/ 
 
 "
 
 A WORLD TO MEND 
 
 OP CALIF. LIBRARY, LOS ANGELA
 
 THE WORN DOORSTEP 
 FAMILIAR WAYS 
 A WORLD TO MEND
 
 A WOKLD TO MEND 
 
 THE JOURNAL OF A WORKING MAN 
 
 BY 
 
 MARGARET SHERWOOD 
 
 BOSTON 
 
 LITTLE, BROWN, AND COMPANY 
 1920
 
 Copyright, 1920, 
 BY LITTLE, BROWN, AND COMPANY. 
 
 All rights reserved 
 Published September, 1920 
 
 THEPLIMPTONPRF.SS-NOSWOOD-MASS'C-S-A
 
 A WORLD TO MEND 
 
 2132922
 
 May 14, 1916. 
 
 I have resolved to put down from day to day, as 
 time may permit and humor bid, not only my im- 
 pression of events during the world tragedy, but 
 something also of my concern for the days to come, 
 for the times grow great, and to live alone with 
 one's silent thoughts is not well. 
 
 The idea of keeping a journal would, a few years 
 or even a few months ago, have seemed to me the 
 extreme of folly, for I have in the course of my life 
 put pen to paper as little as possible. But common- 
 place people, living through a great period, may 
 have much to tell; not about themselves, God for- 
 bid! Yet we who may not take our places in the 
 fighting line, who are mere spectators, may perhaps 
 divine something of 'the deeper drift of these vast 
 happenings. 
 
 I am a commonplace person, but it has been given 
 to me to see great things. 
 
 I saw last week the eyes of a volunteer regiment 
 of Canadian boys starting for the front, perhaps the 
 most wonderful thing on God's earth, a volun- 
 teer army going, willingly up their Calvary.
 
 2 A WORLD TO MEND 
 
 I am a commonplace person, but I have a friend, 
 devoted to his family, his life having been spent in 
 hardest professional work that they might have the 
 best possible education, who has seen his three chil- 
 dren start for the danger fields of France, one in an 
 aviation corps, one in a Canadian company, his 
 daughter in a Red Cross Unit. He takes up his in- 
 struments in quite the old way; he says he is con- 
 tent if his children may but help hi this hard hour. 
 
 I have seen the face of an American mother whose 
 son fell hi the second summer of the war, fighting 
 with the Foreign Legion in France. She had no 
 word of protest, or even of regret, to utter; she spoke 
 of Lafayette. 
 
 And I am aware that there is astir upon the earth 
 some spirit of sacrifice, deeper, more all-embracing 
 than ever before, going out to meet the greatest 
 recorded cruelty of all time. 
 
 Who shall read aright the meaning of these days 
 which have shown humanity incomparably baser 
 than we had dreamed, but also incomparably finer, 
 more disinterested than we could have divined? 
 What promise for the future is held in the struggle 
 of this present hour, wherein the world that is to be 
 is being born in anguish? I, who in my fifty-odd 
 years have understood but little of human nature 
 and the forces which urge it on, am driven by the 
 strong impulsion which has been upon the souls of 
 men since August, 1914, toward deeper understand- 
 ing of the hidden forces of life. 
 
 May 16. 
 
 There is a fine freshness in the air ; the perfume of 
 apple blossoms and of pear comes in through my
 
 A WORLD TO MEND 3 
 
 open window. As I sit here in the sunshine, busy 
 with my needle, the fact that I am the cobbler of 
 Mataquoit comes to me as a startling and not, as 
 yet, fully apprehended fact ; yet, scrutinizing with a 
 certain detached curiosity the position in which I 
 find myself, the steps are clear enough that led to it 
 from the mood wherein I faced my share of world 
 agony of earth's most tragic August. 
 
 In the strong upsurging of feeling from depths 
 unsuspected before there has been for me from the 
 first a sense of lack, a loneliness that was no longer 
 the result of the slipping away of friends and of 
 family incident to my years. It was a something 
 deeper, a longing to be one with my kind. Was there 
 in this the mere instinct that bids men take refuge 
 together in time of crisis? Certainly there was no 
 apprehension of physical danger; it was a subtler 
 feeling, an innermost sense of spiritual danger, a 
 longing for mankind to draw together before it is 
 too late, for understanding so deep that wars will be- 
 come impossible. 
 
 The great trouble that has come upon the race, 
 so staggering in its immensity that neither thought 
 nor imagination can grasp it, has come of imperfect 
 understanding, of unachieved sympathy. As I 
 realized this, the isolation of my life took on a new 
 and sinister significance, for there have been, and 
 are, impalpable barriers between me and most of 
 my fellow men. 
 
 With the sense of not being at one with my kind 
 comes the sting of realization that I have not played 
 my part. The waiting months have brought me an 
 immense desire, a challenge. I, with the many 
 years behind me, I who have done nothing, must yet
 
 4 A WORLD TO MEND 
 
 make good. I must work, must act; I must do my 
 bit, finding my place, if not among the fighting 
 ranks of France, at least among the toiling ranks of 
 humanity. 
 
 It is because of this twofold desire, to understand, 
 to share, that I undertake a handicraft, for no mere 
 looker-on can understand. I am tired of printed 
 words and of mere speculative thought concerning 
 life ; I long to do something with my fingers. There 
 is no way of knowing one's fellows comparable to 
 working among them. Certain also of our own 
 poets have said that we draw near reality in drawing 
 near common things. 
 
 Hence Mataquoit and my cobbler's bench. I 
 have found, I think, the quiet spot for which I 
 longed, and a handicraft that will leave me time to 
 think, yet will bring me into contact with my fel- 
 lows. Because of my troublesome leg my work 
 had to be something at which I could sit. For tailor- 
 ing I know I could never command the requisite 
 skill nor face the long apprenticeship. Factory 
 work I considered, but this would not bring me into 
 contact with all and sundry of my kind. I wish to 
 know not one class alone, one set of aspirations or of 
 grievances, but every kind of man who walks the 
 streets. 
 
 Cobbling draws me, the independence, the 
 chance to smoke in the evening, perhaps, with a cus- 
 tomer. And it is symbolically appropriate: my 
 life, it is but patching and cobbling that it is 
 good for now. Here is my last chance to do it over ; 
 something to be saved yet, and put to practical use. 
 Shoes to patch, shoes to mend, lives to mend !
 
 A WORLD TO MEND 5 
 
 May 18. 
 
 It is but ten days since I came to Mataquoit, and 
 already it begins to seem like home, more like home 
 than anything I have known since I was a boy. Why 
 I chose this place rather than any other for the exer- 
 cise of my craft would be hard to say, but I had to 
 stop somewhere, and I rather fancy the look of vil- 
 lage streets ending in the sea. I had been traveling 
 from town to town and from village to village, on 
 foot for the most part, being by nature something 
 of a rover, and now, not without a spirit of adven- 
 ture and joy in the open road in the ripple of spring, 
 hunting for a place to settle. Perhaps it was the 
 swallows, for, as I stopped to rest late one afternoon 
 outside the village, sitting on a stone wall not far 
 from a barn, swallows flew swiftly this way and that 
 about me, and something in their circling motion 
 and the deep, gleaming blue of their backs, some- 
 thing in their quick, soft notes as they flew past me, 
 seemed to invite my boyhood back. For I had 
 played more than one summer in just such a red 
 barn as this under whose eaves they darted now and 
 then. 
 
 I walked on to the village, past snug, small, story- 
 and-a-half white houses which seem as much a part 
 of New England as do its granite rocks, compan- 
 ionable houses, with latticed porches, and blossom- 
 ing apple trees and trim gardens, ideal houses for a 
 democratic people. Faces on the street seemed al- 
 ready familiar, women's faces both friendly and curi- 
 ous above their calico gowns; one old man with a 
 gray wisp of beard gave me a greeting as is the 
 fashion of natives in country places upon seeing 
 strangers. In the street I met a load of hay last
 
 6 A WORLD TO MEND 
 
 year's to be sure upon a blue hayrick, a straw- 
 hatted man in blue overalls and red suspenders 
 driving the team; and I had a sudden feeling that, 
 could I but mount beside him, I might be carried 
 back into my childhood's simple and kindly world 
 that knew no war. 
 
 I got no such invitation, however, but trudged on 
 past the post-office to the one hostelry of the place, 
 the Eagle Hotel; to a chair on the porch where citi- 
 zens of Mataquoit were smoking with their hats 
 pushed back on their foreheads and their feet on the 
 porch railing. Lingering there, I suffered, to tell the 
 truth, a singular distaste to the idea of becoming in 
 any sense one with them. How am I to make com- 
 mon cause with these? This new adventure of de- 
 mocracy, whither will it lead me? 
 
 It would have been easier to work with the 
 wounded, in France. Yet the physically unfit may 
 not start out on that crusade ; and such am I. They 
 would not take me, even for hospital service. Shall 
 I, who could make common cause with the humblest 
 poilu, shrink from my fellow citizen at home because 
 at a first glance he looks physically, mentally, and 
 spiritually slovenly, down at heel? . . . Supper of 
 ham and eggs and corn muffins; and so, as wrote a 
 greater diarist than I, but in a lesser period, "and 
 so to bed." 
 
 May 21. 
 
 My involuntary flinching from my fellows but 
 strengthens my resolution. I who have been an 
 American citizen all my life, yet no true citizen; 
 who know little about my country and less about 
 the mass of people who make it up, I will continue
 
 A WORLD TO MEND 7 
 
 this voyage of discovery to that unknown country, 
 a commonplace village in my native land. I and 
 mine are descendants of those who first founded a 
 civilization in the wilds of New England, of those 
 who fought in the Revolution for freedom for man- 
 kind. Yet take it all in all, my own class, alas, 
 that I should use this word in a democratic land ! 
 have not concerned themselves greatly with the 
 working of our government, and, busy with intellec- 
 tual pursuits or with pleasures, could hardly have 
 been more false to a great trust. Plato's Republic is 
 more familiar to me than our own. We have slipped 
 outside of vital, struggling America, standing apart, 
 on ancestral privilege. Here and there, perhaps, 
 one has done his duty, in Senate, House, or State 
 legislature, but as regards civic responsibility, the 
 majority of us have been shirkers. 
 
 Yet I mean to set down here not my past history, 
 but my present intent. I must set it down clearly, 
 "lest I forget", and look back from time to time to 
 see if I have kept my purpose clear. 
 
 I intend to observe closely the inner operation of 
 democracy in its old stronghold and initial home in 
 our country, the New England shore. There are 
 many who study the foreign elements, investigate 
 immigrants, interview and tabulate the slums. Yet 
 who studies the old stock to see what the descend- 
 ants of our pioneer forefathers have done with their 
 great chance in life? What have one hundred and 
 forty years of liberty, equality, fraternity wrought 
 here? What finer, freer types of men have been 
 produced? What sense of human brotherhood? 
 
 Regarding the theoretical aspects of our govern- 
 ment as manifest in our political institutions, I am
 
 8 A WORLD TO MEND 
 
 well enough informed, but of the human reaction to 
 these institutions, the individual sense of responsi- 
 bility shown by the mass of people who make up the 
 country, I know nothing at all. Often, I am told, 
 in business enterprises, the proprietor's son begins 
 at the bottom and moves on up through the "works," 
 learning to understand. Even so am I resolved to 
 begin far down, and to learn something of the 
 "works" of this, my America. Hence I desire to 
 draw near, in some inconspicuous place, to people 
 in no way distinguished from the rest, to observe in 
 what ways they fulfil the constant task of always 
 making themselves a free people. In studying 
 others I shall perhaps learn better how to play my 
 own part. 
 
 Surely here in this sacred stronghold of liberty 
 some spark of the ancestral divine fire lingers; at 
 this great moment, the winds that sweep the whole 
 world must blow it into flame. So will become ap- 
 parent the forces on which we can count for the 
 rekindling of life, the earth over, when this awful 
 struggle is ended, in a world where there shall be no 
 more wars nor rumors of wars.
 
 II 
 
 May 25. 
 
