he is. I put you first, George, and then Geraldine, and then Janet.

And, George, do you know about Janet? It looks like Dave McFadden has really straightened up! What do you know about that? Janet thought she'd have to go to work, but now she's going to keep on at school. You know Janet's just crazy about school. She wants to go through high school and be a teacher. I want to go through high school too, but I don't want to be a teacher. I think a girl ought to go through high school-don't you, George? because if ever she has any children of her own she wouldn't want them to grow up and think their mother was an ignorant old thing. And besides, if she hasn't got a good education herself, how can she teach her children? Really and truly, George, you know a good mother has to be a teacher. Did you ever think of that before?

George, I don't suppose I'll ever marry, but if I was to marry, do you know the kind of man I'd pick out? I'd take a farmer every time. I just love the country, George, and I just love the kind of work a farmer's wife has to do. You ask your mother if I don't. There wasn't a thing that Mrs. Riley did last summer that she didn't teach me, and she told me herself I was awful quick about learning.

My, my, George! did you ever think how fast time flies? Here I'm thirteen and it won't be any time before I'm eighteen. When I'm eighteen I'll be grown up and getting ready to graduate from high school. Will you promise to come down and see the graduation? I'd rather have you come than any one else in the world. Let's see how old you'll be then. You'll be twentyfour. That's not so awful old. Maybe you won't even be married. Lots of men nowadays don't get married until they're thirty. But I think you ought to get married by the time you're twenty-five. And you ought to get a wife that would love

your mother and would be willing to take some of the work off her shoulders. That's why I say to you that you ought to pick out a girl that likes the country and isn't afraid of work. And you ought to take a girl that's gone through high school, too, because it's a mistake for a man to marry an ignorant woman that he'd be ashamed of.

George, I can't tell you how much I miss you. I miss you every day. We always had such good times together, didn't we? Do you remember all the times you took me to the movies and for street-car rides and things like that? I remember every one of them. And whenever I was bothered about anything, you were always so kind to me. Other people are kind to me, too. Danny Agin is. I love Danny, but I love you first.

George, I don't think I could get on without you if I didn't have Geraldine. Seems like I just got to have some one to love. When I get real lonely for you, I take Geraldine and give her a good scrubbing, and then dress her up and take her out for a walk.

George, I don't know when I'll see you again, but listen here, George; I want you to remember one thing: It won't make any difference how long it is, because I'll love you just exactly the same.

And, George, I love your mother too, and she told me that she loved me. Will you tell her that I hope she's well and that I'll never forget how kind she was to me and Geraldine last summer. And I hope your father's well, too.

Terry says to say hello to you. And he says, how's farming? Jackie's getting awful big and he's real smart in school. He always gets a hundred in problems.

Ma and Dad are well, and I told you about Janet. So that's all now. With love, Very truly yours,

ROSIE O'BRIEN.

ETC.

W

HEN the telegraph summoned me from Monterey I was listening to a Constitutionalist officer declaring that the only way to establish peace in Mexico was to kill off all the Huertistas. In the instinct of another civilization I shuddered and thought, in palliation: "He does not know any better. He has been brought up on that idea. He has a long road to travel before he attains to that other civilization." The telegraph broke in with word of what was happening in that other civilization, Europe, where Germans were thinking that the only way to keep peace was to kill Frenchmen, and Austrians that the only way to keep peace was to kill Serbs.

Every night on the sleeper hurrying from Mexico I thought that I should awake to find that the headlines of the evening editions were a nightmare. As I write this on the eve of sailing toward that curtain of censorship which screens the action, I still have the same feeling-the demand, as primitive as war itself, for some miracle to avert war. Who should know the meaning and the immensity of that conflict if not one who has seen others--others which, whether Balkan

or Russo-Japanese, seem relatively only brawls?

Oom Paul Kruger said that the Boers would stagger humanity. Stagger! What a miserably inadequate word it is now! One dismisses all adjectives over-used for smaller wars which seemed terrific in their time. The last great European war, the FrancoPrussian, was fought over forty years ago. Its criterions are as antiquated as those of our Civil War. Then only two nations were engaged; now it is all the Powers of the Continent except Italy. Perhaps we shall not even refer to this war in the future as the Great European War or even the Great War. Perhaps simply as the War-the one overwhelming war of the world-which set its results so deep in the minds of all the world's people that it was a turning-point in human history.

It is something to be living and thinking in this moment which forms an epoch for Christian civilization approached by only one other. For once the familiar Napoleonic comparison is not stretched. People who lived at the beginning of the nineteenth century could little have guessed what the end of that century would bring. Those living

at the beginning of this century, could they survive, might see an equally astounding change at its end.

At the close of the eighteenth century a revolution in America and then the French Revolution and then Napoleon. He was the instrument which stirred the dust of European kingdoms into molten chaos. An instrument, he passed on. But he had left a Europe whose masses were untutored and subservient, with a fire in their veins which wrought the Europe of to-day, with all the change of symbols from stage-coach to aeroplane.

The French called him simply "the man.' But to-day we think of no man in connection with this conflict, unless it be the Kaiser, and not of him in the same way as of Napoleon. We think of mankind and of the war. Napoleon never fought a battle with more than a hundred and fifty thousand men under his command; less than little Servia has. If he came to life he would see a France with a population little larger than in his time putting in the field five times the total that he ever had under arms, better drilled and better disciplined. He would see in all those nations which he overran every adult man under forty in arms; all the virile force of all populations come to service with a speed of mobilization in this swift and organized age that would make him dizzy. He would see France, a republic by the will of her citizens, putting every energy of life and industry into the crucible with a unanimity which all the glamour of his name, his cunning, and the force of his will could not command.

