What is the attitude of the American military authorities in France toward drink and vice? I find our leaders in France aggressively and successfully promoting the most comprehensive programme ever attempted by a nation at war to keep her soldiers physically competent and morally fit. An official of the British government, a man of many distinctions and high in political life, told me that the eyes of all the nations of Europe were upon the well-nigh revolutionary policies of General Pershing and his staff. The programme of the military leaders has been effectively supplemented by the Y. M. C. A., the Red Cross, and the Salvation Army. The Y. M. C. A. is responsible for a ministry that cannot be overvalued. With its huts, which range from the commodious double building in the great cities and in the large training-camps to the foul-smelling, dark dugouts at the front, with its canteens and hotels for officers and privates, with its music and its lectures, its classes in French and its Bible classes, with its athletic leadership and its rest-stations high among the quiet mountains, with its religious services and its personal interviews, it is meeting squarely the moral challenge of this stupendous occasion. It is the most potent hope of the church, and God's most fruitful agency, "for such a time as this." A captain of a company of colored stevedores told me that the Y. M. C. A. had increased the morale of his men one hundred per cent. As I have written these lines, I have had vividly before me a group of American soldiers. It is three o'clock in the morning, and they have just marched four miles through trenches, shell-obliterated or filled with mud and snow; they have been relieved from the first line. They are men from four companies of a battalion of a division occupying a permanent position on the western front. They have had the distinction of experiencing the first extensive gassing directed against American troops and of repelling the first general raid over an American front. Of one of the companies every commissioned officer has been killed or wounded in the fighting of twenty hours before; its captain, a gallant Southern lad, died on the parapet leading the successful counter-attack. They are covered with mud, dead for sleep, chilled to the bone, but uncomplaining. Some of them have fallen repeatedly on the way out, and their faces are as black as their boots. They lean against the counters and the tables of the Y. M. C. A. hut, and silently drink the red-hot tea and eat the cookies and crackers. These are the men who have given the first clear demonstration of the fighting superiority of American democracy over German autocracy. They have paid a great price; but, counting all the cost, they have found the expenditure justified. They are the very vanguard of the pathfinders of civilization; they are the knights of the twentieth century.