Had America's ideal won all had been different, but only the side she joined won and not the ideal. France and England broke the spirit of America's great President and ruined him as the Kaiser was ruined, relegated him to another Amerongen, drove him to his Ekaterinburg too, the third great monarch and leader of men to lose his crown in the war. The American masses were left leaderless, bereft of their ideal. In contempt for a vain France and distrust of a lip-serving inimical England they plunged for "_America first and always and one hundred per cent_." But had Wilson carried his great program there had been no estrangement, no exhuming of the American dead. America would have gloried in her European shrines. Therefore in looking upon the collapsed heaps of coffins in the harbour and the dead glowering through riven wood, one is really looking upon an aspect of the Treaty of Versailles. In the second year after the war you see terrible things. Who could have foreseen thousands of dead stacked in the holds of Atlantic vessels, making their unmurmurous return across the ocean! It is night again in human history, deep night, when we dream things of evil and look upon sights of horror which we have no power to dispel. In the gathering gloom of the autumn of 1920 see a whole succession of phantoms stalking. Ireland goes wailing and clanking her chains. Exultant France struts and threatens. Ghosts of Tsar and Tsarina are crying pitifully from Siberian dust. Red demons, mirthless and terrible, stare at us from Russia. Italia stabs nightly fair Fiume. And all the while maledictory shouts and cries are heard on all hands. Spectres and ghosts and things of evil stalk around and terrify us, and there is only one way to lay them low, and that is by the token of the Cross--by the token of the crosses, the hundreds of thousands of them that run out like rows of pins in France. It is only coming from France that the right approach can be made to new life. Let each new man faring forth into this beset enchanted world dip his soul in the blood of the Altar of France--or if not his very soul, let him at least dip a kerchief or a flag there--for remembrance. With that charm he can uncurse curses and disenchant enchantment and break through the chimeras and fogs which cling to the base of the mountain of the world, and he will reach the singing-bird and the water of life at the top of the mountain, and then restore, as in the Arabian tale, the dead to life.