too poor even to print and send out a circular
announcing their little organization. But George Williams brought his
fist down on the table, with the confident words, "If this movement is
of God, the money will come."

It has come. The twelve men have been multiplied now to a million and
a half, scattered in forty lands. Girded with new strength and with
the dauntless optimism of youth, the movement has risen up to minister
not only to the millions of British and American soldiers and munition
workers, but also to the men in the camps, hospitals, or prisons in
most of the nations now at war. The thirteen shillings have been
multiplied until now the permanent Y M C A buildings are worth over a
hundred million dollars. An average of two new huts or centers have
been erected and opened by the British or American Associations every
day since war was declared; while two permanent buildings in brick or
stone rise each week in some part of the world.

Wars are the birth-pangs of new eras. A new day dawned for the Young
Men's Christian Association with the present war. At midnight on
August 4, 1914, the British Association as it had been for seventy
years was buried and forgotten, and a new movement arose on the ruins
of the old. Ninety per cent of its former workers left to join the
colors, but a new army of over thirty thousand men and women was
mustered and trained within its huts for the service of the British
soldiers. The Y M C A had suddenly to "think imperially," and to
minister to a world at war.

Seventy years ago George Williams was the man of the hour, but a leader
of the British war work of the Y M C A was found in the present crisis
in the person of Mr. A. K. Yapp, General Secretary of the National
Council of Great Britain, who has recently been knighted by virtue of
his distinguished service for the nation. He had spent Sunday, August
second, in deep searching of heart and had caught a vision of what the
war would mean, and the opportunity that would be presented to an
organization that was interdenominational, international, readily
mobile, and adaptable enough instantly to meet a great national crisis.

Within a fortnight the British army and the whole British navy were
mobilized for war. During that time the Y M C A was represented in
four-fifths of the camps of the territorial forces and 250 centers were
opened. In six months 500 centers were occupied; at the end of the
first year there were 1