new patience which has entered into the French character. At all times the Frenchman has been the best attacker in the world; to-day he has learnt the duty of patient warfare. When the French Commander-in-Chief says that he is nibbling at the Germans, he is making a statement which would have been impatiently received in the days gone by, but which is, after all, under present conditions not only necessary but the most difficult of warlike methods. To-day France is earnest, whilst in 1870 she was only eager. Her moral position has also changed. Behind the armies to-day woman is present, not to minister to passion but to minister to suffering, and to ennoble in thought. The salvation of France has been, under God, its motherhood. The relationship between, not only the boy, but the grown man and his mother, has remained upon me as the most beautiful thing in the way of relationship that I have ever known. When I hear that almost invariably the dying soldier in France, of all ranks, speaks as his last word upon earth the one that he first spoke--"Maman," I know that I am being told an absolute truth. It may be that in the past the French character has suffered through passion, but if woman has sometimes been an evil influence, assuredly she has oftener certainly proved herself a blessing to the men of the land. It is a delight to one who loves France, but who was never quite sure that she was to be trusted in difficult moments, to feel now that she has all the stability which will make her carry on to the end this awful war. There is another class to which France owes much of her reformation: the religious, the Clergy and the Sisters. It is a pity that at the present time, through harsh dealing, she is deprived of the perfect nursing and caring for, of some of the religious Orders, as one hears rather painful accounts of the conditions in some of the French War Hospitals, but she has her clergy, her priests, who fight and pray and bear no grudge for injustice done to the Church they serve. Whatever we may feel sometimes about the great Roman Catholic religion, we know this, at any rate, that the power of its members is always at its highest in the hour of greatest sacrifice. I have seen some of its priests ministering, themselves wounded and suffering, and I have thanked God that there were such examples of Christlike devotion at this great hour of the world's history. The sacredness of _la patrie_ for Frenchmen is a beautiful thing to dwell upon. We are just learning here in England the first lesson of that which is a finished, perfected knowledge to the meanest of French subjects.