eedingly stupid, or even the rattle of the heavy guns, but the men on
foot. Only when the infantry comes swinging by do I grow wild with the
desire to wear a conspicuous uniform and die for my country.
Saint-Gaudens's man on horseback in the Shaw memorial is beautiful, but
it is the forward-lunging line of negro faces and the line of muskets on
shoulder that threaten to bring the tears to my eyes.

This, I suppose, is rank sentimentality; but I cannot help it. Any
procession, no matter how humble, puts me into a state of mingled
exaltation and tearfulness. It is in part the sound of human footsteps
and in part the solemn idea behind them. I am not thinking of stately
processions moving up the aisles of churches to the sound of music. I
have in mind, rather, a band of, say, a thousand working girls on Labour
Day, or of an Italian fraternal organisation heavy with plumes and
banners, or even a Tammany political club on its annual outing; wherever
the idea of human dependence and human brotherhood is testified to in
the mere act of moving along the pavement shoulder to shoulder. Above
all things, it is a line of marching children that takes me quite out of
myself. I was a visitor not long ago at one of the public schools, and I
sat in state on the principal's platform. When the bell rang for
dismissal, and the sliding doors were pushed apart so as to form one
huge assembly room, and the children began to file out to the sound of
the piano, the splendour and the pathos of it overpowered me. I did not
know which I wanted to be then, the principal in his magnificent chair
of office, or one of those two thousand children keeping step in their
march towards freedom.

Pathos? Why pathos in a little army of children marching out in fire
drill, or the same children marching in for their morning's Bible
reading and singing? I find it difficult to say why. Perhaps it is
consciousness of that law which has raised man from the brute, and which
I see embodied when we take a thousand children and range them in order
and induce them to keep step. Perhaps the pathos is in the recognition
of our isolated weakness and our need to make painful progress by
getting close together and moving forward in close formation. In any
case, the pathos is there. Consider a children's May party, on its way
to Central Park. A fife-and-drum corps of three little boys in uniform
leads the way. The Queen of the May, all in white, walks with her
consort under