“Look at them,” said a talkative Congressional candidate. “Four years ago I could have told how practically every one of the men in this town would vote in November. I can’t do it today. Nobody can. They are freed from partisanship, as I could never have believed. They are out there now thrashing over Wilson and Hughes, and not 25 per cent of them know which it will be when election day comes.” More and more I came to feel that you could count on these people for any effort or sacrifice that they believed necessary. One of the most revealing things about a country is the way it takes the threat of war. Just after we started, the call for troops for Mexico came. It seemed as if war were inevitable. There was no undue excitement where we traveled, but boys in khaki seemed to spring out of the ground. I shall never forget one scene, which was being duplicated in many places in that region. We were in an old mountain town in Pennsylvania. Our hotel was on the public square, a small plot encircled by a row of dignified, old-fashioned buildings. In the center stood a band-stand, and beside it a foolish little stone soldier mounted on an overhigh pedestal—a Civil War monument. We were told that on the square at half-past nine in the evening a town meeting would be called to say good-bye to the boys who were “off to Mexico on the ten-thirty.” “How many of them?” I asked. “One hundred and thirty-five,” was the answer. And this was a town of not over twenty-eight hundred people. As the hour approached, the whole town gathered. It came quietly, as if for some natural weekly meeting; but a little before ten o’clock we heard the drum and fife, and down the street came a procession that set my heart thumping. Close beside the City Fathers and speakers came a dozen old soldiers, some of them in faded blue, two or three on crutches, and behind them the boys, one hundred and thirty-five of them—sober, consciously erect, their eyes straight ahead, their step so full of youth. The procession formed before the little stone soldier, who somehow suddenly became anything but foolish; he took on dignity and power as had the boys in rank—boys whom, if I had seen them the day before, I might have called unthinking, shiftless, unreliable. The mayor, the ministers, a former Congressman, all talked. There was a prayer, the crowd in solemn tones sang “My Country, ’Tis of Thee.” There was a curt order; the procession re-formed; the old soldiers led the way, and the town followed the boys to the “ten-thirty.”