In these days, therefore, immediately following the Great War it is well to keep in our own minds and try to put into the minds of others the great elemental truths of life; and to try at the same time to keep out of our and their minds in so far as possible the unessential and changing superficialities which never last long and which never move forward the civilization of the human race. This very simple biographical sketch is not an attempt to settle the problems of the hour. Such an attempt might excite the amusement and interest of students of that mental disease known as paranoia--students who are far too busy at the moment as it is without this addition to the unusually large supply of patients--but it could not add anything either to the pleasure or entertainment of any one else. That the simple biographical sketch can even approach the latter {258} accomplishment may be held to be a matter for reasonable doubt. Nor, furthermore, is the sketch an attempt at the soap box or other variety of philosophy which one individual attempts to thrust down the mental throats of his fellow beings. There exists a hazy suspicion that the fellow beings are quite competent to decide what they will swallow mentally and what they will, vulgarly speaking, expectorate forthwith. The simple biographical sketch is a frank attempt to express, as at least one person sees it, the character, the accomplishments and the service rendered by one man to his country throughout a life which seems to have been singularly sturdy, honest, normal and consistent, and which, therefore, is an example to his countrymen that may in these somewhat hectic times well be considered and perhaps even emulated. At the risk, however, of entering the paranoiac's clinic it would seem almost necessary if not even desirable to apply the record discussed to the situation which confronts us in these days, since biography has no special significance unless it {259} brings to others some more or less effective stimulus to better and greater endeavor on their own part. If, therefore, the life and record of a man like Leonard Wood is to be of value to others it must to some extent at least be considered in relation to the events of his day and time. These events have been sufficiently startling in the light of all previous history to make it perhaps permissible to glance over them. Roughly speaking, since Wood was born transportation has become so perfected that, in the light of our navy's recent accomplishments with the seaplane, it is now possible for a human being to go from New York to London in the same period of time that it took then to go from New York to New London. It is fair to assume then that the distance of New York from London so far as human travel goes is or will shortly be the same as the distance of New York from New London when Wood was born.