If millions of our young men are prepared to give up their lives for their country, is it too much to ask the rest of us to give up for a time our comforts and our pleasures? The civilian must do his duty no less than the man in khaki. And “duty,” at this time, has many meanings. It is a duty to pay taxes. These will, without doubt, be increased again and again and yet again before this war is over, and in many cases they will be directly felt. The man who dodges taxes when his country is at war is more deserving of contempt than the soldier who shows the white feather on the firing-line, for whereas the one fears for his life the other fears only for his pocketbook. It is a duty to raise foodstuffs and to give every possible encouragement to others to do so. The householder who refuses to plough his yard and plant it to vegetables because it would spoil the looks of his place is as much a slacker as the man who attempts to evade his military obligations. It is a duty to refrain from every form of extravagance. By this I do not mean to imply that people should suddenly stop buying, but only that they should stop buying things that they do not need or that they can get along without. For how, pray, are we to place some seven billion dollars of purchasing power at the disposal of the Government unless we curtail our individual expenditures? And it is the duty of our merchants and business men to promptly cease their gloomy prophecies that an era of national economy will bring on a paralysis of trade and industry. As a matter of fact, it will do nothing of the sort. There is far more danger of there being a lack of workers than there is of there being a lack of work. Already there is more work in sight than can possibly be done. The shipyards, the steel-mills, the clothing-factories, the munitions plants, the mines, the farms, the railways are all clamoring for it, and they will clamor for labor still more insistently when a million or so men have been taken out of industry for the army. It is a duty to keep cool, to think sanely, to avoid hysteria. It is a duty to refrain from giving circulation to sensational rumors. It is a duty to refrain from nagging the Government, for the Government is, you may be sure, doing the best it can. And finally, it is a duty to buy your country’s bonds. Buy all you can. Take that ten or hundred or thousand dollars that you have been saving for some cherished personal purpose and invest it in the Liberty Loan. That is the most practical way I know of showing that your patriotism is not confined to words.