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sens, will not be subordinated during the next four years to crude partisanship or truculent personal ambitions. Mr. Peters has promised this, and his public record shows him to be a

man of his word. Boston, in short, is not reformed, but merely the child of good fortune for the moment. Cambridge, December 24, 1917. WILLIAM BENNETT MUNRO.

PATIENCE WITH RUSSIA

BY NICHOLAS GOLDENWEISER

Dr. Goldenweiser is a member of the Moscow bar and an authorized representative in the United States of the All-Russian Zemstvo Union. THE EDITORS.

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HOW no quarter!" This was the famous order given out by the Kaiser to his troops as they were departing for China to crush the Boxer uprising. This order was typical not only of kaiserism, but of the whole attitude of the Europeans towards the Chinese.

A genuinely national movement which resulted a few years later in a successful revolution and the establishment of a Chinese Republic was interpreted by most Europeans and many Americans as a dangerous, if not a criminal, attempt at mob rule. Russia has not been much better understood than China. China, in the opinion of all Occidentals, stood for Chinese bells, Chinese tea, or Chinese embroideries and porcelains. What did we care or know about Boxers, politics, economics, history, customs, and other tedious items of Chinese life?

Likewise Russia, previous to March, 1917, stood in American opinion for knouting, Cossacks, Siberia, icy winters, samovars, and tallow candles. Since that date it seems to stand almost exclusively for Anarchists, betrayal of the Allied cause, civil war, and German propaganda. Under such conditions, naturally nothing but irritation can be expected with respect to Russia.

Is this attitude a just one? Does America know enough definitely and wholly to condemn? To answer this question intelligently the American reader must understand that it has a twofold character. On the one hand it concerns the political and economic conditions inside of Russia, and on the other it is related to Russia's international situation. Let me deal with the second phase first.

This war has been often defined as a war of exhaustion. Military experts of all the Allied countries, especially in England, have declared repeatedly that victory over the German war machine will be achieved, not by territorial or strategical advan tages, but by the wearing out of this machine by slow but persistent grinding.

If so, Russia has already done more than her total share in the common cause of wearing out the forces of Germany. Russia holds at present over two million Austro-German prisoners. If every one of the great Allied belligerents (the United States, Great Britain, France, Italy, and Japan) will do as much, and each of the minor Allied belligerents only one-tenth as much, the Central Empires will lose in war prisoners alone about twelve million men. Plainly the wheels of their war machine will be ground off and will crash in ruin. The participation of the Russian Bear in the war has not only caused Germany and her allies an enormous loss of man power in prisoners and in soldiers killed and permanently disabled, but has also cost them billions of money, untold quantities of war material, an immense amount of energy and vitality, and great tension upon their means of communication brought about by the wide new areas which the Central Empires now have to hold on the north and the east. On the western or French front the Germans have fought at a huge expense of steel and explosives. On the eastern or Russian front they were forced to fight hand to hand and to lavishly spend their man power, for the Russians fought with bayonets against cannon, and they dearly sold every mile of Russian soil. So much for Russia's balance in the accounts of the transaction of the Allies. This balance still stands to her credit, and in justice ought never to be lost sight of.

But Russia has not lost her significance as a military factor for the present or the future. It is logically impossible to conclude a separate peace between Russia and Germany even under the present chaotic conditions in Russia. The Bolsheviki under the leadership of Lenine and Trotsky face a problem which they thoroughly realize even if they are trying to conceal it from the masses of the people. If their control is overthrown by men with an even more radical" programme, these men will find

