really governed by BOOKS?
The course of this country in the War, for instance, has been largely
determined by the books Wilson has read since he first began to think!
If we could have a list of the principal books he has read since the
War began, how interesting it would be.

Here's something I'm just copying out to put up on my bulletin board
for my customers to ponder. It was written by Charles Sorley, a young
Englishman who was killed in France in 1915. He was only twenty years
old--

TO GERMANY

You are blind like us. Your hurt no man designed,
And no man claimed the conquest of your land.
But gropers both through fields of thought confined
We stumble and we do not understand.
You only saw your future bigly planned,
And we, the tapering paths of our own mind,
And in each other's dearest ways we stand,
And hiss and hate. And the blind fight the blind.

When it is peace, then we may view again
With new-won eyes each other's truer form
And wonder. Grown more loving-kind and warm
We'll grasp firm hands and laugh at the old pain,
When it is peace. But until peace, the storm
The darkness and the thunder and the rain.

Isn't that noble? You see what I am dumbly groping for--some way of
thinking about the War that will make it seem (to future ages) a
purification for humanity rather than a mere blackness of stinking
cinders and tortured flesh and men shot to ribbons in marshes of blood
and sewage. Out of such unspeakable desolation men MUST rise to some
new conception of national neighbourhood. I hear so much apprehension
that Germany won't be punished sufficiently for her crime. But how can
any punishment be devised or imposed for such a huge panorama of
sorrow? I think she has already punished herself horribly, and will
continue to do so. My prayer is that what we have gone through will
startle the world into some new realization of the sanctity of
life--all life, animal as well as human. Don't you find that a visit
to a zoo can humble and astound you with all that amazing and grotesque
variety of living energy?

What is it that we find in every form of life? Desire of some
sort--some unexplained motive power that impels even the smallest
insect on its queer travels. You must have watched some infinitesimal
red spider on a fence rail, bustling along--why and whither? Who
knows? And when you come to man, what a chaos of hungers and imp