future of the nation was assured as a historical fact. For the unifying of all discordant elements into one great and inflexible purpose is character-creating; and character is a history-making fact.

In the upbuilding of any nation there is constant need for watchfulness and activity in combined power. The builder and the sentinel, the ploughman and the man with the spear, the soldier waiting by the forge and the smith who hammers out the blade, the man who crosses the mountain or the sea to the place of sacrifice, and they who stay at home to labor at the

for gain; or where treachery, with the patriotic symbol in his buttonhole, is hampering production by secret propaganda which means the sacrifice of brave men overseas, in circumstances not justified by necessity. It is easy to catch the loosemouthed fool who babbles his folly without understanding. The lash and not the noose is his fitting reward. But it takes vigilance of the highest kind to secure that loyal activity without which no victory shall ever greet the dawn.

Nation-building means protected activities, expanding life, vision, and power.

So has it always been. Who remembers the builders, name by name? Do we sufficiently remind our children, in the twilight, around the fire, of those who nailed the colors to the mast, and, ship lashed to ship, went down into the deep, for noble causes-or led forlorn hopes; and stormed the deadly breach; and braved the blaze of batteries; and snatched from failure the shattered fortunes of many a dreadful day, securing, out of the red and terrible dawn, the white, sweet noon of peace-marking the impregnable frontiers of liberty with their life's blood and their bones? The night has quiet sleep because the brave have watched. The day breaks with promise because the faithful toiled.

IV

WHEN the day of war is over and peace again shall walk the world, shall love reign over the nations? Is life to be an invalid whose every hour is haunted with dread of the nightmare blasphemies that might is right, that bayonets are stronger than God, and that force rules the world? These things have plunged humanity into the agonies of a crucifixion, perpetrating upon Christian civilization unspeakable outrage, rapine, butchery, and madness of lust, with execrable destruction of unique and invaluable treasures of literature, architecture, art, and culture, such as never has been seen or heard of since the darkest days of history. All the free nations of the world have turned, with the

flame of honor shining in their faces, to master this madness, or die.

Scarce a family can escape the touch of the agony of this time. If ever integrity, unselfishness, and honorableness were needed among men it is to-day. We must all hold together. For we must win. And defeat, or a victory with loose ends about it, would mean a world in bondage to blind autocracy, or the certainty of a recrudescence of the horror that to-day afflicts the world. Yet, before victory can be accomplished, it may mean the sacrifice of almost everything that is most beloved by us.

War is, of course, a stern teacher. We have learned how sweet is freedom, since we have been threatened with its loss. We have learned the beauty of true brotherhood. As we have gone into this conflict a federation of free nations, so we must abide when its stormy days are past, when the fields again grow harvests where meanwhile the crosses are upon the innumerable graves. For we must have our liberty assured. And that can only be through the nations that have bled for it, standing shoulder to shoulder, and heart by heart. The pact of liberty must never be dissolved. The combination of free peoples, with the mindful scars upon them, shall have vested in it the public trusteeship of the freedom of the world forever.

These are the truths taught us by that steady procession of the brave across the wide seas, for sacrifice. Let us not ever forget.

SOMETIMES think that in the face of so great a conflict as the present one -the Germans thundering at the gates of so-called democracy-we are apt to overlook the spectacle which the average man presents here in America (I am not enough familiar with him as he exists in other lands to present an intelligible, let alone an intimate, picture). Here in the small towns, the very little ones-Painted Post, Blosses Corners, Sand Centre in any State and in any county, and across the long fields that lie between, what a stirring of the spirit we call American, the dreams we have sometimes sniffed at as democratic! It does not matter really whether one is innately pro-martial or pacifistic in mood (or was) or has (or had) special foreign predilections in any form, in so far as this latter development is concerned. Many of those who are most active in America's rural or urban war activities to-day were most deep-seated in their objection when America entered the war. They saw in the war-America's participation in it much that they could not like: the rigors which go with complete mobilization for war, the end or sharp curtailment of the ease and prosperity which had come since the Civil War, or with the outbreak even of this one, the vast sales of our products to European lands.

But once we were in it, once sons, brothers, sweethearts had volunteered or been drafted and marched away, the other face of the situation dawned upon them they were in it, whatever they thought. Those German guns thundering on the west front were for their sons and lovers. The things which their boys would need would be clothes, food, warm beds, surgeons, and nurses to attend them when wounded, medicines and food to heal them when convalescent, ships to

take them and to bring them back, gasmasks, machine guns, and liquid fire even to protect them in the trenches, enormous guns to thunder against and drive back the enemy so that their boys should not be injured should, if possible, be brought back whole to them.

It matters little, as one can well see under such circumstances, what one thinks of the character of nature itself-its innate cruelty, or the horror of war, or the spirit of man, or of nations anxious to save or advance themselves at the expense of all others. When it comes to us, the puny little individuals who make up these

who, when confronted by the vast constructive as well as destructive forces of life, run here and there to protect, aid, save the things which we know, love, desire, understand, however indifferent in quality those things may seem to any one else what a spectacle we constitute in ourselves, a compound of beauty and pathos not to be gainsaid because you and I deem ourselves of superior intellectual, social, and material interests or instincts. Life is life. A human heart is a human heart wherever it beats. Your boy going out of your door, wherever that may be, is no better than any other boy going out of any other door to those who, with brooding hearts, are letting him go. That is what, to me at least, gives such vivid color to the simple rural American in his efforts at present to comprehend, save, spare, do, in this great crisis which, day after day and hour after hour, is bringing the significance of this war home to him.

Take, for instance, the average rural American banker or merchant or man of means anywhere-I mean the man of means and old-fashioned religious and moral convictions in any of these our small towns. What a change of heart this war, with its vast and ruthless destruction of life and property, means for