 There is little that is distinctive about this shore 
 town ; it is partly because of this that I am resolved 
 to stay. The place has something of a past, sug- 
 gested by rotting wharves and great colonial houses, 
 some of them falling apart, as have many of these 
 coastwise places, enriched by fisheries in past days; 
 it has perhaps a future suggested by a renewal of 
 shipbuilding and by a bustle of life on a main street 
 with thriving shops. One old-fashioned white church 
 with a white spire, in a sunny green square; a 
 modern-looking brick school building hardly in keep- 
 ing with the rest of the place; a Carnegie library; 
 well-kept houses, both fairly large and small, with 
 rose vines and honeysuckle and not wholly neglected 
 lawns; a drug store; two groceries; a department 
 store, recently started, called "Sands' Emporium"; 
 and always the breath of the sea. 
 
 It is not a summer resort; had it been, I should 
 have searched farther. A normal kind of life, so 
 far as I can judge, goes on here, with fishing enough 
 for a part of the population, the small, shallow 
 harbor being admirably suited to this; shop windows 
 testify to a variety of business enterprises; many 
 citizens of Mataquoit live on inherited incomes, in 
 ancestral houses shaded by huge elms or maples. 
 There is farming enough for a large number, the sur-
 
 10 A WORLD TO MEND 
 
 rounding meadow lands and rolling hills being, I 
 am told, very fertile. They are also beautiful, as 
 are the sea meadows north of the village, through 
 which a tidal river runs. 
 
 I had already decided to stay, when I made the 
 fortunate discovery that the place has no cobbler. 
 The one citizen of this profession died six months 
 ago; since then, though Mataquoit does not go 
 shoeless, as these articles, of a rather thin and un- 
 substantial kind, may be bought at the department 
 store, there is no one nearer than ten miles away to 
 cobble them. 
 
 To think of finding thus, at my age, "the need of 
 a world of men for me!" 
 
 I have found more than that; I have found the 
 cobbler's shop, not yet dismantled, with a sign To 
 Rent on its door. It stands in an open space under 
 a pine tree, a bit back from the main street, where, 
 if I have time to look up from my bench, I can see 
 the happenings in this small thoroughfare of democ- 
 racy, and learn something of my new art of living 
 with my fellows as I carry on my chosen profession. 
 My poetic belief in humanity, is it a practical 
 one? Will it stand the test of daily contact with 
 humble folk? It must, and shall. 
 
 I have interviewed the cobbler's widow and have 
 paid a month's rent in advance. The shop is mine, 
 with its two windows; its bench; its lasts; its many 
 awls and needles; its shoemaker's wax; its linen 
 thread; its pieces of rough leather hanging on the 
 walls; its pungent, oily, leathery, waxy smell. A 
 very useful smell. 
 
 I have taken it all over, including material much 
 of which, of course, must be too old for service, and
 
 A WORLD TO MEND 11 
 
 instruments whose use I do not yet know. There 
 will be time enough to find out. The business trans- 
 action I got over as soon as possible, for I do not 
 like bargaining. The cobbler's widow was, I think, 
 disappointed that I did not dispute the terms. She 
 mourns her husband in an untidy pink gingham ; her 
 shoes are ripped. 
 
 Even the cobbler's sign is ready for me, as it bears 
 no name. 
 
 BOOTS AND SHOES REPAIRED 
 
 I found it on the floor and nailed it to the side of 
 the window facing the street. 
 
 So, at fifty and more years, I begin my life work. 
 
 Thus I become a citizen of Mataquoit, lonely, 
 without introductions, cut off absolutely from my 
 previous life; without anything that would preju- 
 dice, anything that would gain favor. Here is my 
 adventure into the unknown, the unknown of a 
 plain New England town. 
 
 Robinson Crusoe on his island was not more alone. 
 After all, this New England town with its homely 
 happenings, the goings on in its little shops and 
 about its doorways, is as much a new world to me 
 as was Crusoe's island to Robinson Crusoe. 
 
 I shall set to work in a different way from his. 
 There shall be no stockade to separate me from my 
 kind! Not if I can keep pulling it down. 
 
 There is a wary friendliness in the attitude of 
 people toward me. They give me kind greeting, but 
 they watch me; they look upon me, I think, as a 
 ne'er-do-well, not without reason, not without 
 reason.
 
 12 A WORLD TO MEND 
 
 May 31. 
 
 I should not like to have my neighbors know that 
 I am keeping a journal; hence the day when I went 
 to purchase a blank book for the purpose I chose at 
 Collins' stationery and small ware store a ledger 
 with brown mottled binding and a long page. The 
 page is rather narrow, and the ruled marginal red 
 lines will be somewhat in the way, but at least old 
 Abel Marks the postman, and Phil Landers the 
 expressman, and the other onlookers standing about 
 in the shop will think that I got it for my accounts 
 in cobbling. It is better in Mataquoit not to be 
 seen writing in anything in which your neighbors do 
 not write. 
 
 "That's considerable of a book," said Abel Marks. 
 "You must have big accounts." 
 
 And in truth it is a long account that I mean to 
 keep. 
 
 I have an idea that such entries as I shall make 
 may not be inappropriately entered in a ledger, for 
 I am resolved to make an effort, not only to balance 
 my own account, but to do a bit in the way of bal- 
 ancing accounts in the universe, so far as an indi- 
 vidual may. 
 
 As I write by the light of my kerosene lamp, which 
 flickers in the fresh breeze from the sea, I think over 
 the past months of world agony, of continued defeat 
 on every front for the Allied armies, and ask what 
 I may put down on the asset side, where all seems 
 loss. Is it all loss for us, or is our whole great nation, 
 with all its wavering, wakening to a profounder 
 sympathy and a finer purpose than were ever ours 
 before?
 
 A WORLD TO MEND 13 
 
 June 2. 
 
 My first day in the shop ; no customers, but many 
 passing feet. I can hear the sea distinctly from my 
 bench when the village street is quiet. Employed 
 my time looking over my stock, sorting tools, nails, 
 pegs, of which I found a good supply; going over 
 the leather left in the shop and throwing out the 
 useless bits. The needles are old and broken, but I 
 brought with me what I thought I should need in 
 this way, also thread. Of Angus McDonell, the 
 Scotchman who taught me my trade in Ontario, I 
 learned that, in the way of thread for the cobbler, 
 nothing less good than the best will suffice. Of 
 lasts I find enough for two cobblers; these I have 
 arranged neatly in a row on the floor. For the first 
 time in my life I swept a room ; the results I burned 
 in a cast-iron stove in the corner. Never before 
 have I made a fire in a stove. 
 
 With the owner's permission, I shall have a chim- 
 ney run up at the side of the shop, and a brick fire- 
 place put in. Also, I plan to have the town water 
 conducted to the shed in the rear. 
 
 The problem of my lodging proved simpler than I 
 had dared hope. I live in a story-and-a-half white 
 house about an eighth of a mile from my place of 
 business. I am to pay five dollars a week for board 
 and lodging; can I earn it? A gray widow in a blue 
 print gown is my hostess; a huge gray tabby cat 
 is my host. 
 
 Bacon and baked potatoes ; ham and eggs ; baking- 
 powder biscuit; rye muffins; an endless drip of tea. 
 It is new diet for me, but prisoners have fared worse. 
 
 Farmers' wagons creak down the streets; the old 
 hitching posts are not yet all gone. The old horses
 
 14 A WORLD TO MEND 
 
 shy at the motors, and sometimes a thin-faced 
 woman screams when Dobbin's antics become alarm- 
 ing. Boys and girls, awed by even this small town, 
 come in from remote hamlets. The faces of grown 
 folk and of children are different from the faces 
 that I have hitherto known. 
 
 I have indeed secured a new outlook on life. 
 
 June 4. 
 
 I have scored two human beings in my dragnet 
 to-day. A boy came, with tennis shoes needing a few 
 stitches. I could take them. But a farmer came 
 with what had once been a boot, and I had no skill 
 for its re-creating. Alack for the ruin that nothing 
 can make good ! I shall have to study the problem 
 of where all hope of reconstruction ends, in boots 
 and shoes and elsewhere. 
 
 In the absence of human companionship, I fall 
 back upon books and magazines which I brought 
 with me. War, and the tragedy of war encompassing 
 all our life! Yet, through all the stages of the 
 struggle, in which humanity is crucified, unbearably 
 vivid as they are, I hear, far off and dim, the echoes 
 of the greater struggle that will come when the ac- 
 tual fighting ceases. For it is a war between two 
 principles, and, even when autocracy is crushed, the 
 battle will be but begun over the earth to establish 
 the free rule of free men, in their several distinctions 
 and individualities. 
 
 They who are in Flanders field and in the fields 
 of France hear the noise of guns, of great explosions, 
 of artillery; I, who have about me quiet, who have 
 time to think, hear the sounds of coming conflict, a 
 greater and more menacing roar than that of war 
 time.
 
 A WORLD TO MEND 15 
 
 We shall face a world with its old foundations 
 gone, a world with foundations to build from the 
 very bottom, of understanding and sympathy and 
 trust between man and man, such as have never 
 existed before. 
 
 To achieve this we must find a way to make the 
 progress of men's souls equal, outstrip their ma- 
 terial and mechanical progress. It will be such a 
 race as humanity never entered upon since time be- 
 gan. How can we draw the creative genius, which 
 has gone in years past into the making of agents of 
 destruction or devices for physical comfort, into the 
 construction of conditions under which man can 
 live with man in harmony? It is not cogwheels and 
 levers that should command the service of our finest 
 intellect, but human souls.
 
 Ill 
 
 June 6. 
 
 I confess that, these first days in my shop, I am 
 lonelier than ever, with a feeling that I have cut my- 
 self off from old associations and have not yet es- 
 tablished new. I walk the village street, realizing 
 that I am a stranger in my own country; I might 
 as well have been born in ancient Rome. This may 
 be a democratic country, but I and mine have never 
 lived in a democratic world; from boyhood I have 
 been kept from knowledge of men, save a chosen 
 few. All my years of training, all my personal en- 
 deavor, have meant a refining, a selection, an at- 
 tempt to reach more and more fastidious standards, 
 with no corresponding sense of responsibility toward 
 those as yet unaware of them. Now, retribution has 
 come, for thin veils of thought, of feeling, distinc- 
 tions that I used to think most important, drop be- 
 tween me and my fellow men. They are aware of it, 
 as am I. 
 
 At my bench, by the window with a newspaper, 
 I listened the greater part of the day to the footsteps 
 of passing people and caught bits of their conversa- 
 tion. There were comments on the high price of 
 eggs and a report of a good catch of fish ; and there 
 were remarks about my open doorway and the sign 
 on my shop. 
 
 "Where does he come from?" asked one gruff 
 voice.
 
 A WORLD TO MEND 17 
 
 "Dunno," was the sufficient answer. 
 
 "Anybody know his folks?" 
 
 I could not hear the reply to this, but I did not 
 need to. The same old question that I have heard 
 so often, though hi different circles and in different 
 English! It is indeed a lonely venture, voyaging 
 where nobody knows your "folks" ! and the hollowed 
 board steps of my shop are to me, even as to him, 
 the prow of Ulysses' wandering ship, headed for 
 uncharted seas. 
 
 The morning passed and nobody called. In the 
 afternoon one visitor arrived, growling. I looked 
 up from the page on which I am writing to see a 
 pair of brown, questioning eyes fixed on me ; a ques- 
 tioning nose sniffing threshold and doorway; a 
 shaggy tail began to wave slightly as I spoke. 
 
 Wagging and growling went on together as my 
 unexpected guest responded to my invitation to 
 enter; he smelled of many things in the shop, then 
 drew cautiously near, searching my very soul with 
 his eyes. Lonely; I know the look; the best thing 
 in life was lacking, companionship. 
 
 I half guessed, what afterward proved to be the 
 case, that he was my predecessor's dog; and I briefly 
 explained to him in words that I had not made way 
 with his master; that I had come honestly by the 
 shop; that I meant to work there; that I would be 
 glad of his friendship, if he would accept mine. 
 
 The growling ceased, the wagging grew more 
 cordial as I spoke ; I caressed his shaggy ears ; before 
 I knew it his head was on my knee; with a deep 
 sigh, as of homecoming, he dropped down upon the 
 floor and slept, with one eye open. So I acquired 
 an assistant and ally.
 
 18 A WORLD TO MEND 
 
 He is large, brown, long-haired, with a suggestion 
 of setter, a hint of collie. Doubtless he has several 
 strains; so much the better! I shall make no in- 
 quiries about his "folks"; we must work out our 
 great task of democracy. 
 
