That, after all, solves the riddle of my second paragraph. And if the soldier must subordinate his cause to his truth, how much more so the General and the King! The General has very little time to hate his enemy. He must know their strength, study their methods, adopt the best of their ideas, spy out the country, plan a campaign. He orders slaughter not for revenge or hatred, but for success. Therefore it is of supreme importance that his success be worth while. And the King, the man who selects the cause and fires men to battle. The nearer he comes to an assertion of infallibility the surer is the final defeat of his cause. If he will allow no room for change and growth, change and growth will sweep him aside. We need big men who will not enlist under colors, but are always pushing back the horizon of truth. Distrust the leader who has found the final answer to the riddle. Some day shall we not have a Messiah who shall begin by saying: "Do not found in my name any church, cult, or school. If a man question my message, listen to him closely and learn what truth he has. Always seek the new, the more perfect. Always grow out from the fixed. So shall you begin a race of Kings greater than I." Correspondence Miss Columbia: An Old-Fashioned Girl That the United States of America is young is a truism which needs no stating, and unfortunately its youth is hopelessly fettered in the strings of tradition. Ferrero says that aesthetic taste in America shows itself in bathrooms; and certainly in plumbing we do seem to have a taste above that of the rest of the world. In other things America fears originality and change far more even than England does. Miss Columbia is a bright girl, sitting in a schoolroom, with well-worn editions of the English classics on the book-shelves. Miss Columbia writes verses and stories following the most approved models; she succeeds rather well, but, after all, they are only school essays. It seems impossible for Americans to have the courage to admit that Life is as they see it. Hence the shallow and frivolous optimism which hangs like an obscuring fog over practically all our writing. It would be a convention were it not that we think we believe it; it would be a conviction only that we never look at it close enough to test it. The vogue, a year or two ago, of Mr. Robert Haven Schauffler's Scum o' the Earth is a case in point. It deals with the problem of immigration, not as it is, but as it might be if it were. The poem is imitative as art, and false as life, but it flatters an existing condition, and paints a sore to represent healthy flesh; wherefore America hails it with content. Americans are afraid of Life, in the Victorian manner. A Catholic said to me, some time ago: "Sex is dirty." This sacrilege is a thoroughly Victorian sentiment, but sex alone does not come under the ban; pain, squalor, and, above all, the fact that