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This “daughter of an educated man” addresses other English women of the same category in replying to man's inquiry on how war can be prevented. By drawing upon Sophocles and the Bible and English literature and documents, particularly the biographies of the Victorian age, she pictures vividly man's dominance of the “private house” and of Society. He has attained to this dominance by education, by property, by law and by tradition. With their aid he has kept closed to his sisters until very recently the door of independence, that door which is entered through education and the practice of the professions. Privations have been imposed upon his sisters in order that he might be educated and be the recipient of honors and position in the Army, the Church, the Courts and the State. His sisters have received an education of another sort. They are free from the traditions, the shibboleths and the material valuations which their brother's training has imposed upon him. They have received an education at the hands of poverty, chastity, derision, and what Mrs. Woolf calls “freedom from unreal loyalties.”
Latterly, educated man has expressed a discontent with the terms imposed by the practice of the professions, in spite of their pomp and glory. They leave little time for friendship, travel or art. A great bishop describes his profession as “an awful mind—and soul-destroying life. The arrears of important work accumulate and crush.” A great lawyer “brought briefs home with him … so that he was lucky if he got to bed at one or two o'clock in the morning,” and a famous politician “since 1914 has not seen the pageant of the blossom.” A doctor has “taken a good deal over $pD13,000 during the year, but this cannot possibly be maintained, and while it lasts it is slavery.” And the question which started the discussion, namely, how war can be prevented, with its admission of the rumblings of guns in the distance, is prime evidence of man's realization that something is wrong with his