 Do not the finest peoples admittedly come of the 
 much mixed races? Witness the English, in their 
 remote beginnings; witness the ancient Greeks, in 
 their remote beginnings. What promise, then, for 
 America, with its present clash of innumerable na- 
 tionalities! One would like to live a few hundred 
 years, or thousands, to see the resulting race. 
 
 Temperament, passion, from the Italians and 
 Greeks; we sadly need that, with our thinner blood. 
 Mysticism, the tendency toward faith, from the 
 Slavs; we sadly need that, with our preoccupation 
 with the merely practical, our profound concern with 
 the world of mere happenings. From the Scandi- 
 navians? I do not know so well, but from all the 
 many nationalities, what resources we may gather; 
 what poetry; what depth of feeling, sensitiveness to 
 aspects of human life and experience of which we 
 have in the past been unaware in our pell-mell en- 
 deavors to make good, to achieve in practical ways! 
 
 June 9. 
 
 Two dollars and forty-seven cents is the result of 
 my first week's work. The size of the sum does 
 not account for my great pride in it ; it is the first 
 money that I have ever earned. This does not 
 amount to a living wage, and yet I shall not strike. 
 To my shame as a wage-earner be it said that I 
 have, aside from my earnings, enough for bread 
 and cheese.
 
 A WORLD TO MEND 19 
 
 The curiosity that my coming has aroused will, I 
 hope, soon die down. To the inquiries of my hostess, 
 the Widow Frayne, regarding my past life, I have 
 replied with a certain reserve, question for question. 
 
 I also was born in New England. 
 
 June 10. 
 
 To-day came in as fine a lad as I ever set eyes on, 
 a tall, upstanding, stalwart young fellow, with a 
 red-brown glow in his cheeks, and a yellow-brown 
 gleam in his hair. 
 
 Tim, I observed, did not know him, but would be 
 glad to make his acquaintance, if the swift touch of 
 a red tongue on the friendly outstretched hand told 
 truth. 
 
 This was a college boy, I saw. My heart would 
 have warmed to him, even without that large letter 
 on his sweater. Having seen that, I felt hesitation 
 about charging him for his shoe. 
 
 He had come to have a rip in his tennis shoe sewed 
 up, a good-sized shoe, I thought to myself, right well 
 in keeping with his six-foot height and his broad 
 shoulders. He would wait while it was being done, 
 he said, and he seated himself with an air of quiet 
 possession in an arm-chair, with his stockinged foot 
 resting on a box filled with scraps of leather. 
 
 As I stitched I saw that he had opened a book; it 
 may be that my job went a bit the worse for my 
 looking up now and then to see him at his study. 
 I watched to see if the trouble of the world was re- 
 flected in his face, but there was no shadow of it; 
 rather, a look as if it hurt a bit to stop smiling for 
 a few minutes. He was working at Latin and was 
 evidently deeply puzzled, for he talked aloud, saying
 
 20 A WORLD TO MEND 
 
 over certain words and giving their individual mean- 
 ing. Evidently their collective sense escaped him. 
 Before I knew it, I had construed it for him. 
 
 "Great Caesar!" he said, with his eyes still on the 
 page. "That's right! Stupid not to see it" 
 
 He thrust the book into his pocket, then turned 
 and looked at me. 
 
 "Who are you, anyway," he asked, "cobbling and 
 quoting Latin?" 
 
 I laughed, but realized that I had blundered. 
 
 "And you," I said, "who are studious enough to 
 work on Latin in vacation time?" 
 
 "Studious ! " he scoffed ; and then, as if it were the 
 only explanation that condoned his conduct : 
 
 "Condition; left over from Sophomore year." 
 
 I said nothing, but went on with my stitching. 
 
 "You seem to be something of a mystery," he 
 ventured. 
 
 "So are all men," I answered. 
 
 His eyes twinkled back at mine in understanding 
 fashion. He asked no more questions, but put on his 
 shoe, patted Tim, and went away. 
 
 I could not help thinking, as I watched him swing- 
 ing down the street, that I should like to see him 
 again. 
 
 June 11. 
 
 One strange thing about 'this epoch, strange cer- 
 tainly in the experience of a person of my years, is 
 the feeling that it brings of the utter inadequacy of 
 one's whole personality, of one's previous interests, 
 the realization of one's achievements as pitiful, as 
 less than nothing. It is as if the past hardly existed, 
 or belonged to a state of unachieved being. The
 
 A WORLD TO MEND 21 
 
 events of the last two years have stirred me, lifted 
 me out of myself, recreated me. A new and suffering 
 youth is born in me, a feeling that I am at the 
 beginning of my experience. 
 
 Do all great periods of change and transition 
 make themselves so distinctly felt in passionate de- 
 sire to begin over, in a feeling that earth is being 
 born again in anguish, and in longing to be born 
 with it? Nothing in all my previous experience is 
 comparable with this; even I, in my sixth decade, 
 am sharing something unfathomably great that is 
 coming into the world, through the grandeur of 
 human courage in this hour of unexampled trial. 
 
 One needs to be greater, different; there are as 
 yet unimagined things to be done and dared, and 
 the stakes are higher, the risks greater than ever 
 before ; one needs young valor, and impetuous faith 
 such as hardly goes with middle age. It is hard to 
 grasp all aspects of this great awakening when we 
 who had grown weary are asking for more years of 
 life that we may understand more deeply the chal- 
 lenge of circumstance to the human soul, and may 
 yet make good. With all the long years back of 
 me, it is strange to feel so new, so ready to be tried. 
 
 If I had but the years of the young man who was 
 here yesterday!
 
 IV 
 
 June 13 
 
 My room commands a bit of the sea, but more of 
 the street. There are lilac bushes below my window, 
 now in fresh bloom. Sometimes I see a white sail 
 between the overarching elms'; sometimes a blue 
 farm wagon or a load of hay goes jogging down the 
 street. 
 
 A worsted motto: Seek And Ye Shall Find; a 
 patchwork quilt; a grayish-blue painted floor of 
 wide boards that look hand-hewn, there is much 
 of novelty in my surroundings and something too of 
 home. I have always been, in theory, a lover of 
 simplicity, paying homage to plain living and high 
 thinking. Simplicity is the secret of all great art, 
 why not of all great life? Seeking, shall I indeed 
 find it? 
 
 A wrought-iron latch is on my door. No lock : no 
 bar. There is writing on my whitewashed wall at 
 night by the shadow of leaf and branch and twig in 
 the light of the street lamp, but the writing is hard 
 to read. 
 
 June 15. 
 
 Twice to-day I saw passing my shop the college 
 youth who came in a few days ago. I wonder who 
 he is? I find myself thinking of him with a certain 
 sense of curiosity. 
 
 Tried to read, but tossed away a long treatise on
 
 A WORLD TO MEND 23 
 
 labor problems. My old study of economics helps 
 me but little now, in any of its aspects. I do not 
 want to understand Humanity in the abstract; it 
 is not to be done; I want to know human beings. 
 
 I am tired of professional analyses, of ratios and 
 percentages and statistics. None of these generaliza- 
 tions ever brought me any whit nearer that under- 
 standing of individual men on which an enduring 
 social order must be based. 
 
 Of Man I have heard and talked much ; how shall 
 I become acquainted with men? Of this I am cer- 
 tain, mere information, mere intellectual acumen 
 will never achieve that finer understanding whose 
 real name is sympathetic insight. 
 
 June 16. 
 
 A fine test of my theoretical sympathy came to- 
 day with a half-drunken brakeman blaming me for 
 the hole in his boot. ... I sit crushed among 
 the wreckage of my aspiration and of my finer mood. 
 How I love you, my brother, when you stand at a 
 distance, with a strong wind blowing between us! 
 
 Yet I have asked for this contact with individual 
 men. Humanity in figures is easier to cope with. 
 A table of statistics, a column of figures is at least 
 non-odorous and does not chew tobacco. 
 
 I am the greatest failure on God's earth. 
 
 June 19. 
 
 As I sit at my bench in my hut under the pine 
 tree, tapping for I have two pairs of boots to 
 mend always with the thought of the great ac- 
 count I am to keep in my ledger, the days of the 
 beginning of the war come back to my mind: that
 
 24 A WORLD TO MEND 
 
 rocky spot where I was staying on the Maine coast, 
 Anaquid, with the days and nights of fog ; the papers 
 coming with their unbelievable headlines about 
 mobilizing and about threatened war; the incredu- 
 lous faces of the readers on the hotel piazzas; the 
 unbelieving eyes of those who read the German 
 ultimatums. Then, with the swift and terrible news 
 of the invasion of Belgium still, alas ! unprotested 
 by our government came creeping mist and fog 
 that blotted out all outlines of a world known and 
 loved; and the tolling of the lighthouse bell, day 
 and night, night and day, as if telling of the passing 
 of souls. The fog opened only to shut down again 
 more heavily, in hushed suspense that seemed to 
 prelude the ending of a world. 
 
 We know now that it was not the ending of a world 
 but the ending of a period; that we have grown 
 somewhat in these two years many things declare. 
 There is something to put on the asset side of my 
 ledger! The shock of those days meant to many 
 people their first realization that humanity is one, 
 so hardly are some great lessons learned ! It is long 
 since I have heard any one say, as people said in the 
 autumn of 1914: "Well, if those people want to 
 fight and kill each other, it is no affair of mine. No, 
 I won't send my money to the wounded ; I will give 
 it to the suffering here. They should not go back to 
 barbarism unless they want to suffer." Such things 
 were said in various ways by various people then; 
 they reflected perfectly the attitude of a young and 
 complacent democracy that had long outgrown war 
 and all longing for anything that could be gained by 
 war, but that had not lost a sense of itself as a 
 thing apart, nor gained the pitying insight into
 
 A WORLD TO MEND 25 
 
 human nature on which a lasting democracy must 
 rest. Are we gaming it now? 
 
 Even then there were signs that heralded a better 
 and more human attitude which has become more 
 apparent since. A physician told me that illness had 
 increased among his patients, the old, the deli- 
 cate succumbing, under their hurt sympathy, to the 
 shock. One was almost glad to hear it ; it showed a 
 deeper sense of life being linked with life than was 
 shown by many of the robust. And again it made 
 me wonder, as I have innumerable times wondered 
 and most times believed, whether the medieval idea 
 of the suffering body as aiding the struggling soul 
 were not, on the whole, better than the impassioned 
 conviction of this age through which I have lived 
 that the strong body is all. Suffering and weakness 
 may be the source of many an insight. We, stand- 
 ing on the edge of this vast sea of sorrow and of 
 suffering, shall we know, when we have plunged into 
 it, perhaps through it, as we have not known in the 
 past? 
 
 After the incredulity, the failure to believe that 
 the evil thing had come to pass, there was for many 
 a sense of great and impersonal sorrow, of sympa- 
 thetic fear for France, for England, fear a deeper, 
 subtler fear for civilization itself. The very foun- 
 dations on which life rests were crumbling under us. 
 There was, born of pity for the appalling suffering, 
 wrath and distrust of this alleged civilization, a 
 deepening sense of the futility of its outward prog- 
 ress, a deepening sense of values of much old thought 
 and faith that had slipped away. There was desire 
 to retreat and find where it was that the modern 
 world took the wrong step.
 
 26 A WORLD TO MEND 
 
 Under all question or approval of this or that act 
 of this or that nation lay a deeper and crueler won- 
 der: Had we been living all these years in a world 
 that did not exist? We had been taught that the 
 universe was a moral universe; was this faith base- 
 less? Hurt speculative thought perhaps hardly ever 
 arrives, but rather goes round and round, squirrel- 
 wise, in its cage. It went faster then, and the world 
 seemed going with it, spinning way off its course, 
 through endless space. 
 
 It was not only the incredible fact of the war, in 
 a world which had gone so far beyond in high aim ; 
 stories of German atrocities began to come, the rape 
 of women, old and young, the constant shooting of 
 civilians in cowardly murder, the utter destruction of 
 farms and of villages, the setting fire to buildings in 
 which human beings had been locked. Sickening 
 belief, only tentative before, followed the publica- 
 tion of the Bryce report, and we felt ourselves on 
 the edge of a vast abyss that had opened at our 
 feet, yawning, a thing of undreamed horror, into 
 whose black deeps we dared not look; it seemed 
 about to swallow us up, with all that men had here- 
 tofore achieved of kindness, of pity, of bare justice. 
 
