On the day of the Nativity, the Infant Brother of Humanity was born and was laid in a manger, there being no room for his human mother at the inn. But wherever he lay--there, through the mystery of his kinship, was the shining Gateway of Heaven. That translucent Light, from the moment of its appearance, intensified, as by opposite polarity, the baleful lights from all unholy fires in human breasts. Herod was first aroused to the Slaughter of the Innocents, and he has had his successors in every age during the growth of Christendom. As the Light of the World has expanded these nineteen centuries, shining in the hearts of men, ever awakening new ideas of Truth, Justice, and Mercy, against every fresh gleam, promising wider horizons of human Love and Sympathy, have been arrayed the brutish hosts, with Hatred and Murder in their hardened hearts. For the present generation has been reserved the vision of the very Armageddon of this Conflict, in which the world is divided against itself. The Powers precipitating it inaugurated it and have in its whole course attended it with every conceivable form of atrocity and outrage against noncombatants--innocent men, women, and children. But that Heavenly Light which shone in the stable at Bethlehem can never be put out! HENRY MILLS ALDEN. [Illustration] _Helping Uncle Sam to Get Up Speed_ “The military masters of Germany denied us the right to be neutral. They filled our unsuspecting communities with vicious spies and conspirators and sought to corrupt the opinion of our people in their own behalf. When they found that they could not do that, then agents diligently spread sedition among us and sought to draw our own citizens from their allegiance.... “They have learned discretion. They keep within the law. It is opinion they utter now, not sedition. They proclaim the liberal purposes of their masters; declare this a foreign war which can touch America with no danger to either her lands or her institutions ... and seek to undermine the Government with false professions of loyalty to its principles. “But they will make no headway. The false betray themselves always in every accent.... The facts are patent to all the world, and nowhere are they more plainly seen than in the United States, where we are accustomed to deal with facts and not with sophistries; and the great fact that stands out above all the rest is that this is a people’s war, a war for freedom and justice and self-government among all the nations of the world.” _From President Wilson’s Flag Day Address, June 14, 1917._ [Illustration] _The Wind of Democracy_