"You have been both tolerant and kind in your dealings with me. If this war had not come, I believe that gradually some of my ideas might have been adopted in Sabinsport; but the war came and, in spite of my fierce gestures and loud shouting, it swept over us. It threw me high and dry out of the current of human activities. As long as I refused, as I did, to go with my kind and take part in its agonies, it had no place for me. It took me two full years to discover this, to understand that my wishes and my ways were too puny for the times. "I would have left Sabinsport and probably been sulking with the few scattered egotists, who, like myself, think their individual wisdom greater than the mass wisdom, if it had not been for the one man in this community who, since the war began, has given his mind and strength to helping all men and women in this town to understand events, ideas, and aspirations as they unrolled. You all know this man. He does not think of himself as being a leader; but we all realize that it has been his wisdom and patience and suffering that has opened our eyes. There has been nobody in Sabinsport so humble, so ignorant, or, like myself, so selfish that he was not his friend and counselor. When I finally realized the hopelessness of my opposition, it was this man who showed me the vanity and the inhumanity of my position, and who urged me to use my little training and scholarship in trying to understand how this human tragedy came about and why there was to-day no finer or nobler thing than to take a man's part in it. For six months I have been following his advice. "I know now that this war came on the world because Germany willed it. It was necessary to her plans. It is no great trick to show from her own records why she wanted the war, why she believed she would win. Perhaps the most amazing thing about it is that while she has herself been telling us for forty years why she must have a war, we have not heeded. The few in France and in England that believed her were cried down as disturbers of the peace. As for us Americans, our stupidity has been beyond belief. There is scarcely a college or university in this country that has not its quota of men and women, educated in Germany, whose chief ambition has been to demonstrate the superiority of her scholarship and of her social system. It was her social machinery that captivated my imagination. Without ever having seen it in operation, without having any sense of its relation to her war machine, which she never hesitated to tell us was her main objective, I, like thousands of others in this country, accepted and lauded her. I swallowed her whole, because she insured her sick, her old, and her unemployed. All I knew about that I gathered from statistics and from observers who had seen in Germany only what they wanted to see.