Every life demands effort, no one is exempt from sorrow, very few are unacquainted with failure. Effort, sorrow, failure, are so many obstacles which bring out the extent of our merit. “In this life”--to quote President Roosevelt again--“we arrive at nothing without an effort. A healthy State can exist only if the men and women who compose it lead healthy, strong, clean lives; if the children be brought up in the right way, if they try to overcome difficulties, not to avoid them, if they do not seek comfort but know how to snatch triumph from pain and risk. Man must be happy to do man’s work, to dare and be adventurous and work to keep himself and those who depend on him. The wife must be the housekeeper, a companion to the founder of the home, a wise mother, who is not afraid of having many healthy children. In one of his powerful and melancholy books Daudet speaks of the ‘fear of maternity--the terror which haunts the young wife of the present day.’ When such words can be truly said about a nation, that nation is rotten to the core. When men fear work, or rightful war, when women fear maternity, they are trembling on the brink of damnation, and it would be a good thing if they vanished from the earth, where they are the just objects of scorn to all men and women who themselves are brave and high-souled.”[2] This is the condemnation of idle wealth and inertia. And if the head of the young American nation thinks it necessary to utter such words to stir up the wills of so vigorous a people, how much the more bitter must their application be to our weary France? Over there they scarcely strike at any but the frantic egoists, whose energies it is more easy to direct into the right channels than it is to galvanise into action our fear and cowardice. President Roosevelt has always made the distinction between material treasures and those moral treasures which give nations and individuals their vitality. In a letter to our Mistral, who had sent him a copy of “Mireille,” he explained this again with his usual clearness. “Industries and railways,” he wrote, “have their use up to a certain point, but courage and power of endurance, the love of our wives and children, the love of home and country, the love of the betrothed for one another, the love and imitation of heroism and sublime endeavors, the simple every-day virtues and the heroic ones,--these are the greatest virtues and if they are lacking, no accumulated wealth, no amount of ‘industrialism,’ however noisy and impressive, no feverish activity, under whatever form it may be shown, will be profitable either to the individual or to the nation. I am not despising the value of these things of the ‘body of the nation’; I merely desire that they should not make us forget that as well as a body there is also a soul.” IV