a solemn and conceited ass? In his heart the Devil began to destroy the common sense of a race with the atmosphere 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

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 a license to use them.

"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.

"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 into partnership and begun to give Him lessons in efficiency. Moreover, they were not to be free lessons. The lessons were to be

-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. This he can do in a generation by the systematic use of hot air. He begins his work on the tender intellect of childhood.

"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.

"For thirty years Germany had been on a steady dream diet. It took its morning hate with its coffee and prayers, its hourly selfcontentment 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 simoon, a tornado.

"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 saccharine morality-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 sense easy even for sober-minded 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, it would seem.

men.

"Now the thing that has happened to the eriminal 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.

"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 slowwrought walls of old cathedrals and public buildings tumbled into hopeless ruin; the châteaux, 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. This, then, is what the boys at the front are to bear in mind. They are fighting a nation criminalized by the worst gang of scoundrels in all history. If one were to search the prisons of the earth he could not find a more abandoned group of cut-throats and highwaymen than that of Bill Hohenzollern and his friends.

"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-headmostly 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 bone-heads on to 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 un-supered. 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

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than a baby sucking its bottle in a perambulator. He fails, and the cost of his failure no man can estimate. He stands discredited: as a public servant he is going into disuse and his going vindicates the judgment of our forefathers regarding like holders of sense preferred. It is a long step toward Democracy and the security of the world.

"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.

"Now this is the thing for the folks at home to remember. Of what use are our farms and shops and banks and surpluses if the world is to be turned over to the devil? Let us bear this in mind when the Government asks for our help in financing the war. What cause should appeal to us so strongly as that of keeping the devil out of America and out of our homes? It is money paid for insurance against arson, rape, and murder."

HE Red Cross

exists, in the main, to help the sick and wounded

of this war. Since this war began, it has embarked upon every undertaking by which the lot of the sick and wounded soldiers and sailors may be made more comfortable. It

has provided stretcher-bearers to bring the wounded off the battlefield, ambulances to carry them to hospital, hospitals (of all kinds) where they can be dressed or specially treated, and boats and lighters by which they can be shipped for home. In addition to all this work in the field, it has been, ever since the war began, a great distributing centre of all kinds of

charitable work, and

especially of those articles of use in hospitals. It gathers together and supplies to the hospitals of all the Allied belligerent countries the countless things continually needed, such as dressings, gauze, lint, ether, chloroform, X-ray equipment, surgical implements, splints, fracture-beds, rubber air pillows, drainage tubes, bedding, crutches, and clothing.

It is now one of the biggest organizations outside the Armies, and supplies comforts and delicacies of every kind to the millions of sufferers broken in the cause. Help the Red Cross and you comfort a broken man.

yet attained in spirit and morale and it is being thoroughly backed up by the French people. France is not 'bled white.""

This has been the greatest task of the Red Cross, the work on which for the last year its energies have been concentrated, its money poured out to help hold up the hands of France. And to do this meant not merely to aid the suffering soldier but to bring such comfort and cheer, such real help, sympathetically and intelligently rendered, to the soldier's people "back home" that they, too, could keep up their courage and back up their fighting men.

“This is not a war of armies, it is a war of peoples," said Major Grayson M.-P. Murphy when I saw him in New York on the day he laid down his commission as head of the Red Cross work in France to take up the new duties of a member of General Pershing's staff. "The question is not so much how we can keep the troops in the trenches, for the men in the trenches will take care of themselves, but it is how we can keep up the morale and the spirit and the courage in those countries that are suffering so dreadfully, behind the lines."

Given food

A NATION'S REAL STRENGTH-THE HOME Behind the lines-there is where the real strength or the real weakness of a nation at war lies; not on the firing line. and ammunition enough the soldier at the front, stimulated by the fierce joy of battle, will fight until he drops. But wounded and in hospitals; tired, wet and hungry as he falls back to the second line; filthy and vermincovered as he makes his weary way back home on leave, the soldier has time to think and his thoughts turn to those he has left behind him. He himself is suffering-yes, but that can be borne; he knows the worst of it. But how about the others? Are they well or ill, comfortable or in want, happy or sad? Strange if, at times, the poilu should not ask himself: Is it, after all, worth while?

And those left behind-ah, only those at home know how much can be borne-for France! But mon soldat-I ask you, monsieur, I ask you, madame, is it right that he should suffer such miseries? One fights, certainement; one dies if le bon Dieu so wills-For France! But when one is ill or wounded, tired, hungry-ah, les pauvres soldats-how can one fight so long and see no end to war?

So the Red Cross went to France; France had invited them; France welcomed them;

to-day all France loves them. Eighteen, there were, in the membership of the French Commission when they sailed away at the end of May. Major Murphy left behind, when he came back in January twenty-five hundred Americans doing Red Cross work in France. I have told how the French morale has stiffened, the French resistance strengthened, between those dates. There is testimony-from the French themselves-that the American Red Cross, with its American dollars, American food and clothing, American doctors and nurses and, most of all, its American sympathy and friendliness, has been a factor of the highest value in helping France sustain herself until she could recover her power of resistance.

"Come on, my children!" cried a French captain to his men at a critical moment during the last attack at Verdun. "Come on! We have only a little farther to go and then we will all go back and get good hot drinks at the American canteen!"

So close to the first line does the poilu meet the Red Cross! There is an American in charge, with a French assistant, of each of these rolling canteens. Working under shell-fire, gas-masks imperatively ready for instant use, they have hot coffee and chocolate waiting for the soldier as he comes from the trenches. Right at the entrance to the communication trenches, in an abri or dugout, but fully as exposed to danger as the soldier himself at most times, the American Red Cross holds out America's hand of friendship. And it helps and has helped, greatly. It helps because the soldier who has had a bowl of hot coffee is a more cheerful soldier than one who, trenchtired, must wait until he reaches his regimental base before he can eat or drink; it helps because it is proof that America is helping with something more tangible than sympathy, that even to render this little service Americans are willing to face danger.

At the other end of the panorama-for one must sweep all France with the eye to get even a glimpse of the manifold ways in which the Red Cross is helping her people over the rough places-here is a village in the devastated area. The Hun has been here; the little homes are in ruins, the children ragged and dirty, their mothers wretched, tired, homeless. Eight hundred and fifty thousand of these refugees, of all ages and conditions except able-bodied men, must be cared for. Homes are rebuilt—