It is too subtle for that! A supreme effort, even a supreme agony, may have more real living worth than years of "normal" existence. The youths whose graves now dot so plentifully the pleasant fields of France have drunk deeper than we can fathom of the mystery of life. As for the nation, that greater mother for whose existence they have given their individual lives, there is even less question of the benefit of this war. We Americans are fond of measuring loss and gain in figures: we reckon up the huge war debts, the toll of killed and wounded, and against this heavy account we set down--nothing. It is all dead loss. Yet even to-day, in the crisis of their struggle, there is not a Frenchman who will not admit the immense good that has already come to his people, that will come increasingly out of the bloody sacrifice. The war has united all individuals, swept aside the trivial and the base, revealed the nation to itself. The French have discovered within their souls and shown before the world qualities, unsuspected or forgotten, of chivalry, steadfastness, seriousness, and they have renewed their familiar virtues of bravery and good humor and intelligence. The French soldier, the French citizen, and the French woman are to-day marvelously moulded in the heroic type of their best tradition: in the full sense of the word they are gallant--chivalrous, self-forgetful, devoted. Is there any price too great to pay for such a resurrection of human nobility? The pacifist is fain to babble of the "disciplines of peace." No one denies them. But how can humanity be compelled to embrace these disciplines of peace? The German lesson of thoroughness and social organization and responsibility was as necessary before the war as it is to-day, but neither England nor France, neither Russia nor our own America gave heed to it until the terrible menace of extermination in this war ground the lesson into their unwilling souls. It may be lamentable that humanity should still be held so firmly in the grip of biologic law that it must kill and be killed in order to save itself, but there are things worse than death. Until humanity learns the secret of self-discipline it will create diseases that can be eradicated only with the knife; it is merely blind to assume that the insanity of war can be prevented by any system of parliamenting, or litigation, or paper schemes of international arbitration. Some issues are of a primary importance, unarguable, fundamental. No man--and no nation--is worthy of life who is not ready to lay it down in their settlement. I know that some Americans are still unable to perceive that any such fundamental principle is at stake in Europe to-day. Extraordinary as it seems to me I hear intelligent men refer to the great war as if it were a local quarrel of no real consequence to us. Even the humblest _poilu_ in the trenches, the simplest working-woman in France, know that they are giving themselves not