nward vagueness with outward zeal, if it be the zeal
of subscribers, presenters or drivers of cars, or both at once,
stretcher-bearers, lifters, healers, consolers, handy Anglo-French
interpreters, (these extremely precious,) smoothers of the way; in
short, after whatever fashion. We ask of nobody any waste of moral or of
theoretic energy, nor any conviction of any sort, but that the job is
inspiring and the honest, educated man a match for it.

"If I seem to cast doubt on any very driving intelligence of the great
issue as a source of sympathy with us, I think this is because I have
been struck, whenever I have returned to my native land, by the
indifference of Americans at large to the concerns and preoccupations of
Europe. This indifference has again and again seemed to me quite beyond
measure or description, though it may be in a degree suggested by the
absence throughout the many-paged American newspaper of the least
mention of a European circumstance unless some not-to-be-blinked war or
revolution, or earthquake or other cataclysm has happened to apply the
lash to curiosity. The most comprehensive journalistic formula that I
have found myself, under that observation, reading into the general case
is the principle that the first duty of the truly appealing sheet in a
given community is to teach every individual reached by it--every man,
woman and child--to count on appearing there, in their habit as they
live, if they will only wait for their turn.

"However," he continued, "my point is simply my plea for patience with
our enterprise even at the times when we can't send home sensational
figures. 'They also serve who only stand and wait,' and the essence of
our utility, as of that of any ambulance corps, is just to be there, on
any and every contingency, including the blessed contingency of a
temporary drop in the supply of the wounded turned out and taken
on--since such comparative intermissions occur. Ask our friends, I beg
you, to rid themselves of the image of our working on schedule time or
on guarantee of a maximum delivery; we are dependent on the humors of
battle, on incalculable rushes and lapses, on violent outbreaks of
energy which rage and pass and are expressly designed to bewilder. It is
not for the poor wounded to oblige us by making us showy, but for us to
let them count on our open arms and open lap as troubled children count
on those of their mother. It is now to be said, moreover, that our
opport