 And this horror has gone on, increasing through 
 torture, lust, treachery and broken faith for two long 
 years. Here we go as usual about our quiet ways of 
 life, with the possibility staring us in the face of a 
 civilization lost, a world lost. 
 
 It shall not be lost ; we have too much wherewith 
 to build a new and better world! If the horror has 
 gone on increasing, as it has, what shall we say of 
 the swift-coming glory of human courage, human 
 devotion, that meets it at every turn, faces it, tran-
 
 A WORLD TO MEND 27 
 
 scends it, conquers even in losing? Never has the 
 unconquerable human soul shone out as clearly as 
 in these last days; never has selfless courage counted 
 for so much. Already the right is victorious, in the 
 face of much that seems defeat on more than one 
 front. The deeds of which one hears constantly of 
 life risked or lost for another life ; the heroic standing 
 of man by man, and the more than heroic standing 
 of all men in these ghastly trenches in defense of 
 honor and fair play and womanhood, in these 
 things something greater than war is won. 
 
 June 20. 
 
 My young friend of the stockinged feet appeared 
 again to-day. I was able to identify him for he 
 told me his name, John Merriwether Sands as the 
 son of the department store recently established in 
 Mataquoit. 
 
 We talked of many things; wars, and rumors of 
 wars. It surprised me to find how untouched he was, 
 how little he knew about the world crisis. A young 
 American, what had he to do with war? His 
 country, safe between sheltering seas, had long for- 
 gotten war. A normal, healthy, active, most intelli- 
 gent youth in non-academic ways greatly 
 interested in athletics. He is a finer man physically 
 than any I saw among the young Canadians with 
 their eyes turned toward the east, yet there is some- 
 thing lacking that was in their faces. How is it 
 possible to be so untouched, so unregarding? 
 
 The youth of half the world goes up to its Cal- 
 vary ; the youth of this half plays football. 
 
 Yet, unless I read this boy's face wrong, he is one 
 fitted to march shoulder to shoulder with his fellows.
 
 28 A WORLD TO MEND 
 
 companionable, sympathetic, where he under- 
 stands. 
 
 What veil has fallen before his eyes? What lack 
 of imaginative insight, understanding, is here? Is 
 it that his parents, after the fashion of American 
 parents, have kept him in a child's world until to- 
 day? How can he have failed to know, to share the 
 anguish of Belgium, the anguish of France? 
 
 I feel in myself a yearning desire to help him 
 understand. Strange that one should wish to waken 
 you* 1 * to suffering! Yet the terrible facts are facts; 
 anguish is the lot of many millions to-day, and 
 no man can attain his full stature of manhood if he 
 ignore.
 
 June 25. 
 
 Reminded myself again that I must not spend, in 
 thought of war, the mental energy which I mean to 
 turn wholly into effort toward reconstruction. But 
 I find myself at a certain disadvantage, in my idle 
 hours, for no great amount of work has as yet come 
 my way. Books I have, for the most part, put be- 
 hind me, for the printed word has failed me; I want 
 to seek out wisdom by the seeing of the eyes, the 
 hearing of the ears, and the searching of the heart 
 of man, including my own. 
 
 I sit at my bench, with high resolve. If no one 
 comes to me, save those who have shoes to mend, 
 whose fault is it? If my kind do not come to me, 
 I will go out to mingle with them. 
 
 I take my hat and go down to that meeting place 
 of men, the village grocery. Silence falls upon a 
 talkative group as I enter. No one offers me a barrel 
 head to sit on; the last broken sentence stays sus- 
 pended in mid-air, where it was broken. I do not 
 know whether it is etiquette for me to find a place 
 on the counter and seat myself there; and no one 
 tells me. They build a little wall between me and 
 themselves; is this equality, fraternity? 
 
 What is it? Distrust? Do they suspect me of 
 dishonest intent? Is it that there is no common 
 background, that they, perhaps unconsciously, feel
 
 30 A WORLD TO MEND 
 
 that the currents of our lives have flowed too far 
 apart ever to mingle? 
 
 Gray-haired, I seek my kind and cannot find them. 
 The basis of trust between man and man, what is it? 
 
 I bought a pound of cheese and went home. The 
 bystanders thawed a little when they saw me pay 
 for the cheese. Is it simply money trust that lies 
 between man and man? 
 
 Yet I begin to know something of the lives of 
 my neighbors, if only the outside circumstances. 
 The Widow Frayne has inexhaustible information 
 about the inhabitants of Mataquoit, which she 
 shares with me, yet I cannot help thinking that, 
 though she knows the facts, she has somehow missed 
 the substance of understanding. The magic key of 
 sympathy, of right feeling, is not there. She sets 
 me to thinking of aspects of alleged progress during 
 our great scientific era; our failure to understand 
 real significances has often been in direct proportion 
 to the amount of information we have heaped up 
 about life and nature. There is nothing so untrue 
 as facts wrongly interpreted. 
 
 We are an ordinary community; there must be 
 scores of shore towns like this. From Round Towers, 
 the lordly estate of a great oil magnate, named 
 Brown, on the cliffs north of the village, and the 
 withdrawn, fenced-in mansions of the old families, 
 we range through prosperous two-story houses, and 
 white story-and-a-half cottages to the unpainted 
 wooden hut of old Mrs. Mooney, with a roof that 
 slopes down the back almost to the ground. 
 
 And I question myself, as I sit by my doorway, 
 smoking my pipe, or stroll up and down the village 
 street, how each and every one of these inhabitants
 
 A WORLD TO MEND 31 
 
 is fulfilling his citizenship in a democracy. For I 
 have set myself the large task in addition to 
 cobbling of studying my fellow villagers in their 
 several relations, civic and domestic, relations of 
 church and of state. I must watch in the street, the 
 market place, the church, these individuals of the 
 body politic, to discern their attitude toward a 
 citizen's duties and responsibilities. This is a 
 microcosm wherein I may read in little what is 
 written large in the length and breadth of this vast 
 country. 
 
 The task I set before me is not only of under- 
 standing, but of sympathizing. 
 
 It is on my tongue to say that the postmaster 
 shows, in his inadequately performed professional 
 duties, the rust of officialdom ; that my friend, Abel 
 Marks, the postman, betrays the democracy in the 
 very way he dawdles down the street, an hour late 
 with the mail ; that my other friend, Joe Hincks, the 
 policeman (it is of course apparent that I have not 
 yet penetrated the polite circles of Mataquoit), 
 loses daily in a seductive coffee house the sense he 
 should have, as an American citizen, that the future 
 of the world depends upon the way in which he 
 does his job; that all Mataquoit betrays too much 
 of slipshod ease. It is the young men who trouble 
 me most ; of the many I see on the street, in shops, 
 at the railway station, a few are alert and brisk, but 
 the majority with their shambling walk, their stoop- 
 ing shoulders, their hats tilted back, their evident 
 desire to appear worse than they are, embody very 
 ill our hopes for the future America. I have no 
 doubt that they possess virtues, are honest, good- 
 natured, and ready to spring at the cry of need,
 
 32 A WORLD TO MEND 
 
 but they lack, alas! the training necessary to 
 toughen their muscles, to train their minds, to set 
 their feet marching in unison with some sense of a 
 goal. 
 
 I walk sadly by the sea, asking myself if these and 
 others represent the principle of freedom for which 
 the world is fighting ; then I pull myself up sharply. 
 This old critical instinct will not down; how can I 
 remember that this is not a world to pull apart 
 and analyze, but a world to put together? We 
 must "hope evermore and believe" and act. 
 
 I will turn to my cobbler's bench; at least there 
 I am putting in stitches, not ripping them out. 
 
 If I am sometimes discouraged in my attempt to 
 dig deeper into knowledge of civic life which shows 
 much of selfishness, much of petty motive, I realize 
 that I am still a bit on the outside. The inner sacri- 
 fices, the homely heroisms of Mataquoit are not un- 
 rolled before my eyes. 
 
 I will be fair; I will be judicial. If, on one side of 
 my ledger, I range personalities and incidents that 
 suggest failure, on the other I will set down those 
 that stand for success, or partial success, and I will 
 endeavor to make this latter a long list. 
 
 I could write, I fancy, an article about Mataquoit 
 in the fashion of the muck-raking articles of a dozen 
 years ago, setting forth the delinquencies, the civic 
 sins of leading citizens. . . . Why not institute 
 another kind of article, trying to rake together the 
 virtues, private and public, of the inhabitants of a 
 town, setting forth instances of civic righteousness, 
 the good achievements? What services the news- 
 papers throughout the country could render in this, 
 the magazines! Headlines of goodness, as erstwhile.
 
 A WORLD TO MEND 33 
 
 and even now, of crime. . . . Three-inch type 
 advertising civic virtue, some prominent citizen's 
 disinterestedness, as startling news. 
 I will begin, as soon as I have the facts. 
 
 June 28. 
 
 In this great rushing together of the nations we 
 are aware of the conflict betwen autocracy and 
 democracy; and the thought of this lends dignity 
 even to the trivial aspects of my quiet session with 
 the democracy at home. I had not thought to be 
 upon the battle line ! It is curious, the way in which 
 my instinct has been leading me, a humble indi- 
 vidual, along the lines of cleavage between the na- 
 tions, the earthquake's path. 
 
 I have set myself to consider what are the prac- 
 tical proofs of gain under a free government. To find 
 these, one has to dig below the surface both of men 
 and of towns. The untidy streets, the unswept 
 corners, the floating bits of paper and the stationary 
 bits of orange peel here contrast badly with the 
 spick and span pavements and corners of autocracy. 
 Not only Berlin, but little German villages present 
 a cleaner face. 
 
 And the upright bearing, the brisk gait of the 
 sons of autocracy might seem to bear witness in its 
 favor, as one thinks of the shuffling feet, of the lazy 
 slouch of many of our free sons of America. Should 
 not the citizen of a free country stand upright? 
 
 Digging deeper, beneath externals, one knows of 
 course that there is no comparison. Better the 
 sorriest disorder of a world stumbling along the 
 ways of freedom than an orderly imperialism where 
 no man is free. Better that men should greet one
 
 34 
 
 another with easy impudence, than that they should 
 click their heels and make servile obeisance to officers 
 and excellencies whose hold over them is a hold of 
 brute force. Liberty is a priceless boon; only 
 through this can the right development of the in- 
 dividual man come, but should not a citizen of a 
 republic achieve by self-discipline more than can 
 be wrought in an autocracy by discipline from with- 
 out? How are we to outgrow all our slovenly and 
 unlovely ways, all manifestations of our freedom to 
 lounge and sit and sprawl in public as we please? 
 An old and flippant saying, heard long ago with a 
 sense of tolerant amusement, that it is the mission 
 of America to vulgarize the world, now brings me 
 sharp pain. One can but confess that the incentive 
 of liberty of action does not as yet seem so cogent, 
 in matters of street behaviour at least, as does pres- 
 sure applied from above. I see no accord between 
 the untidiness of mind and body, betrayed in much 
 of our practice, and our institutions, our opportunity 
 to achieve citizenship of a finer type than the world 
 has yet seen. 
 
 Yet, as I hear man talking with man in the streets, 
 I am impressed by the general intelligence. These 
 men are reading about the war and know not only 
 its events but something of its bearing. I hear them 
 discussing the atrocities, and in the often uncouth 
 comments I find proof that our country has made 
 great gain, whatever unrealized aspects of true 
 democracy may be here. There is profound con- 
 tempt for force as force among these men, high and 
 low, kempt and unkempt. 
 
 If one hundred and ten million citizens already 
 know that might does not mean right, freedom is
 
 A WORLD TO MEND 35 
 
 justified of her children, atrocious though their 
 manners be. 
 
 To the good also might be counted a good nature, 
 a tolerance, a surface friendliness, an amiable sense 
 of the relation of man to man. Americans on the 
 streets and the street corners give you the impres- 
 sion of feeling that they are all good fellows together 
 in a fairly good worlcj. 
 
 Yet in this very tolerance is a danger, for it 
 carries with it a disregard of standards, even a resent- 
 ment. There is a tendency to call a man with con- 
 viction one deep in his own conceit. 
 
