and in Japan and China, and in England and America, will not bow down to the power to crucify.

We have professing Christians among us to-day who say: "Let him now come down from the cross, and we will believe him and accept him. Let us have peace. Let us end this terrible bloodshed and suffering and expenditure of money."

ན་

Then there are others who say, "To go on is suicide. If this war goes on, none of us will have any property whatever. Think of the taxes already!"

Then there is the man who says, frankly, "We're beaten; why not admit it? Germany has the brains, she has the training, she now has resources, and Europe is at her mercy. I have thought all along that our part in this conflict was foolishness. I am a materialist, I believe that materialistic efficiency is more than a match for the moonshine of idealism. Don't throw money and life away for an idea. Accept facts.

Are you willing to sit down at a council table with those who have wrecked every precious and hard-won achievement of the human soul through the toil of thousands of years?

Are you willing to accept the dictates of diabolism to secure creature comfort?

Are you willing to accept the power to crucify as supreme? From such a one let us turn to the trenches and hear the glorious and inspiring and uplifting testimony of the tired, begrimed, wounded, battered, and dying, but not defeated, sons of men. "No man taketh our lives from us, but we lay them down of ourselves. We have power to lay down our lives, and we have power to take them again."

They have seen the spirit of evil and his works. They have met him, and they are absolutely certain of victory. They have found that the supreme power is not the power to crucify, but the power to be crucified, and to meet crucifixion with a cheer. In hoc signo vinces.

The other day there came a fateful telegram to a fond father whose boy had been among our first to volunteer as an aviator, in France.

As the scrap of yellow paper fell to the floor that father's uplifted eyes were filled with tears, but his whole countenance was illumined with joy as he triumphantly exclaimed: "He's won!"

"O happy boy, you have not lost your years!

You lived them through and through in those brief days
When you stood facing death! They are not lost!
They rushed together as the waters rush
From many sources; you had all in one.

"GOD AIN'T DEAD YET!"

The Happy Eremite invaded the domain of Maria, the cook, on his way to the cellar to attend to the furnace. Invading the kitchen with Maria in it was not the ordeal that it was under the government of despots less benevolent-Lena, the Finn, for instance, or Carrie, the Anarchist. For Maria was a colored lady from West Virginia, a relic of an age dead and gone, when the hired girl was a part of the family and loved every member of it, and when no man had yet frantically drawn the attention of his fellow-citizens to the fact that time is money. Time was neither money nor anything else to Maria. She had a way of rising at four or five or six in the morning and working until ten or eleven or twelve at night, taking her meals when she was hungry and sleeping when she was tired. She was generally tired at dish-washing time, and had a way of sitting down at the kitchen table and dropping to sleep for an hour or two, while the dishes waited and the Lady Eremite wrung her hands in despair. Time, it happened, was a word not in her lexicon. For the Lady Eremite, who had a prejudice in favor of prompt meals, this lack was a frequent source of sighing and helpless lifting of hands. She had to tell herself more often than she liked

that a kind heart, after all, was more than promptitude, a reflection of which the Happy Eremite reminded her at intervals when her efficiency as a housewife threatened to overwhelm her appreciation of Maria's qualities as a human being.

For the Happy Eremite liked Maria. She was a slight, agile person with a mouth that could have surrounded a popover without denting it anywhere. Her indifference to time, which had a way of gently wrecking the nice calculations of the Lady Eremite, had served her, on the other hand, to good effect in defying time's ravages. She never told how old she was, but it took no mathematical genius, adding the years she said she had been in this place and the years she had been in that, to calculate that she must be moving toward sixty. She might have been anything between forty and seventy.

The Happy Eremite had always found it rather pleasant, on the way to the furnace, to stop a minute for a friendly exchange of courtesies. Maria did not read the papers. Maria did not read anything. Maria did not know how to read. So the Happy Eremite always gave her the news, with a bit of banter thrown in. But on this particular evening he did not feel like quips and levity. The news from France was like a cold hand clutching his heart. "There's a terrible battle going on, Maria," he said, rather solemnly.

"Who's doin' it?"

"The Germans."

God ain't dead yet!" she snapped.

There was a curious mingling of rebuke and defiance in her voice-rebuke for the Happy Eremite, who had allowed his faith to waver, defiance toward the far-away enemy threatening her country.

The Happy Eremite looked at her and felt a little ashamed of himself for his exhibition of dismay.

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Right you are, Maria," he said, softly.

"Jest you believe it," she muttered, turning to the sink and talking more to herself than to him. "The trouble is when folks git scared they forget that God's alive."

