"Rather set my jaws going!" retorts a fat boy, and the crowd laughs good-naturedly.

The steamer bumps gang-plank is run out. and adjust their clothes. Jack and I lead the way on to the dock, on the opposite side of which yawns the black hole in the side of the transport. The company files off one boat and directly on to the other, where each man is handed a slip with the number and location of his berth.

against the wharf and the

The men pick up their rifles

The system is perfect; the embarkation takes place almost in silence.

"Well, father!"

Jack has turned to me and, smiling and happy, lays his arm on my shoulder. The moment has come, then. What shall I say? There was so much of encouragement and affection that I had carefully planned to put into my parting speech-how we were all so proud of him and would think of him every moment until his return; how, of course, he would returnthe war certainly would be over soon; and how we knew he'd do his duty; and so on.

How fatuous it would all sound! He knows everything I want to say-perfectly well. There is nothing to make a fuss about. Yet I can't let him go like that -just like that-without saying anything! While I hesitate, a private hurries up and, first saluting him, touches Jack upon the arm.

Capt. Stanton, the colonel wants you!"

All right!" answers Jack. He bends over quickly and touches his lips to my cheek.

"Good-by!" he exclaims cheerfully. "Kiss mother for me and Margery!"

Good-by, Jack! I hope-never mind! Good-by, old fellow!-Oh, Jack

But he has gone.

The last company marches aboard and the slidingdoor is pulled to. The smoke is coming even thicker now from the transport's funnels, and there is a white froth rising from beneath her stern. Silently the hawsers are slipped. Over behind the city's castellated sky-line there is a yellow glow, and the water of the river is tinted with purple. A cold wind creeps round my ankles. It is chilly after the warm pilot-house.

Slowly the great leviathan separates herself from the wharf and backs away, out into midstream. Not a light is visible. Not a man is above deck. She looks like an interned empty German liner whose mooring is being shifted. Yet inside her black hulk ten thousand of the youth of America are starting on their great crusade for the maintenance of humanity—that freedom shall not perish from the earth.

VII

WHY JACK HAS GONE

"So speak ye, and so do, as they that shall be judged by the law of liberty. For he shall have judgment without mercy that hath showed no mercy James ii: 12, 13.

Why have I sent my son across the seas to fight? Two years ago, on the Sunday following the torpedoing of the Lusitania, a party of sixteen people was assembled at luncheon in the Long Island country house of a distinguished New York lawyer. Inevitably the sole topic of conversation was the attitude the United States should adopt toward the German Government, which had thus wantonly murdered so many helpless American men, women, and children. Of those present several were jurists of wide reputation or persons of more than ordinary intelligence and standing in the community. After a lengthy, general discussion of that barbaric act, I remember saying that I wished that our government would immediately declare war upon Germany or, at least, sever diplomatic relations pending what reparation was possible and adequate guarantees that such methods of warfare should be discontinued. To my surprise there was little echo

to these sentiments, and upon my asking our host to submit the question to a vote of those at the table, only one other man and his wife agreed with me and mine.

Our friend smiled tolerantly.

"How could war prove anything but an inconceivable disaster!" he remarked, as he pushed back his chair. "It must be the last-and only the lastresort."

That already seems a lifetime ago. My friend, as he readily admits, neither knew what he knows now nor conceived it to be possible. Had he done so he would have been then, as I was, for war. To-day that same middle-aged lawyer-that conservative standpatter is touring the country stimulating by his eloquence hundreds, if not thousands, to enlist. He is for the war-to a finish. For peace only with victory. I do not say that my friend is a different man, but he is an outraged one. He exercises still the discriminating processes of mind that have made him a leader of the bar, and which enabled him to weigh more or less calmly the specious arguments advanced by Germany for her ruthless undersea warfare. The mental habits of a lifetime rendered him incapable of adopting any other attitude toward Germany than that which he would have maintained toward a fellow practitioner in a court of justice-that of courteous consideration. He was accustomed to give every devil

his due. He assumed that even if the German General Staff were, as matter of law, guilty of piracy or murder, their guilt was due to a mistake in, or at least a colorable construction of, the law upon their part-that they had, as we would have expressed it, some sort of “a case."

Then suddenly he discovered that he had made an almost incredible mistake. He awoke to the fact that the blows of his opponent were not accidentally but intentionally below the belt, that his adversary was not a misguided gentleman but a cold-blooded and heartless liar, thief, and murderer. In a word, the earthquake has jarred my friend into a realization of the significance of the present struggle, much as it did the English, after they had for a year or so treated the Germans like "good sports." For we now perceive that this war could not have been averted, that it was inevitable, and had circumstances been such that we could have gone into it at the time of the Lusitania incident, peace with victory might be ours by now-not merely an optimistic confidence that the United States is too populous and too rich and too generally lucky not eventually to win. Yet we are to-day as a nation almost as hazy over what we are up against as my technical lawyer friends were two years ago, when they pondered so solemnly Germany's camouflage about international law.

For while technically the violating of our rights