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themselves confronted with the same problem, for to conclude an immediate peace means to disband the army at once-that is, to sap the very life-blood of the revolutionary power. The Revolution was won in March and the Romanoffs overthrown because the great bulk of the army supported the revolutionary movement. Lenine, Trotsky, and Company are promising peace, but they are taking great care not to disband the army or to disarm the soldiery, for they could not last a week unsupported by the moral and physical power of the soldiery. But it is quite evident that so long as any semblance of a Russian army, or even a mere crowd of several millions of armed men, remains in the east, Germany will be unable wholly to withdraw men, munitions, or equipment from the Russian front. The problem so far as it concerns Germany is complicated by two other factors. The present rulers of Germany cannot pos sibly agree to a formal peace treaty with an indefinite group of visionary radicals who preach anarchy and who deny any stable organization of the state. And, on the other hand, if the leaders of the Bolsheviki are found to be conferring with members of the German General Staff at Petrograd, there will, in my judg ment, be a strong reaction among the Russian masses against the political adventurers who under a false pretense of serving their country summon the help of the invaders of Russian soil All these facts must be considered before an intelligent judgment can be formed of the present international influence of Russia on the war.

Let us now briefly consider the second part of the problemthat is to say, the social and political forces that are within Russia's own boundaries.

What are the Bolsheviki, and what will be their future influence on Russian domestic politics? A mob, even while acting as one man under the impulse of a strong emotion, can never be regarded as expressing the whole definite, collected will of all its participants. Mobs are the product of some terrible, unreasoning emotion. When that emotion has spent itself in the attainment of its specific object, the mob quickly transforms itself again into a gathering of law-abiding, reasonable citizens seeking order and looking for a legally established authority to guide and co-ordinate its conduct. This was true of the French Revolution. It will be true of the Russian Revolution.

In Russia, as everywhere else, there is a class of intellectual people trained and educated in various walks of civilized social life who are the natural and the only possible leaders in a state organism. They must and they will come into their own. Their advent to power is merely a question of time. As long as there are crowds of credulous individuals who easily absorb all kinds of noisy verbosity, taking it at its face value, there will be a chance for soap-box orators to persuade the masses to try out some new, promising political and social experiments. But as soon as these experiments have been transformed into bitter experience and have led directly to the punishment of hunger, misery, and general chaos, the flippant crowd will overturn the soap-boxes and flock in utter despondency to the guidance of those leaders who have proved their capacity to bring back the lost bliss of law and order and the means of satisfying the first necessities of life.

The thoughtful, studious, and loyal elements of Russia must not be deprived of the possibility of offering to the masses the blessings of an orderly state organism. If, in a not unnatural impatience with and distrust of the Bolsheviki, the Allies should cut off Russia from any aid in money and supplies, they will only drive the Russian masses to despair, and will force them to grasp the nearest hand stretched out to them with the offer of appeasing their hunger and covering their shivering bodies. Whereas by encouraging and supporting the ever-growing

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THE CURE, THE COLONEL, AND A PIANO

AUTHOR OF "BEHIND THE GERMAN VEIL,"

T

BY J. M. DE BEAUFORT

"BELGIAN MEMORIES;" LATE WAR CORRESPONDENT OF THE LONDON "DAILY TELEGRAPH

HE Forty-third Battery of the Belgian Artillery had gone en repos. For four days we were to be at the village of Steenkerke (stone church), situated about five miles behind Dixmude. Four days of comparative peace; four days of real, warm food, of plenty of water-for bathing, with plenty of soap; and, last but not least, with plenty of sleep.

were

We were billeted in a place which was a combination of dugout and farm-house. The dugout was necessary, as we within reach of the German guns before Dixmude.

Now let me say at once that dugouts are not always as bad as they are cracked down to be. Take ours, for instance. We had three beds and enough straw for six of us; we had a real table and real chairs-instead of old munition boxes; we had-ah, guess! The mere thought of what else we had in that dugout can give me even to-day a feeling of happy satisfaction. It was a real, honest-to-goodness piano! None of us could play it except the Colonel, and he only by courtesy-but we all tried. The many musical evenings we had, now and then with a real artist present, some itinerant soldier-musician who in pre-war days had delighted larger-but surely not more appreciative audi ences in Paris, New York, London, or Monte Carlo. Even the great Ysaye once played for us, accompanied on our old friend. Yes, I guess that piano earned its purchase price if ever a piano did. Alas! like so many other things in Belgium these days, it was "Made in Germany." But, German or not, it gave us many a happy hour, and of one particular occasion, when its notes gave us the thrill of our lives, I am going to tell you about.

