have got as much
money as I want and you haven't."

But it is not only in the small worries of life that we may be saved by
a right use of recreation. We all realize how in the Great War your
nation and our nation and others engaged in the war were taken out of
themselves, I was going to say lost themselves, but I ought rather to
say found themselves. It was a fine thing on your part to send two
million soldiers across the sea in so short a time to risk their lives
for an ideal. It was even more impressive to us when we heard that in
this country you had adopted conscription, and that your millions of
people, distributed over so vast an extent of continent, were so moved
by one public spirit and one patriotism and one desire to help the
Allies in the war that they were rationing themselves voluntarily with
food and fuel. That voluntary action by so many millions over so great
an extent of country was a tremendous example, showing what an ideal and
a public spirit and a call to action can do for people in making them
forget private interests and convenience and making them great.

That was an example of what could be done by not shrinking from the
duty of life; but you can get greatness, too, from some of the joys of
life, and from none more than from a keen sense of the beauty of the
world and a love for it. I found it so during the war. Our feelings were
indeed roused by the heroism of our people, but they were also depressed
by the suffering. In England every village was stricken, there was grief
in almost every house. The thought of the suffering, the anxiety for the
future, destroyed all pleasure. It came even between one's self and the
page of the book one tried to read. In those dark days I found some
support in the steady progress unchanged of the beauty of the seasons.
Every year, as spring came back unfailing and unfaltering, the leaves
came out with the same tender green, the birds sang, the flowers came up
and opened, and I felt that a great power of nature for beauty was not
affected by the war. It was like a great sanctuary into which we could
go and find refuge for a time from even the greatest trouble of the
world, finding there not enervating ease, but something which gave
optimism, confidence, and security. The progress of the seasons
unchecked, the continuance of the beauty of nature, was a manifestation
of something great and splendid which not all the crimes and follies and
misfortunes of mankind c