counting. The pent-up discontent of years of silent suffering will break forth. with a violence which has not been seen in the British Isles for many a century.

It is not a question of a more or less ineffectual king or a cabinet which was incapable of doing its full duty. There is more than that. People will have to decide this time about the future of their own race. Will it develop as it has done hitherto as a combination of two separated classes, or will it give to all men the chance of developing their own powers to the best of their ability in the most favorable circumstances for all? The men who will come out of the trenches will have their answer ready. No one who has seen anything of this war can doubt for a moment what this answer will be. After the war the laboring world of England will come forward with an ultimatum of no indefinite purport. Their demands will be backed up by the violence which has been taught to those men for the purpose of beating their German enemies. doubt the England of the pretty Christmas cards will be a little less picturesque and not so comfortable as it was before. But there will be a great house-cleaning. That cellar, that horrible and unspeakable cellar of which I have already spoken, will be filled up with the debris of the war, and in this way an evil thing may yet work for the good of us all.

No

Thus far I have mentioned the influence of the war upon the men of the race. It will affect the position of women to an even greater degree. The war is the strongest and most effective ally of those who strive for an improvement in the fate of women. When I speak of women, please do not think of those happy creatures who can spend thirty-five cents to read this magazine. Think of the millions who are obliged to feed and wash and clothe a family on this same amount. Think of the women in the greater part of Europe who pull their husband's plow together with his ox, who carry his bundles and bear his children and wash and cook and clothe and wait upon his entire

family without receiving the wages or treatment of a servant. Try to imagine what the war means to these unfortunate creatures. For the first time in their dreary lives they have known what it was to be their own masters. They have tasted of liberty. Their lord and master has gone and has left them to manage for themselves. In many instances they discover that they can handle affairs much better than their men, who used to treat them as domestic animals, little less valuable than a good cow. Visit the central part of Europe, countries like Hungary and East Prussia, and you will find that a new spirit has descended upon these strong and healthy beings who thus far were accounted of no value except as propagators of the race and busy workers in their master's vineyard. Ask the wives of the men who spend their lives in the drudgery of some industrial center whether they have not had visions of a new world now that they have some time in which to breathe and to be masters of their own minds and bodies. Through this horrible cataclysm they will have gained what centuries of peaceful pleading could not have given to them.

The old order of things is going. As a matter of fact, it has gone. It went out of existence when the ancient régime of predatory politics made its last great attempt at world supremacy.

The guns that battered the forts at Liège did not only demolish a certain quantity of cement and steel. They destroyed the roof of the fine structure of which I told you at the beginning of my little story. The shell went clear through the building. It blew a hole into the cellar that let in the daylight and fresh air and gave my cave-dwellers a chance to escape. You may dislike the author of these pages for prophesying a state of affairs which will mean the destruction of that charming world with which we and our ancestors have grown up; but this is the way in which we see the future of events on this morning of the fourth of November of the year of disaster 1915.

T times in my five months at the front

of so much young life; and most I have wondered about the Belgians. I had seen their first army wiped out; there came a time when I no longer met the faces I had learned to know at Termonde and Antwerp and Alost. A new army of boys has dug itself in at the Yser, and the same wastage by gun-fire and disease is at work on them. One wonders with the Belgians if the price they pay for honor is not too high. There is a sadness in the eyes of Belgian boy soldiers that is not easy to face. Are we quite worthy of their sacrifice? Why should the son of Ysaye die for me? Are you, comfortable reader, altogether sure that Pierre Depage and

André Simont are called on to spill their blood for your good name?

Then one turns with relief to the Fusiliers Marins-the sailors with a rifle. Here are young men at play. They know they are the incomparable soldiers. The guns have been on them for fifteen months, but they remain unbroken. Twice in the year, if they had yielded, this would have been a short war. But that is only saying that if Brittany had a different breed of men the world and its future would contain less hope. They carry the fine liquor of France, and something of their own added for bouquet. They are happy soldiers-happy in their brief life, with its flash of daring, and happy in their death. It is still sweet to die for one's coun

try, and that at no far-flung outpost over the seas and sands, but just at the home border. As we carried our wounded sailors down from Nieuport to the great hospital of Zuydcoote on the Dunkirk highway, there is a sign-board, a bridge, and a custom-house that mark the point where we pass from Belgium into France. We drove our ambulance with the rear curtain raised, so that the wounded men, lying on the stretchers, could be cheered by the flow of scenery. Sometimes, as we crossed that border-line, one of the men I would pick it up with his eye, and would say to his comrade: "France! Now we are in France, the beautiful country."

"What do you mean?" I asked one lad, who had brightened visibly.

"The other countries," he said, "are flat and dirty. The people are of mixed races. France is not so."

It has been my fortune to watch the sailors at work from the start of the war. I was in Ghent when they came there, late, to a hopeless situation. Here were youngsters scooped up from the decks, untrained in trenches, and rushed to the front; but the sea-daring was on them, and they knew obedience and the hazards.

They helped to cover the retreat of the Belgians and save that army from annihilation by banging away at the German mass at Melle. Man after man developed a fatalism of war, and expressed it to us.

"Nothing can hit you till your time," was often their way of saying it; "it's no use dodging or being afraid. You won't be hit till your shell comes." And another favorite belief of theirs that brought them cheer was this: "The shell that will kill you you won't hear coming. So you 'll never know."

These sailor lads thrive on lost causes, and it was at Ghent they won from the Germans their nickname of "Les demoiselles au pompon rouge." The saucy French of that has a touch beyond any English rendering of "the girls with the red pompon." "Les demoiselles au pompon rouge" paints their picture at one stroke, for they thrust out the face of a youngster from under a rakish blue sailor hat, crowned with a fluffy red button, like a blue flower with a red bloom at its heart. I rarely saw an aging marin. There are no seasoned troops so boyish. I came to know their youthful throats. They wear open dickies, which expose the