One evening during the early part of April, 1917, Monsieur le Curé, shepherd of Steenkerke, was our guest for dinner. In the days before the war the Curé had been a professor at the University of Louvain, but on account of his somewhat too liberal views he was transferred to the peace and quiet of Steenkerke, at the end of nowhere. What a charming, dear old chap he was, our friend le Curé! He seemed to carry warmth and sunshine wherever he went. Needless to say, we always heartily welcomed him at our simple mess.

The dinner had reached the coffee and pipe stage, and, as the Germans were about due to start their evening hate, we all descended into our underground “salon.'

Our pipes were lit, our feet stretched out near the impromptu fireplace, and we felt so comfortable and satisfied that we did not even mind Captain Petit's snoring. We were discussing a very popular topic-America's course. Was she going to join actively in the war or was she merely going to leave matters as they stood-broken diplomatic relations? Naturally, as in every community, large or small, we had our pessimists and our optimists. Let me hasten to say that I always belonged to the optimist class as far as America was concerned, and-let me emphasize it-always shall belong. I have no patience with this talk about American slackers, American cannot-get-readyness, and many other American shortcomings. Except for her fleet, England was far less prepared in August, 1914, than we were in April, 1917. See what she accomplished in two short years! Her armies in France were in 1916, and are to-day, man for man and regiment for regiment, better than any army Germany ever had in the field or ever will have. In 1916, at the end of July, the "London Scottish," a regiment made up of former London bank clerks, shop assistants, laborers, college men, etc., wiped out seventy per cent of the famous Potsdam guards-professional soldiers, mark you! And none of those English chaps had ever done the "goose-step" in their lives.

What England can do in two years we, with our industrial and natural resources, our energies, our "take-off-your-coatroll-up-your-sleeves-get-busy" slogans, our inventive genius, our tighting spirit, can do in less than half that time.

AND WE ARE GOING TO DO IT

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American affiliations asked me almost daily: "What is Amerstand by little Belgium?" The exact arguments I used matter ica going to do? Is she coming to help us? Is she going to not to-day, they are old history by now, but I may say that America had always done the right thing in the end, and would again and again I assured my good friends "over there" that do it this time.

All of a sudden, about 11 P. M. I should judge, we heard loud knocking at the street door upstairs. Unconsciously every one of us moved his right hand towards his hip. Presently we heard a deep Flemish voice saying: "Orders van het exclaimed the Colonel;" what may that be?" You see the ordiHoofdkwartier." (Despatches from Headquarters.) "Sapristi!" nary daily despatches from Headquarters usually arrive before 8 P. M., so as to give every C. O. an opportunity to have next under his command. day's orders copied and distributed among the various units

Presently the Colonel's orderly showed in a mud-begrimed despatch rider, who, after saluting, handed the Colonel a sealed the news contained in this urgent despatch. envelope. We were all electrified and could hardly wait to hear

The Colonel, drawing a little closer to him one of the bottles to read. holding a lighted candle, tore open the envelope and proceeded

eyes.

Heavens, what a long time did he study that paper! Was he ever going to share the news with us? We tried to read it from Was his it good or was it bad? Were we to "attack at about his son, who was reported "missing" in October, 1914, dawn," or did it mean "retreat"? Perhaps it contained news and whom he would not believe dead. But the Colonel was slow to solve our questions. For what seemed to us an interminably long time he sat there staring at that sheet of white paper. wondered whether it was not my heart that was beating so The old alarm clock on the table ticked the seconds, and I had sat down in order to be near the light; now he rose. For loudly. At last he showed some signs of action. The Colonel a second or so longer he stood there with large, wide-opened eyes staring straight in front of him, and then he announced, in a slow and trembling voice:

"GENTLEMEN, AMERICA IS OUR ALLY."