It is the masses of men, the masses by the millions being hurled at one another, which make the war seem like some infernal dream devised by the imps of hell sitting in an eternity of inventive council. Is it really here, that cataclysm which many thought would never come; that cataclysm which has been the object of speculation in every officers' mess, while lieutenants rose to gray-bearded generals without its seeming nearer? Yes, there might be war between two of the great land Powers, I have heard it admitted in these discussions, but not a general European war. But I recall the remark of a German officer:

"Yes, we shall all or none be in it," he said. "We must. It will come when any one nation sets out to take some of another's territory. To touch one brick means that all will fall."

And Austria attacked Servia; and the balance of high power, kept level by the nice. distribution of diplomatic pennyweights, toppled into chaos. Now victory is to brute force.

To one who has seen the Japanese masses move in at Liau-Yang or Mukden, who has followed the life of many armies in comradeship, the curtain drawn by censorship rises on a picture of vivid reality. The map of Europe becomes so many sections divided by lines of white posts which have stood unchanged in their positions since the Germans, from Paris, dictated their terms of peace to the French. From the chief of staff office of each country proceed orders as explicit as from the head of some great business office. All the drilling, the training from awkward squads to maneuvers, all the preparations through the years of peace for this hour have come to the test. There is only one authority, that of the army's head. The pawns of its business, the product of its factory, are men in arms.

FOOD FOR CANNON

Cut the

From the moment that mobilization began each life became simply one atomic unit of the mass in the combinations of generals sitting at the heart of the spider's web of wires which, yesterday carrying messages of family and business affairs, are to-day carrying only the army commands. wires' ends at the frontier and the nation which yesterday exchanged thoughts with the world is immured behind walls of bayonets which keep information from either going or coming. Men were in appointed readiness to cut the wires and in appointed readiness to perform every detail planned, the instant the staff released its orders.

All locomotives are moving toward the white posts with their packed human freight or moving away from it empty for more cannon food. There in front of the white posts the skirmishers form, and behind them the hosts in their plain, businesslike uniforms with their heavy packs-such numerous hosts that men have never seemed so cheap. Yet never were men so dear. They are the last word in filling human tissue according to military system into a mold for a set task.

The nature of the packs, their shoes, their racial psychology, every human and

mechanical detail, have been studied in the years of peace to the end of efficiency when they shall cross a frontier or receive the shock of another host that attempts to cross it. Over their heads are the aeroplanes and dirigibles, and behind them the guns which will support their charges or cover their retreats; making a compact, death-dealing compact, death-dealing whole which includes all that science can do -even through the doctors who heal the wounds that are dealt.

More intelligent these men than Napoleon's or von Moltke's, belonging to a generation of universal education and wide distribution of intelligence. They are going in without battle-flags, without the flash of swords, without shouts of command, these marionettes of drills and maneuvers, who know by a glance of the eye the gestured fire-control signal which their officers give. Beside the butcher's son is the banker's son. All classes must serve in the conscript continental armies. The rich man's son may not send a substitute; he goes from the careful attention of his butler and his valet to his pack and pannikin, keeping step with a day laborer. A precious young Reginald Vanderbilt, who had such an uncomfortable time as a refugee on a Channel steamer, might be lying under the stars, dirty, sweaty, blood-stained, shivering, waiting for a night attack and glad for a drink from his stable-boy's canteen.

There is justice in this and there is a great democracy in it. Keep it in mind for future reference. Keep in mind that all the able-bodied men of these lands are going to know war as any one who has been in a railroad wreck knows a railroad wreck.

Each one, whether Slav or German or Frenchman, is fighting for his race, his language, and the God of his fathers. He is a newspaper-reading, thinking unit, though he seems but one of a myriad marionettes. He is going to war, after feeling the weight of armament taxes, because the word comes to his race that the hour of test has come.

And the order comes which releases a spring in the nerve-centers of the skirmish

thing of hazard, of horror, of calculated risks; that thing of quick action and longenduring consequences has come.

Now the hospital corps has work to do, for some of the marionettes lie still or are busy with their first-aid bandages.

If the invasion proceeds it approaches to the line of fortresses, of tier on tier of works manned with every power of resistance known to science. Against these the masses must throw themselves in human waves to gain critical positions, and facing them are men who know that to yield means to yield the press of the very thing in them which makes a man a Frenchman or a Serb.

"Better die than that! Better die than that those civilized men gone savage in desire of conquest become your masters!"

AFTERWARD-WHAT?

War, twentieth-century war, war in the nth degree, war waged with all the intelligence and all the weapons of destruction that civilization can command! There will be too many heroes to be heralded under a censorship; heroes as thick as bush-league ball-players; heroes of the air, of charges into redoubts, and last stands in redoubts; thousands upon thousands of heroes out of the millions. For when their hearts are in their work-an important point, that -the courage of old in smoke-powderpitched-battle charges will pale beside this. of our twentieth-century high-strung men against rapid-firers and in slow approaches.

We shall see the plummet sunk into human emotions as it has not been for a hundred years; we shall learn whether or not man has invented such terrible weapons that he may not longer submit his tender flesh to their attack; we shall see what war is when all the power of civilization is given over to its havoc; we shall see the courage of peoples uplifting them above the fear of death and the strain of hardships in such sacrifices as only war can produce.

And the end? The end, when this vast soldiery, worn and spent, think over their experience? They can not be the same men. Europe can not be the same Europe. Civilization can not be the same. The world must awake to some new era-an era for which this was the price paid. And your sympathy goes out to each nation in its efforts to keep that which it holds dearthat which is its own.