"Back against the shores of this island the British fleet will stand and hold, hold while America brings up the reserves of civilization. _They shall not pass! They shall not pass!_" What is this spirit? I found it everywhere. The very stones of France cried out with its voices; the shattered trees of the forest were the strings of a harp that sang with it; the eyes of the smallest child were filled with it; and aged men in the fields, and gray-haired women pushing carts through the streets of the cities, were monuments to it that cathedral-levelling shells could not destroy. As a troop-train pulled out of a great station in Paris late one afternoon, I saw a sight that will always remain with me as one of the most appealing and suggestive pictures of this war. Perhaps five hundred people were standing on the platform, saying a last good-by to their loved ones and friends bound for the hungry front. With hands outreaching and faces in the sun they stood in a great tableau of farewell as we drew slowly away. And as I looked into the profound depths of those faces, I was swept by a torrent of emotion that left me a changed man. They, and millions of others they represent, are the fathers and mothers, the sisters, wives, sweethearts, brothers, and friends of unnumbered and never-to-return young men. All have felt the agony of this war's separations and loss, have poured out their treasure and their blood. We cannot speak for them, we who only now begin to enter into their suffering. But we can speak for ourselves; we can deliver our own souls. We too have been in this war since 1914, but until a few months ago France and Britain fought our battles for us. As surely as the principles for which we now fight, and our American ideals and liberties, were governing facts with us four years ago, so surely the same misgoverned power that threatens them now threatened them then. The British fleet in the North Sea, the British Tommy in the trenches of Flanders, and the soldiers of France, have made the wall of iron and the dike of flesh and bone against the flood of autocracy and absolutism that otherwise would have broken through to ingulf Europe, America, and the world. The United States is forever in the debt of those who for unspeakable months held the lines against the day of her arrival. What we do, and all that we can do, will not be an unmerited investment from the standpoint of those peoples who, war-weary and impoverished, yet hold fast. As for ourselves, it is the price of our progress and of our very life.