twenty
years she had developed an internal industry and an external commerce on
a scale and with a rapidity entirely unprecedented. She had to build a
navy such as no nation had ever constructed in so short a time. She
seemed destined to progress in the immediate future as she had
progressed in the immediate past.

What has the madness for world conquest done for her now? She has made
enemies of all, and made all her enemies suffer. Like the strong blind
man of history, she has seized the columns of civilization and brought
the whole temple down. But has she not destroyed herself utterly amid
the ruins? Her industry is paralyzed, her commerce gone. Her navy is
dishonoured. Some force she still possesses at sea, but it is force to
be expended on sea piracy alone. And it is not piracy that can save her.
At most, in her extremity, it will do for her what a life belt does for
a lone figure in a deserted ocean. It prolongs the agony that precedes
inevitable extinction. It is the throw of the desperate gambler that
Germany has made, when she flings this last vestige of her honour into
the sea.

ARTHUR POLLEN.

[Illustration: TIRPITZ'S LAST HOPE--PIRACY]

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WEEPING, SHE HATH WEPT

While a world of mourners is plaintively asking, "What has become of our
brave dead, where are they? Alas! how dark is the world without them,
how silent the home, how sad the heart"; whilst the mourner is groping
like the blind woman for her lost treasure, the Belgian mother, and the
Belgian widow, and the Belgian orphan are on their knees, praying,
"Eternal rest give to them, O Lord; let a perpetual light shine upon
them," the Christian plea that has echoed down the ages from the day of
the Maccabees till now, exhorting us to pray for the dead that they may
be loosed from their sins. I would remind the broken-hearted mother
beseeching me to tell her where can her brave boy be gone, adding, "His
was such a lonely journey; did he find his way to God?" of the words of
the poet, who finds his answer to her question in the flight of a sea
bird sailing sunward from the winter snows:

There is a Power whose care
Teaches thy way along the pathless coast,
The desert and illimitable air,
Lone, wandering but not lost:

He who from zone to zone
Guides, through the boundless sky, thy certain flight,