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our boys instead of becoming coal "barons," steel "kings," or "knights of industry," will be knighted upon the battle-field with the accolade of valor and self-sacrifice.

The day of the gold-plate-rock-crystal-duck-andchampagne dinner is over for a long time to come. We are entering upon an era of social sanity, where display and extravagance will be viewed with disapproval.

The thought of the lavishness of only a year or two ago now fills one with disgust, and even to write of terrapin and Chambertin when the dead bodies of one's fellow beings are rotting in the mud in front of German trenches in Flanders seems trivial and heartless. But it has taken the horror of this frightful carnage to bring people to their senses. Perhaps nothing less would have jarred the self-complacent and comfortable rich into seeing things in their true light. If it has done naught else it has brought about a worldwide readjustment of values. Socialism might have eventually accomplished the same result, but it would have achieved it only after a bitter struggle between classes. We might have had another French Revolution. Now people are doing voluntarily what only the equivalent of the guillotine or the terror of the mob might have forced upon them. Strange that only the red-foamed mares of war, blindness, pestilence, and death, could induce people to live as their own

mental and physical well-being require that they should. For it has not been common sense or economics that has led people to shorten their dinners— it has been the horror of the trenches, the suffering of the wounded in the hospitals, and the cries of the famished children of Belgium. Whatever the reason, let us hope that after the war there will be simply for their own sakes no reversion on the part of the wealthy to their former wastefulness. Let us hope that what the horror of the conflict has led them to abandon they may discard permanently because of the realization that it is a better way to live.

A striking change has taken place in the entire outlook of those who have been heretofore referred to as society women. Hundreds of the ones who up to our entry into the war played bridge morning, afternoon, and night, seemingly with an utter disregard for the responsibilities of life, or spent their time lunching, going to the theatre and opera, or at their milliners and jewellers, have stopped short in their mad race for gayety and excitement, and to-day roll bandages at the same tables where yesterday they played double dummy. The money they threw away gambling at cards they now give to the Red Cross. At the summer resort of Bar Harbor alone four hundred thousand dressings were turned out in the three months of July, August, and September, 1917. At the very moment when the city-bred American women seemed at the lowest

ebb of extravagance, idleness, and self-indulgence, when metropolitan life seemed rotten with the gangrene of materialism and luxury, the shudder of the guns along the western front ran down their spines and roused them to the consciousness that it was up to them to do something. And they have done it done it as faithfully and perseveringly as their less wealthy sisters. Where they seemed quite mad before they have now become quite sane, and they have taken off their gloves and set to work with a will. Instead of the foolish chatter one has been compelled to listen to in the past, one begins to hear something resembling at least intelligent conversation. They are acutely interested in what is going on in Rome, London, Paris, and Salonika. Women who used to vie with one another in the display of dress and jewels, have put their pearls in the safe. But, most remarkable of all, where they have idled before they now with one accord pass busy days working with their hands.

I believe that the tremendous change in morale observable at the present time in the fashionable woman followed her reassumption of physical effort. Life had become so easy for her that just as she no longer had to use her body she no longer used her mind. She had almost lost the creative instinct. Now that she has begun to use her hands she has started to use her mind again. She has rediscovered the joy of doing, the thrill of physical achievement. She no longer feels

obliged to ring for her maid to perform the trifling service which she can just as well do for herself. And apart from the mere pleasure to be obtained from physical occupation she has learned anew-if, indeed, she had ever learned it before-the joy of service and of sharing with others.

"It is a very wholesome and regenerating change," says President Wilson, "which a man undergoes when he 'comes to himself.' It is not only after periods of recklessness or infatuation, when he has played the spendthrift or the fool, that man comes to himself. He comes to himself after experiences of which he alone may be aware; when he has left off being wholly preoccupied with his own powers and interests, and with every petty plan that centres in himself; when he has cleared his eyes to see the world as it is, and his own true place and function in it."

It has seemed to me, since my return to America after my long absence of nearly a year, that the President's words are as apt when applied to a nation as to a man, and that at a time when his concern was with individuals rather than with peoples he may have unconsciously been prophesying the change that was later to take place in the nation of which he was to become the head.

That there has been such a change-a startling and radical one-in the American people is indubitable, and it is no less certain that the war has brought this

change about. What one bond-broker has observed of this alteration in the life about him, for what it may be worth of encouragement or of warning to his fellow Americans, it has been my purpose-the purpose of John Stanton of Pine Street, New York City-to record. What is there in fact on the credit side of our spiritual balance-sheet? In the old phrase, let us take a brief account of stock.

It sounds banal, now, to talk about the national conscience. Yet at the time of the sinking of the Lusitania I frankly believe that we had ceased to have any. Our grandiose conception of America was of a country too large in territory and enterprise to have any unity in its opinions or policies. That was how the Kaiser thought of us—unless, indeed, he regarded our public opinion as potentially German, which— shades of Dr. Dernberg!-is possible.

We were rather complacently accustomed to point out that, of course, there were so many different types of nationalities constituting the American people that we had no strictly national aims or ambitions except to be left alone-no principles except the particular form of "liberty" which we enjoyed-no doctrines to uphold except the moribund doctrine of Monroe. Indeed, some people went so far, only four or five years ago, as to prophesy more or less publicly that a nation which had so many local interests and prejudices could not permanently remain intact; that the West feared

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