up their voices above the brutal
uproar of the world, in which it is so hard for the plea of mercy or of
justice, the moan of weakness and suffering, to be heard. We should
quench it, we should make it still, and the sound of our lips would
become the voice of universal peace! For this we must trust one another,
we must be true and gentle and kind.
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