Now we understood what had kept him so long. America our ally! Could it be true? Yes, it was; it came officially from Headup and down the land of Flanders, of England, across the whole. "America, quarters. It thrilled us through heart and soul. It seemed that world, there must have reverberated the message: America is our ally. America has come at last."

No one here at home can possibly realize the effect of those words, the impression they made in Belgium, in France. I don't know how long the silence lasted, but I know that the ten of us stood there like statues, transfixed for a long time. I am not trying to grow poetic, to make fine phrases; let me assure you, it is no abuse of language, no hyperbole, when I tell you that those four little words sounded to us like a message from heaven. For two and a half years we had been looking west, wondering, watching, waiting. For two and a half years. the best manhood of Belgium, France, and England had succumbed on the plains and in the lowlands of Flanders; for two and a half years men, women, and children, many of them homeless, without food, dressed in rags, had been asking me, which you tell us is always fair and always just? When is it "Ah, monsieur, what about that grand contree, America, coming to help us; to free us?"

And here was the answer. April the 6th. O God, to have lived on that day and among those people makes life seem worth all sufferings!

Again the Colonel spoke.

"Gentlemen, we must commemorate this greatest of all days." And, addressing the Curé, he said: "And you, Monsieur le Curé, you must celebrate with us. I know your habits, but I am going to beg of you to-day to make an exception, because I

19

want you to drink with us to-night the health of our new, our grand ally-America.'

And the dear old Curé, his eyes all aglow, his long white locks illuminated by the candle-light, replied: "Yes, mon Colonel, yes, certainly, and with all my heart will I drink with you to night; but"-and then he rose "if you will pardon me for a few moments, perhaps I can bring something that will add to this wonderful occasion."

He left us, and we, the younger ones, got busy to open a few bottles of vin ordinaire. The Curé did not keep us waiting long. Presently he returned, followed by a Belgian soldier. The man, who evidently had been instructed beforehand, at once went to the piano.

The ten of us rose, and as we stood round the table, bareheaded, our glasses lifted, there suddenly sounded through the dugout, and I think I can speak for my friends as well as for myself through our hearts, the strains of "The Star-Spangled Banner."

Ah, what do you people here at home know of that melody?

What do you know of the message of hope, promise, courage, and inspiration it carries? I had heard it often before; I have heard it many times since; but never, never have I heard it under just such wonderful, gripping, and moving circumstances as there in that dugout "Somewhere in Flanders." I can only say that it seemed to us like a melody of heaven, like a chant of angels. The pessimists had disappeared. We were ALL optimists now, and till late in the night we sat there and laughed at the whining German shells above our heads. "Bah!" we thought; "you have done your worst now. You cannot harm us any more. Is not America our ally?"

And the next day and the next week? Why, on everybody's face there had come that expression of relief, and often it was expressed in words. They were:

"No matter what happens now, whether the war lasts one year more, two years, or five years, nothing ill can happen to us again; there can be only one ending-victory, because-ah, because

"AMERICA IS OUR ALLY."

SENSE-COMMON AND PREFERRED

BY IRVING BACHELLER'

HERE are two kinds of superiority-real and inherited. All the troubles of this world have come of inherited

TH

superiority. Of all the defects that flesh is heir to, inherited superiority is the most deplorable. It is worse than insanity or idiocy or curvature of the spine. There are millions of acres of land in Europe occupied by nothing but inherited superiority; there are millions of hands and intellects in Europe occupied by nothing but inherited superiority, while billions of wealth have been devoted to its service and embellishment. A man who has even a small amount of it needs a force of porters and footmen to help him carry it around, and a guard to keep watch for fear that some one will grab his superiority and run off with it when his back is turned.