The Happy Eremite proceeded to the furnace, threw on a shovelful of coal, opened the draught, and took to pacing up and down the cellar floor while he waited for the coal gas to burn off. He was trying to recall the words of a story he had loved as a boy. They that be with us are more than they that be with them," he murmured. "That's it. And then Elijah or

666

BY PIERRE

S regards the internments, they are nothing but wholesale massacre. Merely from the region occupied by Austria-Hungary more than 150,000 Serbian subjects (civilians only) have been interned, including several thousands of old men over sixty years of age, several thousand women, and even children from eight to fifteen years. . . . About thirty per cent have died up to the present of hunger and of cold. The sufferers devour the grass they find along the hedges, although this kind of food is strictly forbidden.

...

"Several Austro-Hungarian doctors attached to the camps declined to see more than ten patients a day, at a time when the death rate in the camps was from twenty to thirty a day. "The whole method of the Austrian administration is directed by the inexorable purpose of exterminating the last remnants of the Serbian people." (From the Memorandum to the Russo-Hollando-Scandinavian Committee of the Socialist Party at Stockholm.)

"This memorandum is not a work of hate. It is a cry of distress. ... What is needed is that at least the Socialists of the Central Empires should know and should act." (C. Huysmans, Secretary of the Socialist International Bureau.)

The Socialists of Germany have known these things for two years, and have done nothing. There was an easy opportunity for them of putting elementary human principles into practice, of coming to the rescue of a stricken group, without even being disloyal to their Kaiser. Relief work only was wanted. But German liberals do not put their principles into practice.

In the case of Armenia, they could claim that distance prevented them from interfering efficiently. But Serbia lies only a few hours from Vienna and Berlin, and the southern Slav race begins at Marburg and Klagenfurt, where the German ends. I consider that German liberals have shut their eyes because German interest demanded the annihilation of the Serbian race. Nobody is more opposed than I am to wholesale accusations based on local instances. Still, when performed on such a scale, atrocities become a historical factor, a lasting drawback to pacification. What understanding will be possible between the people of Germany and the Yugoslavs after these deeds?

The world war had its direct origin in the fact that AustriaHungary, decaying and old, wanted to inflict on Serbia a punishment for being young and prosperous. The example given by Serbian freedom and vitality was dangerous for the millions of southern Slavs incorporated by force in the Austro-Hungarian Empire. These subject people were beginning to envy the fate of their independent brothers from Serbia and to agitate for liberty. This is why Austria waged war (it is strange how many people still fail to see in this a sufficient cause for the conflict). The Yugoslav spirit was in opposition to German ambitions in the southeast, and the Germans soon discovered that this opposition was irreconcilable and growing as education and national consciousness developed among the Yugoslav race, in spite of all efforts to prevent it.

Before 1914 there had been many episodes of persecution in Bosnia, Dalmatia, and Croatia, and the best known is the famous Agram trial in 1908, when the Hungarian administration was shamefully exposed to the world for having practiced forgery in the prosecution. I traveled through Bosnia some time before the war, and, although the Austrians had occupied the country for thirty years, it all looked as if they had just conquered it. There was nothing but military occupation, strategic railways, officers haughtily aloof from the population, and I remember an old merchant of Sarajevo who refused to sell anything to me because I had talked to him in German.

The real war of extermination against the Yugoslavs began in 1914 with the tragic and ludicrous ultimatum of July 23. Serbia submitted to terms which Vienna had thought unaccept

DE LANUX

able, and then Austria-Hungary did the incredible thing of declaring war on a nation after it had already yielded. Austria-Hungary alone proved incapable of “ punishing Serbia. The invading army was repulsed after a crushing defeat. It needed the help of Germany and Bulgaria, in 1915, to break the indomitable little nation. But in the meantime oppression went on against the Yugoslav subjects of the Empire with an untold cruelty. More than one hundred and twenty thousand people were deported to the interior of Hungary in order to eradicate the national element. The documents we have on that policy of suppression could fill a heavy book; these are only a few cases. An engineer at Trebinje saw thirtyseven persons taken to the gallows at one time; six women were among them. A military driver told of once crossing a road where from every tree there hung a corpse. A high priest enjoying much consideration was hanged in the market-place. On the road from his prison the old man sang popular Serbian songs; at the last minute he addressed the people who formed a circle and said: "Look, and remember how the Serbians die!" Then he put the rope around his own neck.

At the Vienna Parliament a Yugoslav Deputy, TresicPavisic, who had been able to escape torture, made appalling revelations :

"All the educated and decent people were arrested, interned, ruined, condemned, executed. Anybody too young or too old had to starve, and the rest were stricken with terror, demoralized, dishonored.

