"Certainly. Let those who made profits out of the war laugh and forget that they were enriched by the world's agony--that they piled up wealth while brave young men were being mangled, smothered, drowned, shattered in the war. If they remembered such things they could not enjoy their profits. By all means make them laugh and take your wages for your hireling mirth. Make the laborers shut their eyes and open their mouths with laughter so that they cannot see the disasters towards which they are hurrying. Make the young laugh so that they will not realize the heritage that is being passed to them by the older generation whose pride, greed, and folly have come near to ruining the world." "The press dispatches say that all the capitals are mad with revelry. It is even said that tourists have been dancing on the battlefields." "Quite so. And do you know what it all looks like to me? It reminds me of the wakes that used to be held around the coffins of the newly dead. Humanity is now holding a hideous wake over a dead civilization." "So bad as that?" "Oh, it may not prove to be so very bad a thing. The sun is still shining. The forces that have produced all the good there ever has been in the world are still at work. It is just possible that in the new world at least the unrest and turmoil that have been troubling us are but the first movements of a change for which we have been preparing with words if not with actions." "I do not understand." "We have been calling the new world a crucible in which all nationalists have been thrown to produce the true American or the true Canadian. Have you ever watched a crucible and noticed what takes place in it?" "I once saw a copper crucible in British Columbia and a silver crucible in Massachusetts and iron crucibles here and there, but I never studied them carefully." "Well, the only crucible I ever saw was the little one, made by the blacksmith, that I used for running bullets when a boy. I used to get big wads of tea lead from the grocer and melt it in the little crucible. When the heat got to the lead it would sink down to a pool at the bottom. The top would be covered with gray scum and blazing scraps of paper. Then I would pour the bright, clean metal into the bullet moulds. When it was all poured there would be left behind the gray scum from the top and some slag at the bottom. And I am thinking that when the good metal of nationality is ready to be poured we will leave behind the scum of parasites at the top and the slag of agitators at the bottom." "That sounds good, but when will it happen?" "It may happen this year and it may not happen for a hundred years but of one thing I am sure, and that is that there is plenty of good metal in our crucible." Whereupon my private Mahatma knocked the ashes from his pipe and walked home across the fields through the glowing sunshine that he loved. CHAPTER XXI THE SOUL OF CANADA