A full equipment of inherited superiority, decorated with a title, a special dialect, a lot of old armor and university junk, stuck out so that there wasn't room for more than one outfit in a township. Most of the bloodshed has been caused by the blunders or the hoggishness of inherited superiority. It is the nursing bottle of insanity and the Mellin's Food of crime.

There are two kinds of sense in men-common and preferred, plain and fancy. The common has become the great asset of mankind; the preferred its great liability. Our forefathers had large holdings of the common, certain kings and their favorites of the preferred. The preferred represented an immense bulk of inherited superiority and an alleged pipe line leading from the king's throne to paradise, and connected with the fount of every blessing by the best religious plumbers. It always drew dividends, whether the common got anything or not. The preferred holders ran the plant and insisted that they held a first mortgage on it. When they tried to foreclose with military power to back them, some of our forefathers got out.

We, their sons, are now crossing the seas to take up that ancient issue between sense common and preferred and to determine the rights of each. We are fighting for the foundations of democracy-the dictates of common sense.

For the sake of saving time, I hope my readers will grant me license to resort to the economy of slang. A man might do worse these days. There is one great destroyer of common sense. It is hot air. Now hot air has been the favorite dissipation of kings. James the First was one of the world's great consumers of hot air. He and his family and friends took all that Great Britain could produce-never, I am glad to say, a large amount, but enough to put James into business with the

1 Mr. Bacheller is the author of "Eben Holden," "Dri and I," "Keeping up with Lizzie," "The Light in the Clearing," and other well-known novels characteristic of American life, spirit, and humor. This paper on Common Sense, which seems to us to be an unusual and happy blending of humorous satire and deep sentiment, is the substance of an address made by Mr. Bacheller at the one hundred and twelfth Festival Dinner of the New England Society of New York City, held at the Waldorf Astoria Hotel on the evening of December 22.-THE EDITORS.

Almighty. To be sure, it was not a full partnership. It was no absolute Hohenzollern monopoly of mortal participation. It was comparatively modest, but it was enough to outrage the common sense of the English. After all, divine partnerships were not for the land of Fielding and Smollett and Swift and Dickens and Thackeray. Too much humor there. Too much liberty of the tongue and pen. Too great a gift for ridicule. Where there is ridicule there can be no self-appointed counselors of God, and hand-made halos of divinity find their way to the garbage heap.

Now, if we are to have sound common sense, we must have humor, and if we are to have humor we must have liberty. There can be no crowned or mitered knave, no sacred, fawning idiot, who is immune from ridicule; no little tin deities who can safely slash you with a sword unless you give them the whole of the sidewalk. Humor would take care of them; not the exuberance that is born in the wine-press or the beer-vat-humor is no by-product of the brewery-but the merriment that comes when common sense has been vindicated by ridicule.

Solemnity is often wedded to Conceit, and their children have committed all the crimes on record. You may always look for the devil in the neighborhood of some solemn and conceited ass who has inherited power and who, like the one that Balaam rode, speaks for the Almighty. So. when the devil came back, he steered for Germany. There he began to destroy the common sense of a race with the atmos phere of hell-hot air. We have seen its effect. It inflates the intellect. It produces the pneumatic rubber brain-the brain that keeps its friends busy with the pump of adulation: the brain stretched to hold its conceit, out of which we can hear the hot air leaking in streams of boastfulness. The divine! afflatus of an emperor is apt to make as much disturbance as a leaky steam-pipe. When the pumpers cease because they are weary, it becomes irritated. Then all hands to the pumps again. Soon there is no illusion of grandeur too absurd to be real, no indictment of idiotic presumption which it is unwilling to admit. By and by it breaks into the realm of the infinite and hastens to the succor of God, for, to the pneumatic brain, God is slow and old-fashioned. Thereafter it infests the heavenly throne and seeks to turn it into a plant for the manufacture of improved morals, and, so as to insure their popularity, every agent for these morals is to carry a sword and a gun and à license to use them. The alleged improvement consists in taking all the nots out of the ten commandments. Nots are irritating to certain people who have plans for murder, rape, arson, and. piracy. Hohenzollern and Krupp had taken the Lord inte; partnership and begun to give Him lessons in efficiency. More! over, they were not to be free lessons. The lessons were to be paid for, but they were willing to give Him easy terms, for which they were to show Him how to hasten the slow process of evolu

