es with
twenty cots and no privacy and wear the same clothes for months, but it's
better than thrashing around looking for something to do and never
finding it, never getting anything real to spend one's energy-on. I've
closed my country house, I've sublet my apartment, I've done with teas
and bridge, and I'm happier than I've been in my life even if I don't get
enough sleep."

Another lady, who looked still young, had two sons in the army. "There
was nothing for me to do but sit around the house and wait, and I want to
be useful. My husband has to stay at home; he can't leave his business."
Be useful! There she struck the new and aggressive note of emancipation
from the restricted self-sacrifice of the old order, of wider service
for the unnamed and the unknown; and, above all, for the wider
self-realization of which service is but a by-product. I recall
particularly among these women a young widow with an eager look in clear
grey eyes that gazed eastward into the unknown with hope renewed. Had
she lived a quarter of a century ago she might have been doomed to slow
desiccation. There are thousands of such women in France today, and to
them the great war has brought salvation.

From what country other than America could so many thousands of pilgrims
--even before our nation had entered the war--have hurried across a wide
ocean to take their part? No matter what religion we profess, whether it
be Calvinism, or Catholicism, we are individualists, pragmatists,
empiricists for ever. Our faces are set toward strange worlds presently
to rise out of the sea and take on form and colour and substance--worlds
of new aspirations, of new ideas and new values. And on this voyage I
was reminded of Josiah Royce's splendid summary of the American
philosophy--of the American religion as set forth by William James:

"The spirit of the frontiers-man, of the gold-seeker or the
home-builder transferred to the metaphysical or to the religious
realm. There is a far-off home, our long lost spiritual fortune.
Experience alone can guide us to the place where these things are,
hence indeed you need experience. You can only win your way on the
frontier unless you are willing to live there."

Through the pall of horror and tragedy the American sees a vision;
for him it is not merely a material and bloody contest of arms and men,
a military victory to be gained over an aggressive and wrong-minded
people.