the test of democracy, since the socializing
process becomes international. Britain has stood the test, even from the
old-fashioned militarist point of view, since it is apparent that no
democracy can wage a sustained great war unless it is socialized. After
the war she will probably lead all other countries in a sane and
scientific liberalization. The encouraging fact is that not in spite of
her liberalism, but because of it, she has met military Germany on her
own ground and, to use a vigorous expression, gone her one better. In
1914, as armies go today, the British Army was a mere handful of men
whose officers belonged to a military caste. Brave men and brave
officers, indeed! But at present it is a war organization of an
excellence which the Germans never surpassed. I have no space to enter
into a description of the amazing system, of the network of arteries
converging at the channel ports and spreading out until it feeds and
clothes every man of those millions, furnishes him with newspapers and
tobacco, and gives him the greatest contentment compatible with the
conditions under which he has to live. The number of shells flung at the
enemy is only limited by the lives of the guns that fire them. I should
like to tell with what swiftness, under the stress of battle, the wounded
are hurried back to the coast and even to England itself. I may not
state the thousands carried on leave every day across the channel and
back again--in spite of submarines. But I went one day through Saint
Omer, with its beautiful church and little blue chateau, past the
rest-camps of the big regiments of guards to a seaport on the downs,
formerly a quiet little French town, transformed now into an ordered
Babel. The term is paradoxical, but I let it stand. English, Irish, and
Scotch from the British Isles and the ends of the earth mingle there with
Indians, Egyptians, and the chattering Mongolians in queer fur caps who
work in the bakeries.

I went through one of these bakeries, almost as large as an automobile
factory, fragrant with the aroma of two hundred thousand loaves of bread.
This bakery alone sends every day to the trenches two hundred thousand
loaves made from the wheat of western Canada! Of all sights to be seen
in this place, however, the reclamation "plant" is the most wonderful.
It covers acres. Everything which is broken in war, from a pair of
officer's field-glasses to a nine-inch howitzer carriage is mended he