reality, and of the crew of fine and fearless young Americans who worked with him. England and France furnished more money to buy food; but the United States, in addition to money and wheat, gave the organization, the personal energy and toil and tact, the assurance of fair play and honest dealing, without which that food could never have gotten into Belgium or been distributed only to the civil population. Holland was the door through which all the supplies for the C. R. B. had to pass. The first two cargoes that went in I had to put through personally, and nearly had to fight to do it. My job was to put the back of the United States against that door and keep it open. It was not always easy. I was obliged to make protests, remonstrances, and polite suggestions about what would happen if certain things were not done. Once the Germans refused to give any more "safe-conduct passes" for relief ships on the return voyage. Of course, that would have made the work impossible. A German aircraft bombed one of these ships. I put the matter mildly but firmly to the German Minister. "This work is in your interest. It relieves you from the burden of feeding a lot of people whom you would otherwise be bound to feed. You want it to go on?" "Yes, certainly, by all means." "Well, then, you will have to stop attacking the C. R. B. ships or else the work will have to stop. The case is very simple. There is only one thing to do." He promised to take the matter up with Berlin at once. In a couple of days the answer came: "Very sorry. Regrettable mistake. Aviator could not see markings on side and stern of ship. Advise large horizontal signs painted on top deck of ships visible from above. Safe-conducts will be granted." When this was told to Captain White, a clever Yankee sea-captain who had general charge of the C. R. B. shipping, he laughed considerably and then said: "Why, look-a-here, I'll paint those boats all over, top, sides, and bottom, if that'll only keep the Germans from sinkin' 'em." starving to death by the work of the C. R. B. The men who were doing it had a chance to observe the conditions in those invaded countries. They came to the Legation at The Hague and told simply what they knew. We got the real story of Miss Cavell, cruelly done to death by "field-gray" officers. We got full descriptions of the system of deporting the civil population-a system which amounted to enslavement, with a taint of "white slavery" thrown in. When the Belgian workmen were suddenly called from their homes, herded before the German commandant, and sent away, they knew not whither, to work for their oppressor, as they were entrained they sang the "Marseillaise." They knew they would be punished for it, kept without food, put to the hardest labor. But they sang it. They knew that France, and England too, were fighting for them, for their rights, for their liberty. They believed that it would come. They were not conquered yet. Here I must break off my story for a month. It has not been well told. Words cannot render the impression of black horror that lay upon us, the fierce indignation that stirred us, during all those months while we were doing the tasks of peace in peaceful Holland. We were bound to be neutral in conduct. That was the condition of our service to the wounded, the prisoners, the refugees, the sufferers, of both sides. We lived up to that condition at The Hague without a single criticism from anybody except the subsidized German-American press in the United States. But to be neutral in thought and feeling-ah, that was beyond my power. I knew that the predatory Potsdam gang had chosen and forced the war in order to realize their robber-dream of Pan-Germanism. I knew that they were pushing it with unheard-of atrocity in Belgium and northern France, in Poland and Servia and Armenia. I knew that they had challenged and attacked the whole world of peace-loving nations. I knew that America belonged to that imperilled world. I knew that there could be no secure labor and no quiet sleep in any land so long as the Potsdam werewolf was at large. [Dr. van Dyke's third article, "Stand Fast, Ye Free!" in the November number. 1 From a million and a half to two million men, women, and children in Belgium and northern France were saved from Ο NATIONAL PARK By Belmore Browne ILLUSTRATIONS FROM A PAINTING BY THE AUTHOR AND FROM PHOTOGRAPHS N the 26th day of February, 1917, President Wilson signed the bill establishing a Mount McKinley National Park in the Territory of Alaska. The creation of this park, comprising approximately two thousand two hundred square miles, marks the beginning of a new epoch in our national development: it means the passing of our last frontier and the end of the reckless régime of the pioneer. The "ice-box" legend that has persisted since Seward's day has received its congé. Fifteen years ago Mount McKinley was only a name. A handful of wilderness men had seen the great peak hanging, cloud-like, above vast stretches of spruce and tundra, but even in Alaska its name was a synonym for the unknown and the unattainable. The mystery which surrounded it was, however, the loadstone that drew men to it, with the result that to-day our knowledge of the big mountain