and what do the women say—the women who lose such men? thus do they decline to attend at the hague the peace congress of foolish women who have lost nobody:

"how would it be possible, in an hour like this, for us to meet women of the enemy's countries?... have they disavowed the ... crimes of their government? have they protested against the violation of belgium's neutrality? against offenses to the law of nations? against the crimes of their army and navy? if their voices had been raised it was too feebly for the echo of their protest to reach us across our violated and devastated territories...."

and one celebrated lady writes to a delegate at the hague:

"madam, are you really english?... i confess i understand better englishwomen who wish to fight.... to ask frenchwomen in such an hour to come and talk of arbitration and mediation and discourse of an armistice is to ask them to deny their nation.... all that frenchwomen could desire is to awake and acclaim in their children, their husbands and brothers, and in their very fathers, the conviction that defensive war is a thing so holy that all must be abandoned, forgotten, sacrificed, and death must be faced heroically to defend and save that which is most sacred ... our country.... it would be to deny my dead to look for anything beside that which is and ought to be!—if the god of right and justice, the enemy of the devil and of force and crazy pride, is the true god."

thus awakened and transfigured by calamity do men and women rise in their full spiritual nature, efface themselves, and utter sacred words. calamity, when the lusitania went down, wrung from the lips of an awakened german, kuno francke, this noble burst of patriotism:

ends europe so? then, in thy mercy, god,

out of the foundering planet's gruesome night

pluck thou my people's soul. from rage and craze

of the staled earth, o lift thou it aloft,

re-youthed, and through transfiguration cleansed;

so beaming shall it light the newer time,

and heavenly, on a world refreshed, unfold.

soul of my race, thou sinkest not to dust.

if germany's tragedy be, as i think, the deepest of all, the hope is that she, too, will be touched by the pentecost of calamity, and pluck her soul from prussia, to whom she gave it in 1870. thus shall the curse be lifted.