"At Mostar, at Doboj, at Arad, where the patriots were interned, the jailer, Gaspar Scholier, chose the hostages that were to be executed later. Only with money could he be appeased. The victims were chosen during the night. The hideous figure of Scholier, surrounded by bayonets, came silently in. In these nights of terror more than one prisoner's hair turned white. Those who wanted to live on had to show by the movement of their hands how many bank notes they were worth.".

Interminable, monotonous, is the list of horrors. I do not speak of the ghastly deeds of Austro-Hungarian fighting troops in Serbia, which Dr. Reiss, from Switzerland, recorded in his famous report. I speak of the regular administration in regions peopled by Yugoslavs, within or without the Empire.

This is not local. It is happening over an area which is approximately the size of England. The Parliaments and the press have known of it, although the censorship tried to hide the most shameful facts. For I have told only of what political oppression did in a spirit of fear, seeing revolt everywhere, among students, among children, and striking blindly on all sides. But the worst was done in occupied Serbia by systematic administration, through police and army forces, when the men from Austria-Hungary tried to get rich as quickly as they could, when private confiscation existed under all forms, each officer enjoying an uncontrolled power to seize and take away anything he pleased. The rate of exchange for Serbian money was forcibly depreciated for the purpose of speculation. In France the Prussians were famous for carrying away the clocks. In Serbia the Austrians carried away everything. Protests? The freedom of opinion is such that any printing is forbidden, even that of menu cards. Every man, woman, or child must salute any Austrian officer or policeman. Two students of the University of Belgrade were condemned to receive seventy-five blows with a stick for failing to salute a petty officer in a car. In that city a certain Lieutenant Wiedmann enjoys unlimited power over the lives and liberties of all the inhabitants. Several thousand people have been interned by his orders.

The courts do not prevent robbing. They legalize it. They deal with human life with great indifference, and on the deposition of secret agents of the lowest class. As an instance, the shooting or hanging of thirty-five peasants with the schoolmaster

the French. The French speakers in turn never lost a chance to emphasize the valor and the chivalry of their allies. Of course I heard criticisms of the Administration, but none offered in dishonor or disdain. All criticism resolved itself at last into a democratic desire to know as much as could be told without giving aid and comfort to the enemy. The Hoosiers simply want the confidence of Washington.

One night when an officer loaned by one of the Allies had finished his simple, moving story of "trench life" the audience that packed the Coliseum to its utmost rose as one to emphasize the solidarity of our war against the enemy and sang with all their might

"Blest be the tie that binds."

Kendallville and Ligonier will always have a warm spot in my memory. At Kendallville I was to change cars for Ligonier, but the train was six hours late. The thermometer spurned zero as the gray day darkened into night, and then went below. There was no auto and no sleigh was to be procured. I tried to get an engine from the nearest junction, and in that I failed. Ligonier was eighteen miles away, across snow-drifts deep in places, and the cold was too biting for a walk so long.

The long-distance telephone was a godsend. The county chairman called back to me across the drifts at half-past seven: "The house is packed. Come on when you can. We will hold them till you come." Then till nine we had an extemporized meeting in Kendallville, and when I reached Ligonier at 10:15 my audience was there-all there.

My fellow-speakers from beyond the State will not think me unappreciative of them if I say that when it comes to public speaking Indiana needs no immigrants. Both men and women Hoosier speakers are of a high type; but, as a county chairman said to me, "The people want to hear you men who have been over there." In consequence, we were usually expected to speak longest, and the courtesy of our local associates never failed. They cared too much for the cause to have any personal feeling. It may not matter much to them, but it matters much to some of us, to whom they showed consideration, that we shall always, after that experience, have a special place in our regard for Hoosiers.

Seldom did the speakers from outside the State have opportunity to hear one another. In the brief intervals, however, between our speaking, when we were traveling slowly from one point to the other or were having hasty dinners under the same roof, we had our good times in exchanging stories and experiences. Sometimes we were under the same roof with National celebrities, and Mr. Everett Colby, at one place, informed me with assumed awe that the man with his feet on the rail was Wallace the showman, and that Pete Jackson, sometime hero of the prize ring, would black my boots.

Lieutenant MacQuarrie, pipe in mouth and note-book in hand, portable typewriter near for his secretary's use, was mapping out with me our afternoon schedule. In his jolly and persuasive manner he implored me to let him speak in the opera-house while I spoke in the church. He seemed to think that his "trench talk" would go better on the stage than in the pulpit. After we had finished, and the audience in each house wanted more, the chairman shifted us, and my last glimpse was of the lieutenant, with a rueful face, carrying his "trench talk" to the church, while I was speeding to the opera-house.

