itself being bought; while the work of refugee relief, clothing, housing, curing, has gone steadily on, from Evian to Cambrai all along the line of the armies in western and northern France and northern Italy. Hand in hand has been going the vast work of rehabilitation which the Friends' Society and the Red Cross are doing in all the reclaimed villages and the farms near the firing line.

Just one tiny evidence of this came to the notice of an outside observer last August while establishing dispensaries around Verdun. Every few miles French women were met using American farm machinery in their fields. The hundred million dollars helped gather the harvest back of Verdun last summer!

All this is in addition to the work which is being done for the American Army in sickness and in health. The hundred million dollars is not being spent alone in laying foundations for aiding the American Army of the future. It is being spent on the American soldier of the present also, in rest houses and canteens, in base hospitals and dental dispensaries, in every provision against discomfort and disease which loving forethought can devise.

That is the destination of all these tremendous supplies which are pouring through the funnel of national headquarters! Hospitals, refugees, children, the French and the American soldier, in health and in sickness, all served by a newly created tremendous transportation and warehouse system; and meanwhile, day by day, the workers in France are preparing the vast groundwork for the task which will confront the Red Cross once the American Army goes into action on a great scale. That is what the money is being used for, with smaller efforts in Italy, England, Serbia, Rumania, and Egypt. The work and supplies furnished by the vast web of chapters in the United States are being sent unerringly, efficiently to their destination, with these aims always in view.

This is one side of the vast organization which centres in Washington. What is the other side? Well, one cannot long feel the pulse of the Red Cross in Washington without realizing that the story of the other side, the story of the web of chapters, of the sources of supply, of the Cantonments, the Naval Auxiliaries, the Canteen Service, the knitting, the Home Service, is women,-women, and now children added!

The women of the country are heart and

soul in the war. Their chief means of expression, their main opportunity to help, is the Red Cross. The work they have done, and are getting ready to do, is soul stirring. Almost to the last one they are mobilized. Red Cross, Surgical Dressings, American Fund for the French Wounded, Armenian and Syrian Relief-the Red Cross works with them all nowadays and helps shoulder their burdens. In return the women of America are giving their all to the Red Cross-time, work, money, without distinction of class or race. Contrast these two letters, picked merely at random.

AMERICAN RED CROSS, Washington, D. C. GENTLEMEN:

BUENOS AIRES, Oct. 29th.

I take great pleasure in enclosing draft No.12637 on the National City Bank of New York by its Buenos Aires Branch for the sum of $105,000 to be applied to the American Red Cross War Fund.

This represents the proceeds of a bazaar held by the Patriotic Society of American Women in Buenos Aires Sept. 21 and 22nd.

Hoping that the good which may be done by this money will be proportionate with our pleasure in being able to contribute, I am,

Yours most sincerely, (signed) EVA T. HUNTINGTON, Treasurer.

There is no way of gauging the sacrifices and work of the women, indeed, in these chapter work rooms whose lights gleam until late at night in Maine towns, in the hills of Pennsylvania, following the sun's departing rays along the Ohio and the Mississippi, across the mountains of Tennessee, the black prairies of Illinois and lowa, the flat Kansas towns, to the new cities of the West and Pacific Coast. The lights of the Red Cross shine in hundreds and thousands of workrooms of all kinds and descriptions in which the women of the nation are working, either on bandages or surgical dressings or some of the knitted articles whose yarn was bought with part of that hundred million.

A nation's women mobilized behind the Red Cross.

Their fingers are making a great part of those huge, almost endless, supplies which pour through the funnel toward Europe, toward Perkins in Paris, Endicott in London and Perkins in Rome.

Their work directed in every chapter and

youse but if they would realize what youse do they would soon change there mind. If there would not be any red cross what would the soldier boys do they would be without tobacco; cigars, and cigarettes and such things. Youse must excuse my

the Red Cross at home.

It is true of the canteen service which has given weary soldiers on troop trains all over the country the comforts of hot coffee and human attention; it is true of the nursing. service in the cantonments; of the Home Service.

THE WORK APPRECIATED

It is true of all the activities of the Red Cross in America, indeed, from Miss Jane Delano, the head of the Nurses' Bureau, to the most unknown worker in a backwoods auxiliary in Maine.

That this work is not unappreciated the following letters will show. They are selected from some eight hundred which came in on one day to Headquarters from the National Army camps.

THE RED CROSS SOCIETY:
DEAR FRIENDS:-

I wish to express my gratitude to you for the fine sweater given me through my company.

Last night I was on guard duty without an overcoat and if it hadn't been for the sweater I think I would have nearly froze.

You folks at home cannot begin to realize what wonderful work is being done by the Red Cross Societies. We are the boys that realize.