 June 30. 
 
 In my adventure into democracy it would be diffi- 
 cult to tell how much I owe to Tim. To know him 
 is a liberal education, at least in cobbling. To begin 
 with, he understands the business, which I do not. 
 He knows the old customers and gives them warm 
 welcome, snuffing at their shoes as if he knew where 
 they ought to be worn out. He is able to discern, 
 in some occult way, through his sensitive, slightly 
 lifted nostrils, which of my visitors come with bona 
 fide business motive, which are drawn by idle curi- 
 osity to find out something about the new master of 
 the shop. These he embarrasses by sniffing at their 
 shoes. He knows all there is to know about boys. 
 
 The art of advertising he understands to perfec- 
 tion, barking always at the right minute. Well- 
 known figures are greeted by a single, short, sharp 
 bark, as if by way of suggestion that business is 
 going on at the old stand ; strangers are startled by 
 prolonged, vociferous barking, as if Tim were de- 
 termined that they should look up and see my sign.
 
 36 A WORLD TO MEND 
 
 He is an incorruptible guardian ; I can leave him 
 in charge indefinitely, with the shop door open, and 
 not so much as a shoe string will disappear. If one 
 ever should disappear, I know it will be over his 
 dead body. 
 
 I am learning democracy of my dog; he has an 
 almost ideal attitude toward his fellow creatures, 
 though I cannot help feeling that he thinks democ- 
 racy needs a deal of watching. 
 
 He is an admirable "mixer"; I often look at him 
 with envy, marvelling at his art of making friends. 
 He evidently finds no difficulty whatever in under- 
 standing humankind and drawing near it. A sniff, 
 a swift look, a more or less tentative wagging of the 
 tail; then, if the stranger is found worthy, a lick 
 on the hand with a friendly tongue, a snuggling trot 
 at the heels, invitations to be caressed on head and 
 ears, leading to complete understanding, com- 
 plete intimacy. 
 
 I wonder, wistfully, how he does it; perhaps all 
 is different when one has a tail to wag. It seems 
 unfair for certain of nature's creatures to have so 
 much more potent means of expression than others. 
 Language is a poor substitute for some that we have 
 foregone.
 
 VI 
 
 July 2. 
 
 It strikes me that, during the last few days, 
 people crowd my shop with more than necessary 
 insistence. Men, women, boys, girls, come bringing 
 shoes for repairing; my shop corners are piled high 
 with slippers, boots, and shoes, some of which seem 
 in little need of mending. There must be some 
 rumour about the newcomer; curiosity is the best 
 advertiser. Perhaps my lack of skill makes them 
 suspicious. I take care to be putting in pegs or 
 waxing my thread when customers are here, lest 
 they see how awkward I am with my needle. 
 
 They have brought me more shoe problems than 
 I can cope with, for I have not been long a cobbler 
 and sadly need practice. Yet it is the only profes- 
 sion that I have ever had, and I take pride in it. 
 The Scotchman who taught me, Angus McDonell, 
 up in Ontario by the lake where I was fishing last 
 summer, predicted no great future for me in this 
 work. 
 
 "Mon," he said, when I began, "if your fingers 
 was all great toes you couldna' handle the needle 
 worse." 
 
 I resolved to show that Scotchman, for I shall not 
 be done by dispraise out of my life work. In fact, 
 before I left him to return to the States, I half- 
 soled a pair of boots for him, charging him nothing, 
 and he said that they "were na so badly done."
 
 38 A WORLD TO MEND 
 
 He added that if I were but five and twenty years 
 younger, it would come easier. I had suspected this 
 myself, but a man is not to blame for his many 
 years. 
 
 There is not much time for thinking, yet this is 
 perhaps well for me who, since boyhood, have done 
 little but think. These days bring sharper and 
 sharper realization of a life unused; I must double 
 my efforts to find a place in the actual working 
 order of our commonwealth. I who have existed, 
 for five full decades, outside of life, have suffered 
 life rather than lived it, must do my bit, even if 
 it be hard, discouraging; even if the stitches which 
 I put into old Mrs. White's second-best pair of shoes 
 will not hold. So may I escape from the mist of 
 special privilege and the maze of words and of ab- 
 stract thought that have encompassed my years, 
 and, perchance, touch reality. 
 
 July 5. 
 
 My young friend, John Merriweather Sands, put 
 his head through my window to-day and gave me 
 cheerful greeting. To tell truth, I had been think- 
 ing about him and wishing that he would come. 
 
 I gravely asked him if he had brought me any 
 business. 
 
 "No, but you don't mind my watching you, do 
 you?" he asked. "I might learn your trade; I am 
 not good at books." 
 
 I invited him in and gave him a lesson in cutting 
 out leather for soling a boot. It was not many 
 minutes before he did it better than I, but I did not 
 tell him so. Where would the teaching profession 
 be if we admitted these things?
 
 A WORLD TO MEND 39 
 
 I told him that he must practise, and might do 
 so whenever he wished; I realized that I wanted 
 him to come back. 
 
 He was chaffing much of the time; asking me 
 sudden questions about Memorial Hall at Harvard, 
 the Yale campus, the Alumni building at Princeton, 
 the architecture of the Leland Stanford buildings. 
 I was wary enough to evade direct answers, not that 
 there is any reason for concealment, for his curiosity 
 is wholly friendly, but that it is amusing to play 
 the man of mystery with him. 
 
 I slowly make him out. He is no student; he 
 has an eager, intelligent mind, but it does not find 
 its best nurture in books ; rather, in men and things. 
 He is interested in people and has all the friendli- 
 ness and faith in human nature of an unhurt young 
 puppy, a young Newfoundland puppy whom no- 
 body has ever struck. Here is boundless energy, as 
 yet unfocussed. He is a great athlete, full of love 
 of the game and of fair play in the game, and herein 
 lies much unconscious chivalry. So far, his sole 
 sense of responsibility has come through athletics. 
 He is sympathetic with any suffering he can 
 see, as yet incapable (perhaps long ancestral 
 habit is responsible for this) of imagining any 
 suffering that he does not see; honest as the 
 daylight; quick to wrath in a good cause that he 
 understands; almost wholly unaware of the world 
 of ideas in which I have spent my life. He is still 
 largely, I think, saying over his father's and mother's 
 ideas, and rather poor they are. We talked much 
 about the war, and I told him that he and his fellows 
 could not afford to miss anything that would make 
 them understand the appalling disaster that had
 
 40 A WORLD TO MEND 
 
 come upon mankind, or the efforts of those who 
 were struggling to help ; that it was upon his genera- 
 tion that the task of rebuilding the world would fall. 
 
 No one could be more utterly unlike my own son, 
 if I had one ; why do I yearn over him in a kind of 
 vicarious parenthood? 
 
 As he went to-day, calling out with a laugh, 
 "Good-by, Socrates," I was stung by a sudden, deep 
 desire to help him make good, to have him make 
 good at any cost. Then I pulled myself up in aston- 
 ishment. What do I mean, at my age, by a desire 
 so intense, by feeling thus keenly about somebody 
 else's son, a son of people I do not even know? 
 
 Sons of people I do not know have been ignored 
 in my life hitherto. 
 
 July 6. 
 
 My mind is at times a bit bewildered by the con- 
 trast between the varied aspects of this simple and 
 friendly world and the sudden gulfs that yawn at 
 one's feet. 
 
 In spite of my resolution to fix my mind upon 
 the world beyond the war, in and out, and in and 
 out of all our peaceful days and ways the war goes 
 winding ; across the beauty of summer meadows with 
 their daisies and their sorrel, one sees the long lines 
 of pictured transports and pictured troop trains, the 
 loaded camions, the faces of soldiers bravely smiling 
 good-by out of the car windows. Such pictures move 
 on in one's mind, a thin, endless film, before the 
 actual scene that one is looking upon. And, more 
 insistent still, come the pictures of actual trench 
 attack, the storming, the going over the top, the 
 gray-white smoke rising after the explosions. One
 
 A WORLD TO MEND 41 
 
 sees the British soldiers swinging into line, going out, 
 singing, to battle; one sees the laughing faces of 
 those, fewer in number, who come back cheering and 
 throwing their caps high into the air. 
 
 One is haunted by bits of description read and 
 memories of pictures seen, and on the dim confines 
 of sleep one sees great guns in desolate lands where 
 you can see the face of no living thing. As they 
 lift their heads, belching out, like undreamed 
 monsters, fire and smoke, it seems the place of 
 dragons of which the Hebrew prophets wrote, with 
 broken, shattered branches and blasted tree trunks, 
 showing that the world was once alive. 
 
 The intense preoccupation of many of us with this 
 grim struggle is almost a proof that that which men 
 are fighting for is already partly achieved. It is 
 shaping our present selves, as it is shaping the future 
 destinies of the world. We never escape from this 
 war and the thought of it; we are prisoners all. It 
 is as if destiny were saying: Henceforth thou shalt 
 not escape the bonds of thy brother's soul. Every- 
 thing turns to it; it is the undercurrent of all our 
 thoughts, and has been, since August, 1914. Every 
 line of thought takes us ( ultimately, back to it ; every 
 book that we open has, somewhere, that within its 
 pages which reminds us. There is no path so peace- 
 ful that it fails to lead us to those bloody battle 
 fields; the courage of those who fight and fall there 
 is a measure for our after years. Along all the ways 
 of life and suffering it has set minds and hearts 
 stirring, with a deepened sense of the significance 
 of human experience. 
 
 Even Tim, sleeping in the sunshine, his head on 
 one paw, dreaming of the bone last gnawed and of
 
 42 A WORLD TO MEND 
 
 the bone to come, even Tim, in these tragic days 
 of continued loss, is more than Tim. He is all the 
 dogs of France, of Belgium, waiting by the roadside 
 or at the shell of the old home, for the lost master 
 to come back; all the shell-torn, frightened dogs of 
 all the martyred towns and villages. 
 
 He is all the patient pack dogs of the refugees, 
 helping drag the family burden, clothing, bedding, 
 kitchen utensils, babies, grandmother. 
 
 He is all the brave dogs of the battle fields, search- 
 ing untiringly for human wounded, as selfless in 
 devotion, as utterly given to human service, as if 
 his kind had not been kicked and maltreated, tor- 
 tured, vivisected on the rack for real or fancied 
 human progress. Humanity betrays them ; they love 
 on, and serve. . . . Already Red Cross Dogs are 
 enrolled among the saints. 
 
 July 8. 
 
 I heard two men speaking as they were passing 
 my window. Said one : "Some think he is a German 
 
 spy." 
 
 As they went on, I heard a half remark about 
 hands that looked unused to working and about 
 letters that came with foreign postmarks. 
 
 So this is what results from trying to be one with 
 my kind! I eat and sleep and work exactly as the 
 rest of them do, except that I work harder than 
 many. Yet I am uncomfortably aware that I am 
 something of a mystery to them, a man apart. And 
 I regret my whole past life, that study of exclu- 
 sions, preferences, that laborious fitting myself not 
 to be one with my fellows. 
 
 My young friend Jack took this question up with
 
 A WORLD TO MEND 43 
 
 me one day; this use of his first name follows his 
 shy suggestion that everybody calls him Jack. He 
 drops in frequently, with tennis racquet or golf 
 clubs, to sit in my armchair or on the section of a 
 huge log standing endwise in the corner, to watch 
 me work, talking to me in a picturesque slang, which 
 I am often at a loss to understand. If I like, more 
 even than I admit to myself, to have him come, 
 I do not say so; a cobbler should be a man of few 
 words. 
 
 Of late his manner has been slightly protective. 
 
 "You see," he said, with embarrassed kindliness, 
 "people are saying rather nasty things about you; 
 suspecting things. They've got a hunch that some- 
 thing's wrong." 
 
 "Don't I give the right change?" I asked him 
 anxiously. 
 
 "Oh, it's nothing of that kind, but you never tell 
 anything about what you did before you came 
 here " 
 
 "And cobbling," I suggested, "is a favorite pursuit 
 in a place I will not mention. Cheer them up by 
 telling them that if my term had been a long one, 
 I should have learned my trade better. No, you 
 may as well assure them at once that I have never 
 robbed a bank." 
 
 There is nothing in life that I like better than to 
 hear this boy laugh. 
 