tion. Evolution was hindered and delayed by sentiment and emotion.

Sentiment and emotion were a needless inheritance. Hohenzollern and Krupp proposed to cut them out of life and abolish tears. Tears consumed the time and strength of the people. They were factors of inefficiency. What was the use of crying over spilled milk and dead people? Tears were in the nature of a luxury. The poor could not afford them. Life was not going to be lived any longer-it was to be conducted. It was to be a kind of a hurried Cook's tour. Nobody would have to think or feel. All that would be attended to by the proper official. Life was to be reduced to a merciless iron plan like that of the beehive-the most perfect example of efficiency in nature, with its two purposes of storage and race perpetuation. No one ever saw a bee shedding tears or worrying about the murder of a drone. The ideal of Germany was to be that of the insect. To the bee there is nothing in the world but bees, enemies, and the nectar in flowers; to the German there was to be nothing in the world but Germans, enemies, and loot. With no wall of pity and sentiment between them and other races they could rain showers of bursting lyddite on the unsuspecting, and after that the will of the Kaiser and God would be respected. The firm would prosper. It is not the first time that conceit and Kultur have hitched their wagon to infinity. It is the old scheme of Nero and Caligula--the ancient dream of the pneumatic prince. He can rule a great nation, but first he must fool it. ...

You may think that this endangered the national morals, but do not be hasty. The morals were being looked after.

Every school, every pulpit, every newspaper, every book, became a pumping-station for hot air impregnated with the new morals. Poets, philosophers, orators, teachers, statesmen, romancers, were summoned to the pumps. Rivers of beer and wine flowed into the national abdomen and were converted into mental and moral flatulency.

For thirty years Germany had been on a steady dream diet. It took its morning hate with its coffee and prayers, its hourly self-contentment with its toil, its evening superiority with its beer and frankfurters. History was falsified, philosophy bribed, religion coerced and corrupted, conscience silenced-at first by sophistry, then by the iron hand. Hot air was blowing from all sides. It was no gentle breeze. It was a simoom, a tornado. No one could stand before it not even a sturdy Liebknecht or an unsullied Harden.

Germany was inebriated with a sense of its mental grandeur and moral pulchritude. Now moral pulchritude is like a forest flower. It cannot stand the fierce glare of publicity; you cannot handle it as you would handle sausages and dye and fertilizer. Observe how the German military party is advertising its moral pulchritude-one hundred per cent pure, blue ribbon, spurlos versenkt, honest-to-God morality! the kind that made hell famous. I don't blame them at all. How would any one know that they had it if they did not advertise it?

It is easy to accept the hot-air treatment for common senseeasy even for sober-minded men. The cocaine habit is not more swiftly acquired and brings a like sense of comfort and exhilaration. Slowly the Germans yielded to its sweet inducement. They began to believe that they were supermen-the chosen people; they thanked God that they were not like other men. Their first crime was that of grabbing everything in the heaven of holy promise. Those clever Prussians had arranged with St. Peter for all the reserved seats-nothing but standing room left. Heaven was to be a place exclusively for the lovers of frankfurters and sauerkraut and Limburger cheese. God was altogether their God. Of course! Was he not a member of the firm of Hohenzollern & Krupp? And, being so, other races were a bore and an embarrassment. Would he not gladly be rid of them? Certainly. Other races were God's enemies, and therefore German enemies. So it became the right and duty of the Germans to reach out and possess the earth and its fullness. The day had arrived. There was nothing in the world but Germans and enemies and loot.