Again thanking you and trusting the good work will continue. I remain

Gratefully

My Dear friend I thought thought I would Set my self down to let you know that I received one of your breast protection Swetter and was very much pleased with it for they are very handy and comfortable

I will send you my best wishes and regards

I wish you health

I wish you wealth

I wish you gold in Store

I wish you heaven after death

What could I wish you more.

MADAMS:

I just want to write you a few lines to let you know i received one of your Sweaters and Thanking you very much for it as it keeps me very warm and if i can help you in way please write to me and let me know. There are lots of people condeming

is about all for this time So i will thank yous a hundred times again for the sweater. And do not forget to write to me if i can in anyway help youse. So i will close with best wishes and many thanks for the Sweater. Yours Truly

To The Ladies of The Red Cross,

I wish to express my sincere gratitude to you all for the noble work you are doing for the army. You can never know how comforting it is to know that there are those back home who care. I received one of the many sweaters that you sent to camp. It certainly keeps me warm and comfortable and each time I wear it I give thanks that America is Blessed with such good and kind women and best of all by your many kind deeds you are showing that you are behind us in this struggle which gives us renewed confidence.

Yours is a noble organization and let me assure you of the heartfelt appreciation of "The Boys."

The soldiers and sailors of the United States realize the work which is being done by the Red Cross and the Hundred Million Dollar Fund you and I gave.

They know of the millions of sweaters, mufflers, socks and other comforts given them at the camps; of the sanitation done and the rest houses at the cantonments; the cheer and hot drinks en route; the help and advice and financial assistance rendered their dependent families at home.

Abroad, they know they will find canteens serving a million meals monthly to French and American soldiers; warehouses crammed with materials situated all along the French and Italian lines, at seaports, and at places where they are going to fight; institutions for the care of consumptives, for the care of children, and the re-education of maimed men; supply organizations reaching thirty-five hundred hospitals: gangs of workers restoring devastated farms and villages-the whole served by a motor transport which employs hundreds of trucks and, outside of the equipment of the army, is the greatest system of its kind in the world.

Apart from the armies, indeed, they will find that the Red Cross to-day is one of the It is most potent, single agencies in Europe. time we knew that the hundred million dollars is being well spent.

IN

T

HE sun had set at the end of a wheatless day. I found that famous country lawyer-the Honorable Socrates Potter-sitting in the warm glow of some blazing logs, by the fire-place of his inner office, with feet upon the fender, reading war news. He had lately returned from the battle front in France. "What do you think of it?" I asked.

"I have got through thinking and gone to swearing," he answered. "A man that's too old to fight has got to do something to help-ain't he?"

"Stop swearing and give me a message to the boys at the front."

"Stop swearin'-gosh almighty! I haven't time to stop. I'll do anything in reason. What kind of a message do you want?"

"Something that will help them to understand why they're fighting and what they're fighting."

"Williamism is the thing they're fighting and if you'll take that poker and agree to keep me decently respectable while I talk about it, I'll do my best.

of this world is the swelled head. It ranks above alcohol and drugs as a ruiner of the human intellect. Our Yankee ancestors understood this. They drove Conceit from their homes as they would have driven a serpent. They knew the value of humility.

"The average prince is ruined by praise.

There

"Young Bill Hohenzollern began life with a swelled head and an overwhelming sense of inherited superiority. There are two kinds of superiority-real, and inherited. and inherited. All the troubles of this world have come of inherited superiority. Of all the defects that flesh is heir to, a sense of inherited superiority is the most deplorable. It is worse than insanity or idiocy, or curvature of the spine. are millions of acres of land in Europe occupied by nothing but a sense of inherited superiority; there are millions of hands and intellects in Europe occupied by nothing but a sense of 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 tote 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 out

fit in a township. Most of the bloodshed has been caused by the blunders or

"Slowly the Germans yielded to hoggishness of

the 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 or 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 presented 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 senses common, and preferred, and to determine the rights of each. We are fighting for the foundations of democracy--the dictates of common

sense.

humor there. Too much liberty of the tongue and pen. Too great a gift for ridicule.

"Where there is ridicule there can be no selfappointed counselors of God, and hand-made halos of divinity find their way to the garbage heap.

THE SAVING GRACE OF HUMOR

"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 mitred 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

"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 favourite 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 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

You

wedded to Conceit, and their children have committed most of the crimes on record. 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 the heart of the most solemn and conceited ass in the world-William the Second of Germany. Bill had been ruined by adulation; when he made a jest the palace rang with laughter; when he expressed an opinion the household wore a look of awe. On his visits to England he failed to get his usual allowance of hot air. That made him mad. At Windsor Castle he used to go into yelling fits in which no one but his old grandmother could control him. Can you wonder that he became