51. German War Practices, Bureau of Public Information, 1918. 52. BANG, J. B., Hurrah and Hallelujah, New York, Doran, 1916. 53. ARCHER, WILLIAM, Gems (?) of German Thought, pp. 264, New York, Doubleday, 1917. 54. GAUSS, CHRISTIAN F., The German Emperor as Shown in his Public Utterances, pp. 329, New York, Scribners, 1915. 55. CHAPMAN, JOHN JAY, Deutschland über Alles, pp. 102, New York, Putnams, 1914. 56. HURD, ARCHIBALD, An Incident of War, by Order of the Kaiser, pp. 16, London, Canston & Sons, 1916. V OUR DEBT TO FRANCE (Delivered at Johnstown, Pa. on Bastille Day, July 14, 1918.) "To thee, sweet France, we eager turn, Ode to France, by RAYMOND Weeks. "France, fortunate among nations, has conserved the good and rejected the evil experienced in her national progress. The dark passions of the Revolution have utterly disappeared, giving place to the spirit of liberty, equality, fraternity, truly expressed in the national life and uniting France and the United States by unbreakable bonds." -GEORGE ELLERY HALE. "The unspeakable sacrifices willingly borne by France with so much stoicism give her the right to speak with authority to the allied Powers, which she has saved from an irreparable disaster."— GUGLIELMO FERRERO. "Let me go back to France! I'll stifle in this ease, This doing as I please Let me go to France! "They call! They're calling me to come! But I forget-you cannot hear The voices ever in my ear! 'I am so tired of war,' you say? Yes, yes-I, too; but so are they- But tell them, tell them that I come! You've not been there-how could you know If I could make you understand E. LOUISE WHITING. Bastille Day holiday IT is, I am sure, for all of us a proud moment when with England and her self-governing commonwealths, America celebrates for the first time in history upon the French national an American holiday the liberation of France from autocratic rule; a rule which has recoiled behind the defenses of the Kaiser's empire and his vassal states. It is an event which I hope will be perpetuated in a regularly recurring celebration; and it is, I trust, an augury of the coming alliance of democratic peoples against autocracy, whether seated upon a throne or lurking in disguise in a constitutional livery. The purged soul of France Great as have been its sacrifices, the world war has brought us its spiritual uplifts of the greatest significance and importance. Tried in the fire, the pure metal of our civilization has separated from the dross. More than of any other warring nation, however, the purged soul of France shines forth in splendor to a world that pays homage as never before in the history of mankind. It is the verdict of a contemporary writer that "no nation in all history, in any episode of its life, has received in so large a measure the love and admiration of mankind, as France has received since the war began... No nation has ever borne itself with finer dignity, greater simplicity, clearer loyalty, in the face of universal homage.' Barbarians repeatedly turned back on French soil Throughout recorded European history it has been preeminently upon French soil that the tides of barbarian hordes, sweeping across Europe and threatening to blot out its civilization, have recoiled and rolled backward in defeat. In the second century of our era when the Teutons and Cimbri were carrying all before them, they were turned back at Aix, and thus were preserved for centuries the Greek and Roman civilizations; in the fifth century at Châlons upon the Marne, Attila, "The Scourge of God," with hordes of fierce Huns at his back, met defeat and disaster; only a half-century later the West-Gothic barbarians under Alaric were defeated at Poitiers; there and at Tours near by Charles Martel, in the eighth century, rolled back the Saracen hordes and thus saved Europe from Mohammedan domination. In 1792 the citizen armies of the newly organized French Republic faced the armies of Prussian autocracy and defeated them in the decisive battle of Valmy. France the And now in our own day, in battles incomparably greater than any which have preceded them, France, at first almost unaided, has been the savior adamantine of our civilization from the baseness and wall treachery of the modern Hun. In doing this she has fought our battles as well as her own. Well has the poet sung of her: "Take courage, France! 'Tis not in vain That ancient glories Still remain! Since times of old, Thou art the adamantine wall Where tides barbaric beat and fall; And backward to their source are rolled. No couch of dreams with poppies spread Clad in the soldier's red and blue, Marching they sing the hymn of hymns, The splendid Marseillaise, That binds their present courage to "To-day the world has become convinced," says the greatest of Italian contemporary historians, "that if France had not resisted like an anvil the furious blows of the God Thor, mad with rage, Europe would not have escaped the German hegemony." France the anvil of Thor The invasion of France in 1914 Is there one of us who can forget those ever-memorable days of early fall in the opening year of the war, when each succeeding day, borne down by a terrible and consuming anxiety, we scanned the headlines of our news columns only to find that an overwhelming superiority in men and guns had carried the Teuton hordes yet another stage forward in their apparently resistless advance upon Paris? And then-we were at first hardly able to comprehend it-when the tide had reached the ridge beyond the Marne, its advance lost headway, the |