There were two days beyond description. I arrived at Bloomington one Sunday night, barely in time to reach the auditorium where the meeting was beginning, with a crowd outside so large that the chairman, on my arrival, thought it best to change the meeting to the biggest auditorium in town, where twenty-five hundred people used up every inch of space and needed more.

66

As I went to bed at eleven I told the hotel clerk to call me the next morning in ample time to catch the train at 3:55, so that I might speak some hours away that afternoon in Indiana's Switzerland." As our train drew down to Madison among the "knobs," crowned by gigantic trees, with the water toppling over" Clifty Falls," and valleys even in the winter sheering off into surpassing beauty, the shade of Lincoln seemed to hover over us. The Lincoln spell was on the farmers who came out to hear the war discussed. There were real Lincoln types-tall, lean, thoughtful, serene, patient, tolerant, forgetful of self in the preservation of peace. The chairman told my soldier friend

and me that we might expect a large "turnout" of farmers. He was conservative. The halls were filled to overflowing. Antiquated buggies lined the curbstone. Beards and top-boots walked the streets. The make-weight of democracy was there in all solemnity. They, listened. When they had the chance, they questioned. They wanted to know. They were making up their minds that in the land which Lincoln saved democracy must get ready to strike Lloyd George's "knock-out blow to autocracy and the world become all democratic.

It was not at Madison-but it might have been-that word came of the torpedoing of the Tuscania. The presiding officer grimly announced that "a boy from this county was on that boat," and I realized then that America is now like Milton's strong man, waking out of sleep and shaking his puissant locks to carry Gaza's gates away and make an end to war.

North Vernon lay beyond the hills. Twenty-three miles intervened. The Bureau had decreed that I was to speak there in the evening, and to North Vernon I was bound to go. But no train was running. The thaw was setting in. "You will never make it," said one who thought he knew. But there are always autos, even in the land of Lincoln, and relays of autos were arranged by telephone. Two chauffeurs drove each car. Because of slush and mud the valleys were as difficult to cross as the snow-clad hilltops. Twice our auto stuck, and not even the younger of our chauffeurs was quite confident, but we drove through. Once we clipped a big slice from a five-foot bank of snow which impudently barred our way.

The stream George Rogers Clarke in 1778 waded, on his way to snatch Vincennes from British hands, was overflowing both its banks, and we had a pretty drive, a memorable drive, for a few minutes through water two feet deep, with even chances whether we should go out with the maddened torrent down to the Ohio or go on to North Vernon. We went on, and when we reached North Vernon the time to speak had come. The moving-picture house was packed. The street outside was dense with those who wanted to get in. We could not force our way through such a crowd. The chairman, in collusion with the owner of the house adjoining, took me through by the "back way.' The mud and water, almost up to our shoe tops, were unwelcome, but we reached the stage at last. Anybody can speak when such enthusiasm awaits him for the sake of what he represents.

At Lafayette I had the honor of speaking with the President of the Monon Railroad, the Belgian Commissioner, and Judge Kenesaw Mountain Landis, of Chicago, whose attitude was so properly judicial that he left nobody outside of the insane asylum anything to say to justify our foe; and the Purdue University band punctuated the good speech by playing " Pack up your troubles in your old kit bag, and smile, smile, smile."

The Hoosiers talk. They read. They make you feel at home. They never bristle. They are folks. What they know, they know; and when they do not know, they candidly admit their ignorance. Said one aged man to me at midnight, with a chuckle in his voice," Last summer I thought I knew how to run this war. I said so pretty freely until I ran up against a man who knew more than I, and ever since I have known enough to keep my mouth shut:"

Mr. Samuel Hopkins Adams may be right in pointing to the menace afforded by the truly large foreign population, the workings of whose minds we do not always understand. Perhaps the Secret Service has its problems with a few of them, but my experience in Indiana, confirmed since in other Middle Western States, leads me to assume such patriotism in the average man as needs no questioning. At any rate, this proper assumption brought out declarations of loyalty where else there might have been no word.

Professor Mütterer, of the State Normal School of Indiana, certainly spoke for the great mass of German-born when he said in public, of his own accord :

I am not ashamed of my German name or German blood, but I feel deeply aggrieved against the German military party, the German Imperial Government, Prussianism, and the unholy German arrogance which made good blood and a good name a challenge to the world and has discredited the spiritual contributions of old Germany. I believe the great majority of the Americans of German descent feel the same intense grievance

toward this dire Power. What is in me I shall do when my country calls. I shall not regard it a sacrifice, only a duty and a righteous debt I want to pay.

