The charge that we had lost our soul, or, at least, had mislaid it, rests on two facts. One is that we are prosperous. That fatal alliteration of poverty and piety has a fearful hold upon the soul of the prophet. The other is that we did not go to the rescue of Belgium when it was invaded. But Mr. Roosevelt himself did not realize that we ought to have gone to the rescue of Belgium, till March, 1916. He is on record in September, 1914, as satisfied with the course of the Administration, and convinced that we should not have entered the war when our own interests were not touched. And it ought to be forgiven a statesman, if he is very reluctant to plunge his country into war, and declines to put his Government in the position of a knight errant, wandering around the world in search of maidens to be delivered from donjons. And furthermore, as the Monroe Doctrine is the corner stone of our foreign policy, we were properly slow about intruding into a European quarrel, until it became unmistakable that it was much more than a European quarrel--that it was an attack upon civilization and popular Government. We were also justified in assuming that Great Britain, France and Russia, three of the five guarantors of Belgian neutrality, were capable of punishing the two guarantors who violated their pledge, several times renewed by Germany, even up to the day before Germany invaded the country it had pledged its honor to protect. But our soul, whether it was lost or not, is now in our possession. Let us be thankful that the prophets recognize that encouraging fact. And if our mind is also in our possession, we may look forward to a world not entirely different from the one we have known, but unquestionably less likely to play with firearms, and quite certainly one in which the common people will have much greater control of their political destinies, and one in which no War Lord, with chatter about shining swords and shining armor and mailed fists, will be able to hurl his nation against the others in a desperate effort to establish for himself an overlordship of the world. Nor will any nation ever be likely to rhapsodize over carnage, and feed its sordid soul with thoughts of the territories and indemnities to be got by war, or intoxicate itself with the delusion that it is a race of supermen charged by the Almighty with the duty of forcing its harsh language and its brutal habits upon all other nations. MY FRIEND THE JAY