Because England has been fighting our battle for two and a half years, we are now not only fighting our own battle, but trying to repay in part our immeasurable debt to the motherland. Great Britain has been the mother of many republics; all the harvest of our liberty came from seed corn gathered in England's harvest fields. Among Pilgrim Fathers who founded New England were men educated in Cambridge. We had our revolt against the autocracy of George the Third from the inspirations of Oliver Cromwell, John Pym and John Hampden. Boston owes a great debt to Sir Harry Vane, whose statue stands at the entrance of her Public Library. We borrowed our freedom of the press from John Milton's noble argument. Our Declaration and our Constitution are nothing other than the restatement, in legal form, of the noble visions that pursued the soul of John Milton all his life long. And now that England is steadily winning and gaining six battles and attacks out of seven, during the fourth year of the war, the time has come for the American people and government to ask themselves this question,--Shall we not do in the first year of our war the things that England did in the third year and the fourth?--thus assuring our winning six times out of seven. At the beginning of this war, Britain's ammunition was provided by three government factories and a few auxiliary firms. "The first 100,000 men," sneered at by the Kaiser as "Kitchener's contemptible little army," were pounded by fifty German shells for every one shell with which they could reply. Now England has over 5,000 factories turning out munitions. Her capacity for producing high explosives in October, 1917, was twenty-five times as great as in the autumn of 1915, while the expense is one-third. She is now producing 25,000 tons of projectiles every week, and each new arsenal factory is built with the thought of turning them over to productive industrial companies when the war is over. Her cannons are roaring upon every front in Europe, as well as in the Balkans, in Palestine, in Persia and in Africa. She now has 400,000 automobile trucks, or lorries, in France and Belgium, and will turn out 20,000 airplanes during the next year. Her fleet has increased from 136,000 sailors to 400,000; and at last, thanks to the deep-sea bomb, for every slow and old ship Germany sinks, she has to lose a far more costly submarine. To-day England has 4,000,000 men on six fronts and three continents. She has not simply mobilized her army, but mobilized the entire nation, and is only beginning to exert her full power.