It was at the last great mass-meeting that I had an extraordinary illustration of the new religious unity the war has brought. When, in the early dark, the train deposited me at the station, the local committee met me, led by its chairman, Father Dhé, the parish priest, a Frenchman, who less than twenty years ago lived in the Vimy and Lens region, where his relatives have suffered in this war. I stayed under his hospitable roof

FATHER DHE

through the night. He poured out a torrent of interesting talk. He was an inspiration. He understood the effect of the war on the deeper life of the world. I discovered that when coal grew scarce in his community, and all the churches in Fowler had to close, he opened to them all "Casey" Hall in his parish

house. The visit was like turning back to France. There were the same French buoyancy, the same French hospitality, the same delicious French cooking which perhaps Americans will learn from our dear friends across the sea.

My soldier boy. The car was crowded. In the seat ahead of me, chubby of face, light of hair, merry of spirit, sat a young soldier, one of the first to represent us on the field of honor, and with both legs badly damaged last August. The bone of the right ankle, splintered as it is, has baffled all the skill of doctors on each side of the ocean, and he was on his way to a great hospital for a last try to save his life.

Every jolt of the car hurt. He was never free from pain. He knew that he might lose his leg within two days, but he smiled as he said to me, "They can take it off if they like." The little children came across the aisle to play with him. He sang along the way. The high notes of "Swanee River" gave him trouble. With "Tipperary "he dashed gallantly along. He could "Keep the Home Fires Burning." He certainly knew how to pack up his troubles in his old kit bag and smile, smile, smile.

We talked and talked. He said nothing about pacifism, though he had fought for peace. He had no word of hate for those who had inflicted all that hurt upon him. The holy magnitude of our country's task was clear to him, and he was too good a soldier to waste energy in idle comment or in bitterness. As I left the car I hoped that he would have a comfortable night, and his voice rang out cheerily: "I'm all right. My leg always hurts. But what's the use of worrying about it?"

One last look, and a "Good-by, soldier boy," to him. But even after I had set foot on the step his voice came ringing merrily, "Good-by, sir, and good luck to you."

I do not know whether he is living as I write these words, but I do know that whether he still lives or not he has done his "bit." He has made it impossible for any right-minded man, woman, or child not to do his utmost, if only to keep pace with our soldier boys like him, who from our colleges the whole land over may soon be counted among those of whom even the Cherubim must soon be singing:

"Let there be laughter and a merry noise
Now that the fields of heaven shine
With all these golden boys."

A

S I write, some three hundred thousand men and women composing the various Liberty Loan Committees are waiting for the 6th of April to inaugurate the campaign for the sale of the third bond issue made necessary by the war. The amount offered is $3,000,000,000, but the Secretary of the Treas ury has announced that any over-subscription will be accepted, and, unless good judges are mistaken, the over-subscription will be large. The bonds will bear interest at the rate of 44 per cent, and the provision that they may not be converted into a later issue is generally construed to indicate that the Government does not expect that it will be necessary to pay a higher rate of interest on any subsequent loans it may make. The term for which the bonds will run is not yet announced, but it is generally expected that they will mature in twenty-five or thirty years and be redeemable ten years before maturity. They are to be issued in denominations of $50, $100, $500, and $1,000.

The subscriptions are to be payable in installments at dates not yet announced, but running probably well into the summer. Almost any bank or trust company will agree to buy small quantities of the bonds and carry them for subscribers who will undertake to pay for them at the rate of two per cent a month.

Thus a person can buy a $50 bond and pay $1 a week against it for fifty weeks, at the end of which time his bond will be delivered to him. In such cases the rate of interest charged on the unpaid balance should not exceed 5 or 6 per cent, and the

interest paid on the bond should be credited to the borrower's

account.

This is specially mentioned, as there are some lenders who are attempting to practice usury under the guise of patriotism and appropriate the entire interest on the bond for a year as their compensation for a loan that runs an average of only twenty-five weeks. In doing this they get something over 82 per cent per annum for lending money on the best security in the world.

For the benefit of the small subscribers on the partial payment plan who are unfamiliar with interest calculations, perhaps this should be made a little clearer: The man or woman who buys a $50 bond through a bank or trust company, and agrees to pay $1 a week on it, is in effect borrowing $50 for an average of twenty-five weeks. Interest on this loan at 6 per cent per annum, even if it were compounded quarterly, would not exceed $1.50. Against the interest charged, the coupons on the bonds (which at 414 per cent would be worth $2.12) should be credited so that at the end of the fiftieth week the borrower should receive this bond and not less than 62 cents in cash. If the rate of interest charged were 5 per cent, the cash payment accompanying the delivery of the bond should not be less than 87 cents.

There is hardly any one who does not realize that a United States bond is the safest investment that can be made and the