 "Nobody has suggested yet that you've done time, 
 but I did hear Phil Landers say that you 'don't talk 
 English like folks in Mataquoit.' ' 
 
 "I admit it," said I. "Thank God for that!" 
 
 Jack flung his cap into the corner; it was clear 
 that his task was not to his liking.
 
 44 A WORLD TO MEND 
 
 "Oh, but you told him that you had come here to 
 turn over a new leaf, to start out fresh. Now you 
 know what a small town is; lots of people are just 
 waiting for bones to pick. Maybe it would be better 
 for you to ante up and tell them who and what you 
 are, and where you pitched your tent before. I 
 haven't the least curiosity, you know; it is just that 
 they can make it beastly unpleasant for you. You 
 see, in this country, you pay high for being some- 
 thing of a philosopher. In circles like ours it isn't 
 done." 
 
 "But I've given them my real name; there is 
 nothing to tell them." 
 
 "Oh, yes. there is! Tell them how you came by 
 hands that look like that ! And by your vocabulary ; 
 and your books. I've never told them anything 
 about your Greek books, but they've found out some- 
 how." 
 
 "It couldn't be Tim," I suggested. 
 
 He laughed. "You know and I know that you 
 can trust a dog." 
 
 "My vocabulary isn't so extensive," I told him. 
 "Such as it is, I achieved it in spite of a college 
 education." 
 
 "What college?" said the boy. 
 
 "Your own," I admitted. 
 
 "Well, what's wrong with your past, anyway?" 
 
 "Nothing. It is irreproachable, so far as acts go. 
 That's the trouble; I've never done anything, even 
 anything bad. I have sat still and let life happen. 
 It's the sins of omission, my boy, that count most 
 heavily; of these you must not, like myself, be 
 guilty.'" 
 
 We sat long in the late afternoon, talking; then
 
 A WORLD TO MEND 45 
 
 Jack went away, remarking that he would reassure 
 Mataquoit about the bank. It is long since I have 
 enjoyed anything so much as watching Jack's face 
 when I talked to him; for a face so ruddy and so 
 boyish, it is extraordinarily expressive; there is 
 something there quickly and sensitively responsive; 
 I almost have the feeling of playing on him as if 
 he were a stringed instrument. 
 
 He rouses all the creative instinct there is within 
 me; over and over something within me keeps say- 
 ing: "I will make me a citizen of this young man." 
 I want him to act, to play his part, to realize early 
 his responsibilities to his fellow man. In some 
 strange fashion, in him my unlived life seems there 
 still to live; here seems almost a chance to begin 
 over again, with all one's experience to aid. I share 
 his youth, its audacities, its uncertainties, its resolu- 
 tions; and I find my passionate interest in getting 
 him started overmastering all other interests. 
 
 I find the human race more interesting because of 
 him.
 
 VII 
 
 July 9. 
 
 Shopkeeping Mataquoit unlocks its doors betimes 
 and offers its wares ; rural Mataquoit drives in with 
 produce and drives away; ancestral Mataquoit, if 
 I may put it that way, comes out to purchase, then 
 goes back to click its wrought-iron gates behind it, 
 shutting the world out. Possibly in town meeting 
 the walls of class break down a bit, but in church, as 
 on the street and in the market place, the line of 
 cleavage is unmistakable. Though I am learning 
 much by regarding my New England from the bot- 
 tom up, instead of from the top down, I find it the 
 same old world, with the same laissez-faire attitude 
 of which I and my kind have always been guilty. 
 
 It is this New England on whose shores Pilgrim 
 feet first stepped that is the greatest culprit, the 
 country over, a slacker in the great task of democ- 
 racy. She sits supinely on a wreck of ancestral 
 achievement, counting genealogies when she should 
 be girding her loins for the struggle, should be find- 
 ing new ways to pass on to newcomers the principles 
 inherited from our forefathers. She cherishes as 
 keen a sense of caste as England cherishes, some- 
 times without justification in the matter of actual 
 family history, and without the inherited feudal 
 sense of responsibility for the lower that has lent 
 humanity to the system as it exists in England.
 
 A WORLD TO MEND 47 
 
 In this New England, which should be a fountain 
 pure and undefiled of democracy, is an intellectual 
 and spiritual shiftlessness of which I am ashamed. 
 
 For I am not attacking; I am confessing. 
 
 Measuring my fifty odd years by this new measure 
 of a great and terrible time which demands that a 
 man shall be wholly a man, I find them failure. I 
 look back upon much appreciated, gladly received, 
 accepted with a not undiscerning taste. What to 
 accept, what to reject, I have, in a way, known. But 
 I have been more or less passive; too much have I 
 let life be a spectacle, passing before my eyes; I 
 have not played my part. The stamp of my finer 
 critical judgment I have not left anywhere upon my 
 country; the masses do not know through me any 
 better how to choose. My insight, my fastidious- 
 ness will die with me. ... A man must do posi- 
 tive things and must hand himself to the future, if 
 not physically, then intellectually and spiritually. 
 Many men do both. 
 
 It may be partly because the formative years of 
 my life were passed in a period critical, analytical, 
 with lijttle of the vigor of active faith anywhere, 
 and little of creative activity. There was a dead 
 stagnation about those years of the eighties and the 
 early nineties; it was ebb tide in religious, in intel- 
 lectual, and in national life. The causes of this are 
 too subtle for complete analysis, but some of them 
 are fairly clear. The great wave of all-conquering 
 scientific dogmatism had somewhat spent itself, but 
 mankind was sitting paralyzed under the shock of 
 it. It had proved less potent than had been ex- 
 pected in solving all human problems, but there was 
 nothing as yet to take its place. In our national
 
 48 A WORLD TO MEND 
 
 life there was a sense of deadness, a lack of great 
 issues, little to strike fire in the heart of youth. 
 
 And the great university at which I was educated 
 I find partly at fault. It should have made me 
 aware of the vital issues of existence ; it should have 
 trained me to be less a critic, more an actor in life, 
 with deeper concern for the part I was to play there- 
 in. One thing and one thing only it taught me 
 thoroughly, how to keep apart from my kind. 
 
 It was only through athletics that men gained a 
 sense of the necessity of unity of life and of effort, 
 of a goal, something to win through struggle, 
 through fair play. All this has grown since my day, 
 till it threatens to absorb the whole of college life. 
 To Jack, I can see, it represents the sum and sub- 
 stance of university training. But my slight bodily 
 infirmity kept me out of athletics, as it is keeping 
 me now out of France. 
 
 One cannot blame the country at large for its 
 waning spiritual morale in those days, but I most 
 keenly censure this institution which should have 
 been a stronghold of faith and inspiration. Here, 
 certainties of thought and of action should be held 
 high above all ebb and change; the dignity of in- 
 tellectual and spiritual effort should be forever main- 
 tained. 
 
 But this was the golden age of the mere con- 
 noisseur, the dilettante, the man who watched, not 
 shared, life. My alma mater taught me surfaces, 
 polish, plausibilities, taught me to talk more or less 
 knowingly of other men's achievement; taught me 
 the analytical methods of an analytical age. It never 
 taught me to achieve. My fellow alumni say, with 
 an air of finali ty, "I do not like this or that" which
 
 A WORLD TO MEND 49 
 
 some other man has done; rarely do I hear on their 
 lips: "I have done this or that." To comment with 
 taste on the achievements of others, for the most 
 part with polite disapproval, more rarely with some 
 slight measure of praise, was considered enough. As 
 I look back upon it all, I can see that this was 
 almost treason, in a democratic country, where the 
 weight of the national life should rest on each man's 
 shoulders, this failure to teach us to do or die; 
 this teaching that amused comment on the work of 
 others was sufficient. How many of my classmates, 
 like myself, have drifted up and down the tide of 
 life in the country, not sharing, not caring, annoyed 
 by vulgar tastes and corrupt politics, but not trying 
 to better things! 
 
 More and more I realize that the great thing need- 
 ful here is a profound sense on the part of the privi- 
 leged of democratic responsibility, an accounting to 
 the people for every grain of ability, of finer emo- 
 tion, of deeper insight. 
 
 July 10. 
 
 I had resolutely put out of sight everything that 
 would place barriers between me and my kind. 
 Books which I bring to the shop to while away the 
 hours when I am not working I usually hide. To- 
 day Jack, rummaging in my box of waste leather, 
 discovered my Greek Testament, and held it up, 
 whistling. 
 
 "My mother," he remarked, with a twinkle, "is 
 making trouble for me. She says that I shall do 
 worse than ever in college if I spend so much time 
 with an ignorant man." 
 
 "Meaning me?" I asked.
 
 50 A WORLD TO MEND 
 
 "Meaning you." 
 
 There is something in the twinkle in Jack's eye 
 which exactly responds to something which I feel 
 in my own. 
 
 Later in the day I was surprised by a visit from 
 a lady. 
 
 I had not known how hard 1 was trying to bring 
 up my young friend so that he would be aware of 
 his responsibilities in this world which is being re- 
 created before our eyes as in the first day, until his 
 mother came to tell me not to try to influence him. 
 
 I admit that my first glance at Mrs. Sands preju- 
 diced me a bit against her, for my eyes were bent 
 over my cobbler's bench, and I saw her feet first. 
 I have an excessive dislike of seeing middle-aged 
 ladies in short skirts, with shoes whose several inches 
 of heel and pointed toes belie the intelligence of their 
 owners. These ladies usually look hot and tired 
 and ought to rouse a feeling of pity, but they do not. 
 
 She told me her name, and I rose to offer her the 
 one chair my shop contains. 
 
 She had on a smart sailor hat, suitable for sixteen ; 
 a string of pearls ; a white veil, hugely dotted. She 
 was not at all unlike the picture I had made of her 
 in my mind as I touched this or that insensitive 
 spot in her son, though I should not, of course, have 
 been equal to all the details of her fashionable cos- 
 tume. The wide stripes of her skirt, for instance, I 
 could never have imagined. 
 
 I saw at once that she was up-to-date; that she 
 was prominent in affairs. I wondered at once how 
 many clubs she belonged to; perhaps as many as 
 there were black buttons on her white shoes. 
 
 She told me that she would like to have me take
 
 A WORLD TO MEND 51 
 
 a stitch in the handle of her shopping bag; and, as 
 I did so, suspecting that the stitches had been cut 
 to give her an excuse for entering, she studied me 
 closely, while her tongue ran on. Jack had spoken 
 to her of me, she said, not without condescension; 
 she understood from him that I was quite a char- 
 acter. 
 
 I could see that she wanted me to understand dis- 
 tinctly that she did not belong to Mataquoit; she 
 was not a small-town woman, but a woman of the 
 world. Yes, they would spend next winter here, 
 but they were really only summer residents; her 
 husband was getting his business here started, 
 she called it his Establishment. Jack would be 
 away at college; she dreaded the loneliness and the 
 lack of intellectual companionship in Mataquoit. 
 
 As her rapid speech flowed on, I learned that she 
 was an adherent of the school of New Thought, a 
 pacifist, and that she held other convictions that 
 are the very foam on the crest of the advancing wave 
 of our alleged civilization. While I was marvelling 
 at these uninvited confidences, made to a mere 
 cobbler, she came to the point with astonishing di- 
 rectness. She had felt that I was exercising an 
 undue influence on her boy. 
 
 "But, Mrs. Sands, what can I have said or done?" 
 
 She flushed a little and moved unsteadily about, 
 nobody could stand squarely on those heels. 
 
 "You said that, after the Germans crossed the 
 Belgian line, there was, for any thinking person, but 
 one side to the question. Now I know perfectly 
 conscientious people, people of lovely characters, 
 who think that Germany was justified." 
 
 "Madam," I answered, "you must pardon me, but
 
 52 A WORLD TO MEND 
 
 I belong to on old-fashioned school, believing in the 
 essentially sacred nature of agreements." 
 
 I shall, thank Heaven, get none of her foolish 
 shoes to mend! 
 
 "You told him that it was our responsibility; that 
 we ought to be helping England and France, who 
 were fighting our battles." 
 
 I was puzzled, for I was not conscious of having 
 said all these things, I who had come to Mataquoit 
 to learn, not teach. I must have been thinking 
 aloud. 
 
 Fighting was terrible, she went on ; didn't I think 
 so? My question as to whether the loss of our 
 national honor would not be greater if we went on 
 letting the right be crushed brought from her the 
 response that no sacrifice could be too great if it 
 kept us out of war. 
 
