I wish I could always remember these things. I have panicky times, when the sun dies for me, and my world goes black. But I am like the other mothers. I shall go through with it, and I would not have things otherwise. I would not have my son do other than he is doing. He is still in his ‘teens, but he is a man, and this is his country. I have not raised him to be a shirker. Only—this is a matter for everybody. It is not my war, or his, or the war of those other college boys who are always the first to go. Just as we all benefit by the country, so must we share—and share alike—its dangers. Unless it is your war, this is not a democracy. If, as in the past, we have allowed the few to do our political thinking for us, as even now in the churches the few earn for all of us the right to call this a Christian land, if in this war we allow the few to fight for us, then as a nation we have died and our ideals have died with us. Though we win, if all have not borne this burden alike, then do we lose. Sometimes, in these last troubled days, when every newsboy on the street under my window has been crying War, I cover my eyes and see that gallant little first army of England, springing to the call, and facing, without hope, the great trained German army. It was the best England had, and it is gone, almost to a man—because the mothers of England had not insisted that every man in the empire bear his share. What if now your boy and mine could be a part of a vast trained army? His chance would be better. Better? There would be no war. You and I, trembling for what may come, are paying the price of not having risen, an army of women, and demanded what now may come too late. Because we did not rise this situation confronts us. For this is what a volunteer army means in this country to-day. For every high-spirited lad like yours and mine who goes out to fight, there are a hundred, a thousand, men of fighting age and strength who will not go, men who have no country, but only a refuge from the oppression of Europe. Are we to suffer that they may live? Is this liberty of ours, this Land of the Free, without price? And will those hold it dear whom it has cost nothing? Yet, so great is my faith in this great nation, so sure am I that the principles on which it is built are enduring, that I believe all these things will be set right in time. The one thing that matters now is to do our part, to show to the world that America still believes that there is such a thing as honor, and such a word as right. For—and this I believe as I do in my country—we are to end this war. And that is the greatest privilege a nation of the world may have. We have sat by, through such horrors as have turned the world to blood. But now we can come in our strength, and mighty strength it will be. So rich we are! So strong! So young! And the enemy is old—jaded and crafty and old: as old as cruelty is old. We are young and tireless and unafraid.