Nothing could have equaled the impression made by the quietness and the naturalness of the proceedings. Beside the continuous agitations and hysteria to which the East had treated us in the last two and a half years, this dignity, this immediate action, this willingness to see it through, gave one a solemn sense of the power and trustworthiness of this people. It was a realization that I should have been willing to pay almost any price to come to. Certainly it more than paid me for my forty-nine nights in forty-nine different beds. Eight months later this impression of the steadiness of the people under the threat of war was deepened. After my Chautauqua circuit, which I had supposed to be a temporary adventure, the lecture bureau asked to book me for a month of lyceum work, most of it in the Middle West. Late in January of 1917 I started out. I was on the road when the break with Germany came. Our evening papers of February 3rd had the digest of the President’s speech to Congress. The next Sunday morning there was the full text. I went out to walk early that morning, and one of the first things I saw was a lively row in front of a barber shop. Inquiring, I found that a big Swede had expressed sympathy with the Kaiser, and was being thrown into the street. At the hotel, my chambermaid, the elevator boy, the table waiter, did not wait for me to introduce the subject. Everybody was talking about what the break meant—war of course. They were ready, they said. As the days went on, I found that was the opinion of everybody. One morning I landed at a railway junction town, with no train until late afternoon. It was a forlorn place at any time, but deadly now, with the thermometer around twenty below. A friendly ticket agent warned me that the only hotel was no place for ladies, and sent me off into the territory beyond the railroad shops to a dingy-looking house which, he said, was kept by a woman who was clean and decent. It was anything but inviting on the outside, but travelers who are choosers are poor sports. The woman gave me a room and, following the only wisdom for the lecturer who would keep himself fit, I went to bed. It was four o’clock in the afternoon when I came down. The woman of the house, whom I had found in the morning rubbing out clothes, was in a fresh gingham dress, sitting in the living room reading the Chicago _Tribune_. Beside her lay a copy of the _Record Herald_. I found that this woman since the beginning of the trouble in Europe had been reading full details in these admirably edited newspapers. She had not been for a war, she said, until they went back on their word. “That settled it for everybody out here. Now,” she said, “there is nothing else to do.”