 I was forced to say at last: 
 
 "But, Madam, you talk to me as if I were the 
 butcher's dog, and advocated fighting for fighting's 
 sake. Like you, I think peace the greatest thing on 
 earth; I should choose peace, always, if there were 
 a choice. But here we have no choice ; we ought to 
 be standing shoulder to shoulder with those who are 
 fighting for the right." 
 
 The indictment continued : I had obtained a hold 
 on Jack, partly through what I said ; partly through 
 books about the war I had lent him. Did I not 
 think it a pity that the mind of youth should be 
 soiled by these things? Jack was not a reader; he 
 might have escaped knowledge of much of the 
 horror. It meant so much to have the young grow 
 up happy that she had tried to keep all knowledge of 
 unpleasant things from her son. Such a joyous
 
 A WORLD TO MEND 53 
 
 youth he had had! It was better not to let the 
 young know how hard life was; this modern system 
 of education, which made everything easy, was much 
 wiser than the old. Did I not think so? 
 
 I did not. It was surprising how quickly my 
 views in regard to the modern system of pedagogy 
 ripened under the gaze of those restless blue eyes. 
 
 It was much better for him not to know what 
 Germany was doing ; she wanted her son to keep his 
 little-boy faith in humanity. It was as if I had 
 observed the female ostrich instructing her young 
 in the art of keeping its head under the sand. 
 
 No, I did not agree with her in any point whatso- 
 ever. I told her so in much detail, punctuating, I 
 fear, my remarks with my awl. This may not have 
 been polite. 
 
 What treachery you have been guilty of, you 
 parents of to-day, in teaching your children that 
 there is nothing hard in life! It is as if you were 
 scouts, on ahead, knowing perfectly well that a huge 
 enemy force is there, and that there has got to be 
 fighting; as if you came back with this knowledge 
 and told the young that there was no one there. 
 Treachery, cruelty, Madam ! Life is damnably hard 
 (I beg your pardon), and the young ought to be 
 prepared for it. Life is a battle, whatever way 
 you take it, and the young have got to fight it. 
 Heaven help those who have to face it so kinder- 
 gartened, so Montessoried, so emasculated that they 
 will sit down and cry at the first round. 
 
 How much of this I said to Mrs. Sands I have no 
 idea. The man within me who does the thinking 
 sometimes has a bit of discretion in regard to the 
 amount that he passes on for the speaking man to 
 say.
 
 54 A WORLD TO MEND 
 
 After all, she was Jack's mother; and when she 
 asked me to promise that I would not in any way 
 try to influence him I promised to try, and she went 
 tottering away on her foolish heels. 
 
 As I tapped, the childhood and the youth of this 
 boy passed before me; this mother had evidently 
 done for him all that she knew how to do. I could 
 see that she had brought him up in accordance with 
 the latest thing in germ- theory; the stages of his 
 sterilized babyhood passed before me, bearing wit- 
 ness to her vigilance. What grim irony that this 
 over-guarded generation should be flung into the 
 filth and stench and horror of the trenches! Will 
 it there recover some of the healthy unconsciousness 
 in regard to physical matter that has been lost dur- 
 ing many years? 
 
 But alas, for American motherhood without real 
 vision! The sole definite teaching he had ever re- 
 ceived had been about his body. Born in an age of 
 negation, of half acceptances, the only positive asser- 
 tions being those of science, he had been trained 
 by his mother, who had doubtless kept pace with 
 advancing thought through digests in popular maga- 
 zines, not to believe anything very hard, but to 
 keep the shell, the outward conformity, lest, after 
 all, something in the old faith should prove true. 
 Not that one mourns the lack of dogmatic theologi- 
 cal teaching for the young; one mourns the lack of 
 affirmation of the reality of things divine. How 
 shall an age spiritually trimming bring forth young 
 with that deeper insight which is the essential con- 
 dition of real progress? 
 
 I felt much more potential seriousness in Jack 
 than the transitional teaching, the external educa-
 
 A WORLD TO MEND 55 
 
 tion of his generation has ever brought out; there 
 are deeps here which his mother has never fathomed. 
 
 What were the boy's intellectual and spiritual re- 
 lations with his father, I wondered? I did not know, 
 but I the Iit that I could surmise with some con- 
 viction. 
 
 His father is proprietor of Sands' Emporium; 
 nothing hi life seems to him so important as that 
 Jack should carry on this business here and in other 
 towns. I have seen him sitting in church, his face 
 a noncommittal mask, like that on many an Ameri- 
 can citizen; I have seen him walking the floor of 
 his shop, among the wares, silks, linens, and hose, 
 with his soul in his eyes. 
 
 "My soul dwelleth among the ribbons of the bar- 
 gain counter." 
 
 Kingdoms may fall; Belgian women suffer rape; 
 children be mutilated ; the shackles that the German 
 people wear come nearer our wrists, but it does not 
 trouble this man, so long as Sands' Emporium goes 
 on as usual, with its china department, its dry-goods 
 department, its department for kitchen wares. 
 
 These parents between them, despite a hard- 
 working ancestry, despite the fact that the father 
 toils early and late, have brought up this stalwart 
 youth like the lily of the field that neither toils nor 
 spins. Duty, service, work for home or for country, 
 none of these considerations have ever been im- 
 pressed upon him. 
 
 There he stands, with a radiance of youth and of 
 health about him, representing unhurt young 
 America. With the lowering cloud above us growing 
 darker and darker, what will he become?
 
 VIII 
 
 July 12. 
 
 I gave my left thumb a bad prick to-day, so bad 
 that I had to make a leather hood for it out of one 
 of my last pair of gloves. 
 
 I cannot claim that I am a good cobbler; an 
 efficiency expert would undoubtedly condemn both 
 many of my stitches and the time it takes me to 
 make them. But, inasmuch as it is the most efficient 
 who have gone most wrong in our day, I take heart 
 of courage. The final balancing of things, the sum- 
 ming up in the Great Ledger which will correct 
 the errors hi mine is a more delicate process than 
 our best thinkers have discovered, and many of 
 those who have reckoned most clearly have reckoned 
 most wrong. Working in my inefficient way I have 
 time to think about the question as to when the 
 initial mistake was made by those supermen who 
 have achieved everything except the one thing 
 needful. They would have gained more had they 
 achieved less, had they spent their mental energy 
 in trying to think out the right of things. 
 
 The Eternal Balance will not be in favor of 
 mechanical expertness, of skill with mere things. 
 
 July 14. 
 
 Still Jack comes to sit on my doorstep and talk 
 with me as I take my stitches or drive my pegs.
 
 A WORLD TO MEND 57 
 
 Keeping my promise to his mother, I have ceased 
 to speak of the world crisis; he watches me, quizzi- 
 cally, as he now and then introduces the subject 
 himself. My silence seems to rouse in him an im- 
 mense curiosity, and from the questions that he asks 
 me I can see that he is making swift progress in 
 reaching some understanding of the present pre- 
 dicament of the human race. Perhaps I am be- 
 ginning to rely too much on his companionship; I 
 have found myself, in these last days, watching for 
 his footsteps, which I can detect far down the street, 
 and a bit impatient at the passing footsteps that 
 are not Jack's. 
 
 Meanwhile, I keep steadily at work. By day I 
 keep my mind busy with my task, but my nights 
 are full of troubled questioning. At home I find 
 each night my candle ; my window open to the leafy 
 branches beyond which lies the sea; white walls, 
 relieved by the many-colored patchwork quilt upon 
 my waiting bed, and my quiet. The cool night air 
 with its sea wind on my face, and sleep, why 
 should I have these things when the noisome horror 
 of the trenches is the lot of so many of my kind? I 
 walk softly, ashamed of my manhood, and yet my 
 years forbid that I should go. 
 
 How far have we gone toward realization of the 
 nature of this crisis? To what extent is America in 
 her inmost soul sharing in this awful struggle? I 
 watch, thinking that the signs of a great awakening 
 increase; and then, all seem to have dropped back 
 into the old indifference, the old selfishness, in spite 
 of the increasing menace to civilization itself, in spite 
 of the long series of disasters from the Dardanelles 
 to Fort Vaux, in which our cause seems losing
 
 58 A WORLD TO MEND 
 
 ground. Here we have food and drink, men seem 
 to say, and safety, for the sea is wide. Why trouble? 
 
 And I cover my face with my hands, in shame for 
 my kind. What children are we of those who dared 
 all for liberty if we can stand aside and fail to help 
 in the struggle of millions of men for liberty akin 
 to that which we have inherited, not ourselves 
 achieved? 
 
 My thought comes always back to Jack ; had I but 
 this boy's years! Perhaps this is why his face 
 haunts me : I envy him his chance. 
 
 In the long night hours I have much time, too 
 much, for speculation. We are quivering nowadays 
 with a sense of great change. Are we at the end of 
 a civilization, dying as Rome died, or are we at the 
 beginning of a new and better era? 
 
 How many times in the waxing and waning of 
 kingdoms and of empires have people asked them- 
 selves this question? Only the years can tell. Cer- 
 tain it is, there is a stir and stress, a rush of deep 
 currents of life, for those who have souls to be aware, 
 such as were not known in my days of youth or of 
 early middle age. 
 
 As I find myself yielding to these insistent 
 thoughts, as to whether this is indeed the end of 
 civilization, a passionate denial comes in the thought 
 of Jack. It is for us to make such as these aware 
 of their unexampled opportunity; for such as these 
 to carry out our highest hopes and dreams. 
 
 It is impossible to think of national or interna- 
 tional decadence in the face of such young eyes as 
 his. Whenever he is here, I feel that this is not 
 the collapse of a civilization, but the beginning of 
 a new era.
 
 A WORLD TO MEND 59 
 
 July 15. 
 
 Clear and sunshiny summer weather, with 
 the fragrance of new-cut hay abroad, mingled with 
 that of roses and many blossoming things. 
 
 This afternoon an event occurred. Looking up 
 for a minute as I was putting a patch on the post- 
 master's shoe, I noticed a span of high-bred horses 
 stepping down the village street, driven by a young 
 girl. Many a team have I seen in Mataquoit but 
 never a team like this; as I was admiring both the 
 pair and the way in which the driver held the reins, 
 a motor-cycle flashed sputtering past. There was 
 a sudden plunging, the smart trap swerved peril- 
 ously, and I should have been alarmed if I had not 
 recognized the superb horsemanship with which the 
 crisis was met. I was turning to my work again, 
 when I saw that the team was stopped, a groom 
 standing at their heads. The slender driver sprang 
 to the ground ; there was a swift examination of the 
 harness ; then I saw that she was coming toward my 
 shop. 
 
 I put down my needle and watched her; she 
 looked incredibly young and tensely alive, with all 
 the strength of her young mind and soul and body 
 still to spend. There was a spring in her walk that 
 I have seldom seen in that of young girls, a sug- 
 gestion of repressed energy, a reserve of force. She 
 wore, I fancy, the simplest and the costliest white 
 dress in Mataquoit, or in the whole State of 
 Maine. It was a fresh, salt-sea day, and she seemed 
 to bring with her the tang of the bracing sea air, 
 with the breath of summer roses. 
 
 There was something so compelling in the swift 
 white figure that I held my breath, for I had been
 
 60 A WORLD TO MEND 
 
 thinking half consciously, as I put in my stitches, 
 of the war and its horrors, of shells crashing in the 
 trenches, and the outcries of wounded men. As she 
 came, straight, slim, and white, with a half-boyish 
 look, some thought of the herald angels flitted 
 through my mind, and I half expected to hear her 
 say 
 
 "Peace on Earth." 
 
 Instead she asked me to mend a strap ; one of the 
 lines had broken. 
 
 She watched my hands intently as I worked; it 
 vexed me to have her see how awkward I was in the 
 management of my needle, and I jabbed my finger 
 almost to the bone, but made no outcry. There 
 was a little flicker of sympathy in her gray eyes, for 
 she saw and understood. 
 
 Straps ought not to break in that fashion, she 
 observed. 
 
 I suggested that the war was already making a 
 difference in the quality of things one could get. 
 
 "It's a horrid war," she said idly, looking out 
 toward the street. 
 