and the wilderness that guards it is practically complete. From the mass of data concerning it two facts stand out clearly: the first is that scenically the Mount McKinley region is surpassed by no other region on earth, and the second is that it is the finest big-game range in the western hemisphere. In fact, with the one exception of certain parts of Africa, there is probably no other region where so many big-game animals can be found in a like area. The new park lies in the centre of the region known as South Central Alaska, which is bounded on the north by the Yukon River, on the east by the Alaskan Boundary, on the south by the North Pacific Ocean, and on the west by Behring Sea. This vast expanse is bisected by a great mountain system which, with the exception of a few minor breaks, extends northward from the Aleutian Islands and the Alaskan Peninsula, and thence eastward and southward in a great curve to the Alaskan Boundary, a distance of more than one thousand miles. Of this system the Alaskan Range forms the northern and central link. It is about five hundred and fifty miles in length, and its size makes it one of the most prominent mountain chains on the continent. This one range is of greater relief and extent than the European Alps. These few facts will illustrate the tremendous difficulties that have been overcome by the men who have explored this wilderness. Vast forests of spruce, treacherous muskegs, savage glacier-fed rivers, impenetrable thickets of alder where a day's travel is measured by the power of axemen, awesome mountain slopes and fields of living ice had to be overcome before the vast solitude became known. To-day the new park is practically as inaccessible as it ever was. The only way of reaching it from the seacoast is with pack-train, dog-sled, or small boat, and either of these methods of travel necessitates a journey of more than one hundred and fifty miles, entailing a great amount of labor and hardship. From the north the approach is less arduous, but the distance to be travelled is so great that it is almost prohibitive. It was conditions such as these that bred the Alaskan slogan, "Give us a railroad!" And in answer to that call the government has taken up the huge task. On these steel rails rests the future of Alaska, for when the work is completed the Mount McKinley National Park will be within a two weeks' journey of New York! Beginning at Seward, on a fiord-like arm of the Gulf of Alaska, the road will sion called Broad Pass, and this spot is destined to be the Mecca of the tourists of the world, for it will be the principal entrance to the Mount McKinley National Park. Had nature planned this spot for an entrance, it could not have improved much on what exists, for as you travel westward from the pass the Alaskan Range is divided into two parallel walls by a valley that forms a natural roadway to Mount McKinley. The altitude of Broad Pass is low and the mountains are of the smooth or eroded type, but as the traveller moves westward the range broadens and becomes higher. Slowly, but with infinite majesty, range on range and snow peak on snow peak, the gigantic mass of couver saw the mountain from a distance of one hundred and fifty miles, it is interesting to speculate on how his final description would have been worded had he pushed on to the actual base of the huge peak. In fact, no word-picture or photograph can give any but the slightest impression of this unique mountain. While Mount McKinley is exceeded in altitude by many mountains, no other known peak on the globe rises so high above its own base. The great peaks of the Andes and Himalaya ranges rise from high plateaus, and while the individual peaks tower a great distance above the sea they only rise a comparatively short distance above the plateaus that support them. Mount McKinley, on the other Looking down on the Alaskan Range from an altitude of 15,000 feet on the Central N. E. Ridge of Mount McKinley. the northern base of the Alaskan Range throughout almost the entire length of the park, averages about two thousand five hundred feet above sea-level, and as it forms a natural roadway and is overhung by a continuous line of gigantic ice-clad peaks, the views can be better imagined than described. On the north the land falls away in a series of giant steps into the haze of the valley of the Kantishna, which, like a blue sea, stretches away into the mysteries of the Arctic. Northward through the great valley flow the streams that carry the freight of melted snow from the mighty glaciers of the Alaskan Range. Some of or the leap of a canoe in swift water, can there find his heart's desire. But let us turn from the scenic side of the region and consider its economic side. Day by day as the traveller moves westward from the railroad he will realize more and more that the rock-ribbed mountains and ocean-like sweeps of tundra have an important function to perform-the production of wild life. On first sight of this vast wilderness, with its ice-capped peaks, its grinding glaciers, and its sphagnum-covered foot-hills sweeping down to spruce-carpeted valleys, the traveller is overcome with its grim solemnity and apparent barrenness. Then, little by lit |