It is not sad to leave her here, now when the whole earth seems one great family of the sorrowing, where the children and the grandchildren of many other folk are so near. May 20. Spring, with the thawing of the icicles, and the sunshine growing warmer on the southern wall of the house,--spring comes back in the old and lovely way to a world never in such anguish before. What an April, to bring the cowardly murder of soldiers in the trenches by volumes of poisonous gas! What a May, to bring the _Lusitania_ massacre of hundreds of innocent men, women, and children at sea! What a Germany, quite, quite mad: "O what a noble mind is here o'erthrown, The soldier's, scholar's----" but I am not quoting correctly and am too busy to look up the lines. I dare not even try to speak of my sense of these things; words are lacking to express it, but surely this marks the parting of the ways. To me it seems that the time has come for the nations of the earth--would that my own would join them--to band together once more in a holy crusade and do battle with the Pagan, not for the tomb of our Lord, but for the faith He taught. As time goes on, I see more clearly what the real England stands for. My mind works slowly, for I am but a practical American; it isn't as if I were a thinker like yourself, who could reason things out on purely intellectual grounds. The war between my great love of England and my indignant sense of things that are wrong gives way to something more impersonal, as I have more chance to see the way in which her customs serve humanity. Complete fulfillment of her great purposes has not yet been achieved, yet surely the human race has got no further: liberty for the individual, fair play,--these watchwords of England are the hope of the human race. What other land could rule many alien peoples and make them so proudly content? As England has kept faith with the past, she has, barring some great mistakes, kept faith with humanity. The recent magnificent bravery of the Canadians in the battles with flaming gas only intensifies the splendour of the voluntary tribute of England's colonies to England in distress. Earth has not seen the like of this empire resting on the will of man; from the four quarters of the globe, Canada, Australia, New Zealand, India, they come sailing swiftly home, counting it great gain to die for that for which she stands. It means that at the heart of England is something too precious to lose, a faith in the working possibility of human freedom. Crude races, races old and outworn, need to learn at her feet the practical way of making good this immemorial hope of the race. Under her rule, the individual has his chance of self-government; if he fails to take it, falling into the net of sloth and old habit as he often does in England, the fault is his own. His individual conscience is left him; he is not compelled to become a soulless cog in a gigantic conscienceless mechanism.