The European war will engage at least ten millions of men. A great number of these will be young men, who otherwise would marry and rear families. After the war these young men will be considerably older and many of them would never marry. A vast host of lives will be destroyed by shot and shell, by sickness and disease, by exposure and famine. Thousands will lay down their lives or else be broken wrecks for the remainder of their lives.
With women already in numerical preponderance what will this signify to them? It is seen at a glance that the surplusage of females will be such as to cause them to be drafted more largely than ever into industry and into forms of enterprise from which they have as yet been exempt. These women, deprived of the opportunity of marriage and bringing up families and forced to enter forms of toil that will cause the stamina of the sex greatly to deteriorate, will constitute one of the tremendous calamities of the war.
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The British troops are sadly in need of blankets, and patriotic housewives in the motherland began stripping their own beds as soon as the need became public. In all, 1,500,000 pairs of blankets must be had, as an outbreak of pneumonia is feared, if the unseasoned soldiers who have gone to the front, are to be protected while sleeping on concrete floors of draughty gymnasiums, warehouses and stables, also in tents and frequently in the open air. Here is another chance for Canadians to support a share of an absolute necessity.
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Published Oct. 8, 1914
Aylmer Express Newspaper
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