Their great leader, in their name, had claimed a swinish mo nopoly of God's favor. His was not the contention of James the First, that all true kings enjoy divine right—oh, not at all! Bill had grown rather husky and had got his feet in the trough, and was going to crowd the others out of it. He was the one and

only. And as he crowded, he began to pray, and his prayers came out of lips which had confessed robbery and violated good faith and inspired deeds of inhuman frightfulness. His prayers were therefore nothing more nor less than hot air aimed at the ear of the Almighty and carrying with them the flavor of the swine-yard. In all this Church and people stood by him. It would seem that the devil had taken both unto a high mountain and showed them the kingdoms of the earth and their glory, and that they had yielded to his blandishments.

Now the thing that has happened to the criminal is this. In one way or another, he loses his common sense. He ceases to see things in their just relations and proportions. The difference between right and wrong dwindles and disappears from his vision. He convinces himself that he has a right to at least a part of the property of other people. Often he acquires a comic sense of righteousness.

I have lately been in the devastated regions of northern France. I have seen whole cities of no strategic value which the German armies had destroyed by dynamite before leaving them in a silence like that of the grave-the slow-wrought walls of old cathedrals and public buildings tumbled into hopeless ruin; the château, the villas, the little houses of the poor, shaken into heaps of moldering rubbish. And I see in it a sign of that greater devastation which covers the land of William II—the devastation of the spirit of the German people; for where is that moral grandeur of which Heine and Goethe and Schiller and Luther were the far-heard compelling voices? I tell you it has all been leveled into heaps of moldering rubbish—a thousand times more melancholy than any in France.

Behold the common sense of Germany become the sense that is common only among criminals! The sooner we recognize that, the better. They are really burglars in this great house of God we inhabit, seeking to rob it of its best possessions-Hindenburglars! In this war we must give them the consideration due a burglar, and only that. We must hit them how and where we may. We are bound by no nice regard for fair play. We must kill the burglar or the burglar will kill us.

When I went away to the battle-front, a friend said to me: "Try to learn how this incredible thing came about and why it continues. That is what every one wishes to know."

Well, hot air was the cause of it. Now why does it continue? My answer is, Bone-head-mostly plumed bone-head.

Think of those diplomats who were twenty years in Germany and yet knew nothing of what was going on around them and of its implications! You say that they did know, and that they warned their peoples? Well, then, you may shift the boneheads onto other shoulders. Think of the diplomatic failures that have followed!

I bow my head to the people of England and to the incomparable valor of her armies and fleets. My friendly criticism is aimed at the one and only point in which she could be said to resemble Germany, viz., in a certain limited encouragement of

supermen.

Now, if the last three years have taught us anything, it is this: the superman is going to be unsupered. Considering the high cost of upkeep and continuous adulation, he does not pay. He is in the nature of a needless tax upon human life and security. His mistakes, even to use no harsher word, have slaughtered more human beings than there are in the world. The born gentleman and professional aristocrat, with a hot-air receiver on his name, who lives in a tower of inherited superiority and looks down at life through hazy distance with a telescope, has and can have no common sense. . . . He has not that intimate knowledge of human nature which comes only of a long and close contact with human beings. Without that knowledge he will know no more of what is in the other fellow's mind and the bluff that covers it in a critical clash of wits than a baby sucking its bottle in a perambulator. He fails, and the cost of his failure no man can estimate. He stands discredited.

...

Now is the time when all men must choose between two ideals: That of the proud and merciless heart on the one hand, that of the humble and contrite heart on the other; between the Hun and the Anglo-Saxon, between Jesus Christ and the devil. Faced by such an issue, I declare myself ready to lay all that I have or may have on the old altar of our common faith. My friends, be of good cheer. The God of our Fathers has

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