The day after the news came of her insolent announcement that she would resume her submarine warfare, a full column of the _Argus_ was given to a double-leaded, signed article. It was an article of vast importance in Sabinsport, for it put into words the feelings that were within her. It became her statement of the necessity that she should at last take part in the Great War. And it gave her, too, some sense of an issue far greater than the defense of rights. The article was headed "A Confession and a Good-by," and it began with a characteristically blunt statement: "As this is the last piece that the editor will write for the _Argus_ for a long time, he is going to drop the third person and use the first. That third person always was a cramping for him as a dress suit." The piece followed. "I have always tried to say to you as nearly as I could what I thought about any matter which it seemed to me I should discuss in this newspaper. I have often failed to say what was in my mind--sometimes because I attempted to write of things of which I did not know enough, sometimes because I was determined to force your attention to things in which you were not interested, and again because I was more interested in converting you to my ideas than in attending to my business, which was the expression of those ideas. But, whether I have failed or succeeded in saying what I undertook to say, I have tried to be frank, especially since the war began. "I don't think there is anybody who reads the _Argus_ who does not know how the war has affected me. I have tried to believe, and to persuade others to believe, that Sabinsport need not concern herself with the war. I tried to talk and act as if we could go on with our daily lives here as if it were not loose on the earth. I thought that was our duty--at least, I wanted to think that was our duty. My persistency has been due mainly to the program I had laid out for myself for this town. "I came to Sabinsport eight years ago with a plan for her regeneration. I do not know that a man should be ashamed of wanting to make a perfect community in this imperfect country, but I see now that a man should be ashamed of thinking that he can force regeneration on men. There is very little difference, except in the size of the field of action, between my attitude toward Sabinsport and that of the Kaiser towards the world. He had a plan for making what he thought would be a perfect world; I had a plan for making a perfect Sabinsport. And I have been in my way as narrow and as unreasonable as he.