By Mrs. O. H. P. BELMONT

A woman, I suppose, to some of you seems out of place at a gathering of this kind. If I were the owner of the Bethlehem steel factory, you would say: "Let us pay close attention. This person manufactures cannon and shrapnel." If I were the walking delegate of a union of mechanics employed by the Remington Arms Company, you would say. "Here is an individual worthy of respect. He represents those that manufacture the rifles. Let us hear what he has to say." If I were the head of a big bank, you would say: "This person supplies the money that buys the machinery that inflicts death. Let us be polite to him."

I am here to advance the proposition that merely as a war-making machine a woman has her place here the same as a manufacturer of shrapnel on a wholesale scale, or a maker of armor plate, or a mechanic turning out rifles. Woman is the manufacturer of the chief tool used in war-namely, man. For every rifle there must be a man manufactured by some woman to pull the trigger and push the shells into the magazine. For every cannon there must be a man of keen sight, born of some healthy woman who gave him good nerves, the power to aim straight amid noise, smoke and death.

More important than cannon, powder, dynamite or warships, is the war material that the women supply-the soldiers, the sailors, the officers, those that have their statues built in the market place when war is over and those that lie bleeding to death on the ground when the battle ends.

If you would listen patiently here to the walking delegate of rifle manufacturing mechanics, you should also listen patiently, if only for a few minutes, to one who may call herself a sort of walking delegate for the women who manufacture the men that carry the rifles.

Address delivered to the Navy League of the United States

Ours is the hard work, the painful work and the slow work. You can give an order to Schwab, and he will give you a million rifles in three months. A good mechanic may produce a death-dealing weapon in a few hours of work. But it takes a woman many months to produce the son who is sent to be killed with the rifle on his shoulder. And it takes her many years of patient care and anxiety to bring him up to the age where he is fit to kill or be killed. Your factories have hastened the process of manufacturing the weapons that men produce. But there is no hastening of the process that nature lays upon woman. We are the manufacturers of all time, and it is time for some attention to be paid, when you discuss preparation for war and wholesale slaughter, to the women who must produce the real machinery of war-the men that kill and are killed. Women do not demand recognition where war is concerned as actual fighters. In their way, women have shown the physical courage on the battlefield that they show now every day in the hospitals and in childbirth.

The King of Ashantee trained his regiment of fighting women so ferocious and terrible that a half dozen of them would easily chase twenty-four big New York policemen into the North River. The women of the Germanic tribes, whom Tacitus describes, went into battle with their men, fought as savagely as they, and those that survived strangled their children and then themselves, that they might not be captured.

I wish all of those who lack appreciation of woman's place in the cosmic scheme could read Olive Schreiner's book, "Woman and Labor." She defines admirably woman's contribution to war as follows. I shall read