y child, at any
time to face whatever giant might have challenged him.

I remember that one day in the year 1914, he was training Georges
Carpentier, who was to meet some negro heavy-weight or other. The
disproportion in the strength of the two men struck my friends and me
as rather alarming; and we took the champion of the world aside and
begged him not to hit too hard and to spare our little instructor as
much as he could. That good fellow Carpentier, who is full of
chivalrous gentleness, promised to do what we asked; but after the
first round he came back to us and said:

"I can't let him off just as lightly as I should like. The little chap
is too plucky and too sensitive; and I have to hit out in earnest.
Besides, he overheard you and what he says is, 'Never mind what the
gentlemen say; they are much too considerate and are always afraid of
my getting smashed up. There's no fear of that. You go for me hard,
else we sha'n't be doing good work.'"

5

"Good work." That is evidently what he did down at the front and what
all of them there are doing. It is indeed fine work, the most glorious
that a man can perform, to die like that for a cause whose triumph he
will not behold, for benefits which he does not reap and which will
accrue solely to his fellow-men whom he will never see again. For,
apart from those benefits, like so many other men, like almost all the
others, he had nothing to gain and nothing to lose by this war. All
that he possessed in the world was the strength of his two arms; and
that strength finds a country everywhere.

But we are no longer concerned with the personal and immediate
interests that guide nearly all the actions of everyday life. A
loftier ideal has visited men's minds and occupies them wholly; and
the least prepared, the humblest, the minds that seemed to understand
hardly anything of the existence that came before the tremendous
trial, now feel it and live it as thoroughly and with the same
infinite ampleness as do those minds which thought themselves alone
capable of grasping it, of considering it from above or contemplating
it from every side. Never did a sheer ideal sink so deeply into so
many hearts or abide there for so long without wavering or faltering.
And therefore, beyond a doubt, somewhere on high, in the heart of the
unknown powers that rule us, there is being piled up at this moment
the most wonderful treasure of immaterial forces that man has ever
possessed, one u