magazine readers.

Considering the difficulties to be surmounted, due to the advance
preparation of material, and considering that, at the best, most of its
advance information, even by the highest authorities, could only be in
the nature of surmise, the comprehensive manner in which _The Ladies'
Home Journal_ covered every activity of women during the Great War,
will always remain one of the magazine's most note-worthy achievements.
This can be said without reserve here, since the credit is due to no
single person; it was the combined, careful work of its entire staff,
weighing every step before it was taken, looking as clearly into the
future as circumstances made possible, and always seeking the most
authoritative sources of information.

It was in the summer of 1918 that Edward Bok received from the British
Government, through its department of public information, of which Lord
Beaverbrook was the minister, an invitation to join a party of thirteen
American editors to visit Great Britain and France. The British
Government, not versed in publicity methods, was anxious that selected
parties of American publicists should see, personally, what Great
Britain had done, and was doing in the war; and it had decided to ask a
few individuals to pay personal visits to its munition factories, its
great aerodromes, its Great Fleet, which then lay in the Firth of
Forth, and to the battle-fields. It was understood that no specific
obligation rested upon any member of the party to write of what he saw:
he was asked simply to observe and then, with discretion, use his
observations for his own guidance and information in future writing.
In fact, each member was explicitly told that much of what he would see
could not be revealed either personally or in print.

The party embarked in August amid all the attendant secrecy of war
conditions. The steamer was known only by a number, although later it
turned out to be the White Star liner, _Adriatic_. Preceded by a
powerful United States cruiser, flanked by destroyers, guided overhead
by observation balloons, the _Adriatic_ was found to be the first ship
in a convoy of sixteen other ships with thirty thousand United States
troops on board.

It was a veritable Armada that steamed out of lower New York harbor on
that early August morning, headed straight into the rising sun. But it
was a voyage of unpleasant war reminders, with life-savers carried
every moment of the day, with every