For many reasons therefore she had visualized America as a land in which all nationalities understood each other with a resulting friendliness which was not possible in Europe, not because the people still living in Europe were different from those who had gone to America, but because the latter, having emigrated, had a chance to express their natural good-will for everybody. The nations at war in Europe suggested to her simple mind the long past days of her grandmother’s youth when a Protestant threw stones at a Catholic just because he was “different.” The religious liberty in America was evidently confused in her mind with this other liberalism in regard to national differences. Holding this conception of actual internationalism as it had been evolved among simple people, crude and abortive though it was, she had been much more shocked by the fact that friendly Americans should make ammunition to be used for killing any human being than by the actual war itself, because the war was taking place in Europe, where it was still quite natural for a German to fight against a Frenchman or an Italian against an Austrian. Her son had been a Socialist and from the discussions he sometimes held with his comrades in her house, she had grown familiar with certain phrases which she had taken literally and in some curious fashion had solemnly come to believe were put into practice in her El Dorado of America. The arguments I had used so many times with her fellow-countrymen to justify America’s sale of ammunition, ponderously beginning with The Hague conventions of 1907, I found useless in the face of this idealistic version of America’s good-will. She was evidently one of those people whose affections go out to groups and impersonal causes quite as much as to individuals, thus often supplementing and enlarging harsh and narrow conditions of living. She certainly obtained a curiously personal comfort out of her idealization of America. Her conversation revealed what I had often vaguely felt before when men as well as women talked freely of the war, that her feelings had been hurt, that her very conception of human nature had received a sharp shock and set-back. To her the whole world and America in particular would henceforth seem less kind and her spirit would be less at home. She was tormented by that ever recurring question which perhaps can never be answered for any of us too confidently in the affirmative, “Is the Universe friendly?” The troubled anguish in her old eyes confirmed her statement that the thought of the multitude of men who were being killed all over the world oppressed her day and night. This old woman had remained faithful to the cause of moral unity and bore her humble testimony to one of the noblest and profoundest needs of the human spirit.