 I had not supposed that any human being, how- 
 ever young, could live through this tragic time and 
 be so untouched by it. I hardly know what I said 
 to her, as I sped on with my work; doubtless it was 
 unbecoming for one performing my humble task to 
 venture at all. But I made an attempt to make 
 her realize more deeply the significance of these days, 
 pouring out what was in my mind before she came. 
 The herald angels could not know the high import 
 of their message unless they knew something of the 
 hell of war.
 
 A WORLD TO MEND 61 
 
 A troubled look came into her eyes, and they 
 seemed a deeper gray; I felt sure as I watched that 
 no idea was too deep for the clear depths of them. 
 It was a sensitive face, I saw; the hurt that my 
 words had brought quivered in the delicate lines of 
 the lips. 
 
 She said that her father did not like to have her 
 read about the war, and she knew little concerning 
 it. I answered nothing, but shook my head as I 
 gave her back the bit of harness, wondering who her 
 short-sighted and foolish father might be. To think 
 of living through earth's hour of supreme trial and 
 not even trying to understand! 
 
 If I disapproved of her state of mind, I distinctly 
 approved of her feet. Doubtless I am judging 
 people too much by their shoes, perhaps because my 
 craft is new. Hers looked a rather perfect indication 
 of character, dainty, strong, of finest material, 
 with no suggestion of absurdly pointed toe, or ab- 
 surdly high heel. I will not say that they had flat 
 heels or unnecessarily broad toes, for they had not; 
 they were just right. 
 
 Any person coming down the street, with his eyes 
 fixed meditatively on the pavement so that he hap- 
 pened to see the shoes, would have said, even with- 
 out a glance at the wearer: "Here comes a 
 gentlewoman." 
 
 July 18. 
 
 My present life brings me at times a rare content. 
 When it is dusk outside and duskier inside, a place 
 of queer shadows, I sit on my bench at the side 
 of my doorway and smoke my pipe, with Tim at 
 my feet. The smell of the sea is pleasant at this
 
 62 A WORLD TO MEND 
 
 hour; old-fashioned lemon lilacs grow in a tangle at 
 the corner of my shop. Here I listen to the foot- 
 steps of passing people, young footsteps and old. 
 Laughter comes, the shrill shout of laughter of the 
 young, the cackle of the old. Sometimes I hear the 
 murmur of the ocean ; always, even when it is quiet, 
 I am aware of its nearness, with its silence envelop- 
 ing all human voices 
 
 I have a new sense of sharing; now and then some 
 one stops, or calls out to me as he is passing. Per- 
 haps he asks me if his boots are done, or asks me 
 how I like the weather, an endless source of pleas- 
 antry in Mataquoit. Or it may be that he jeers at 
 my shop, inquiring if I have not a corner to rent; 
 it is indeed small. Sometimes a child comes, 
 almost to my knee; sometimes, when Tim is not 
 there, a kitten, or a wise old disillusioned cat. 
 
 Swallows circle overhead, flying low and wide; 
 robin and song sparrow light on my chimney; even 
 the clouds seem more friendly, now that I have a 
 roof tree; the sea is all but a caller at my doorway. 
 
 Neighbors; a job; a threshold of my own; an 
 honest wage, four dollars and sixteen cents for 
 this week's work; a place among men: what more 
 could one ask? 
 
 Sometimes I stay late, until Mrs. Frayne sends 
 her little daughter to tell me to come home. I like 
 being looked after; I am not used to personal care. 
 
 In spite of all my failures there is with me a 
 subtler sense of fibers being more closely knit, bind- 
 ing man to man ; of deeper unity ; of finer and more 
 sympathetic understanding. 
 
 And the deepest aspect of all this deepening life 
 comes in my thought of Jack. I confess myself
 
 A WORLD TO MEND 63 
 
 rather at a loss to understand the depth of my 
 feeling for him. 
 
 It began in a passionate desire to be of service, 
 to open the ways of life for him. Something in me 
 is father to something in him, though physical fact 
 contradicts this; it is a purely spiritual fatherhood, 
 centering in a desire to help make the world a fit 
 place for him. All things must be made fair and 
 new; I would reshape earth for his destiny; it is an 
 impulse such as God must have had when he created 
 Adam in the morning of the world. 
 
 Such love seems not unjustified; I know that, 
 though he has parents, he is spiritually an orphan. 
 
 Yet I find myself surprised, disturbed by the grow- 
 ing warmth of my interest; distressed by the lack 
 I feel on the days when he does not come. Such 
 freshness, zest, youth he brings to my shop ; so much 
 potential power! 
 
 Then I rebuke myself, finding a flaw in my atti- 
 tude toward him. It is not for me to create for him, 
 but to try to create in him; not for me to reshape 
 the world for him, nearer to the heart's desire, but 
 to help make him ready to reshape it; to have this 
 boy's soul grow equal to his flawless body. 
 
 The measure of my drawing near my kind is the 
 measure of a deepening sense of the world agony 
 and of our intolerable position in not trying to help. 
 It is incredible; I sit at my bench and draw my 
 needle in and out ; the minister strolls happily down 
 the street; the expressman whistles as he passes, 
 and over there, women in anguish, children cruci- 
 fied! A world of agony, of mangled men and out- 
 raged women and crucified babies, and Mataquoit 
 strolls up and down in the sunshine, smelling of its 
 lilies and its roses.
 
 IX 
 
 July 20. 
 
 It was certainly through no fault of mine that 
 those two young creatures encountered each other 
 this afternoon. Jack was somewhat hidden in a 
 corner, behind my high machine for stitching soles ; 
 he was prying about, through a box filled with bits 
 of waste leather, for more Greek literature, or, as 
 he put it, "for more incriminating highbrow evi- 
 dence" against me. My lady of the white gown and 
 the broken rein did not see him at all when she 
 came in. As before when she was there, though it 
 did not ordinarily trouble me, I was conscious of the 
 junk about the place, the litter of boot lasts and 
 tools, the disarray of the tray that held needles and 
 tacks and pegs. My guest, however, did not appear 
 to notice any of this; she stood with her eyes fixed 
 upon me, serene, simple, lovely in line as a maiden 
 in a Greek relief on a day when no wind was blow- 
 ing; those white shoes should have been sandals. 
 
 She had come, she said, with a fine directness and 
 no suggestion of an excuse for entering my shop, to 
 ask if I could give her the names of books and 
 articles that would enable her to understand the 
 present crisis and the history of the war during the 
 two years past. 
 
 I could and did. It took me twenty-seven minutes 
 to say what I had to say; my visitor took notes on
 
 A WORLD TO MEND 65 
 
 a small tablet which she carried in a gold-meshed 
 
 Her state of mind surprised and hurt me; I had 
 not supposed that any human being could be so 
 ignorant of the facts, of the profoundly tragic nature 
 of the struggle. 
 
 She seemed to have a dim feeling, as in regard to 
 the slums, that unpleasant people were doing un- 
 pleasant things from motives wholly inexplicable to 
 any rational human being. Though her exquisite, 
 cloistered girlhood was wholly charming, her ig- 
 norance made me wonder if the fashionable terms 
 paid by wealthy American parents at exclusive 
 finishing schools to keep their daughters from know- 
 ing anything were not too high. Are they satisfied 
 with the result, I wonder? 
 
 But to-day, how can one be young and not know? 
 Do they not realize, they who walk on the edge of 
 the precipice, that the very ground is giving way 
 under their feet? 
 
 All this time I glanced but once in Jack's direc- 
 tion ; he was sitting perfectly quiet in the corner on 
 the large section of a tree-trunk that my predecessor 
 had evidently regarded as furniture. There was a 
 look of awed delight upon his sunburned face; the 
 girl's eyes followed mine but did not linger. She 
 was too intent upon what I was saying to be con- 
 scious of his presence. 
 
 As she took notes, I observed that Jack also was 
 jotting down the information, evidently upon the 
 back of an old envelope; how many times had I 
 suggested these things to him, but in vain ! 
 
 There was no reason whatever why, as I watched 
 this young girl standing there, tall, erect, with brown
 
 66 A WORLD TO MEND 
 
 hair done in simple style under her broad white hat, 
 there is no reason why my heart should have 
 skipped a beat. My appreciation of the beautiful 
 is always calm, dispassionate, impersonal. 
 
 I have been wondering why there seemed a certain 
 splendor, a radiance about her as she stood there. 
 Young girls in white are no novelty to me. That 
 fine definiteness of outline, that clean swiftness and 
 grace of motion as she went, could not account for 
 the peculiar impression. 
 
 I did not understand until I saw Jack's face. He 
 was watching, and unconsciously I saw with his 
 eyes. 
 
 It was not until she was well down the street that 
 I saw she had left her little bag, having dropped it 
 on my bench when she took out her tablet. Jack's 
 eyes followed mine, and he pounced upon it. A 
 minute after he was sprinting down the street; he 
 is, I believe, the champion runner of his class. He 
 came back presently, silent, breathless, a starry 
 shining in his eyes. 
 
 "Wh-ew!" said Jack. 
 
 But I knew that he meant what Homer meant 
 when he sang of Helen, and the Greek sculptor 
 meant when he was trying to speak in marble of 
 the glory of Diana. 
 
 "Who is she?" asked the boy. 
 
 "I've no idea," I told him, "unless she is the 
 daughter of your local millionaire." 
 
 "He has two daughters, I believe," said Jack 
 thoughtfully, "but I have never seen them. We are 
 new here, you know."
 
 A WORLD TO MEND 67 
 
 July 23. 
 
 It has its troublesome moments, but I am free to 
 say that I enjoy my cobbling. Tap, tap, and the 
 air comes in freshly through my window, sometimes 
 full of the fragrance of roses from old Mrs. Blake's 
 bush around the corner; sometimes of the breath of 
 lemon lilies that grow not far away; sometimes of 
 the fresh earth with rain falling on it ; sometimes of 
 the sting of the sea. 
 
 I like the smell of leather, of the shoemaker's wax, 
 of the sunshine hot on the shingles. 
 
 I am doing something. The morning hours have 
 a long sweetness of toil; I draw my waxed thread 
 in and out, pulling it tightly, making my stitches 
 firm. I can see with my eyes what my hands have 
 done. 
 
 It helps me to forget, at times, the roar of artillery, 
 the flaming gas, the mud and stench of the trenches, 
 the cries of captured women, all the suffering of the 
 war, of which I am, perforce, the wretched spec- 
 tator, the mere passive observer. It helps me to 
 forget, at moments when I sadly need it, those other 
 problems of rule and government in regard to which 
 I am trying to do some constructive thinking; I am 
 reading widely, along the line of new political creeds, 
 socialistic and other, to see whether any man or 
 group of men has a finer solution of the human prob- 
 lem to offer than that embodied in our Constitution. 
 In the deeper struggle underlying this clash of war, 
 our democratic beliefs, our democratic institutions 
 are at stake. All my power of thought and all my 
 observation are bent toward making a dispassionate 
 estimate of their worth to-day. 
 
 In all this swirl of thought my cobbler's bench is
 
 68 A WORLD TO MEND 
 
 something solid, tangible. I can not, it is true, see 
 from it over the horizon; I can not see the end or 
 the full meaning of this great world war, still less 
 of the far-reaching struggle that will follow; daily 
 intercourse with these people has not, as yet, re- 
 vealed to me the ultimate secrets of harmonious 
 government. But my bench is real, and it is there ; 
 there was nothing so solid in that doctrinaire world 
 from which I came. There were only theories, dis- 
 cussions, heated talk; solution of the deepest prac- 
 tical problems of the country by people who had 
 never done a practical thing in their lives. 
 
 Now, when my mind is puzzled beyond the power 
 of human endurance, I remember that I can still 
 make stitches, and I come back to my bench. 
 
 Which needle shall I use? 
 
 July 25. 
 
 Sweet peas grow larger and more beautiful near 
 the shore than anywhere else. Next year I must 
 have a row of my own, under my shop window. 
 
 July 26. 
 
 I do not know how Jack managed it, for I did not 
 ask him, but he has evidently contrived to get him- 
 self properly introduced to my lady of the high- 
 stepping horses and the questioning gray eyes. 
 Certainly I did not perform the ceremony on the 
 day when they happened to be in my shop at the 
 same time; of the convenances as they touch one 
 of my humble calling I am well aware. But I saw 
 them greeting each other on the street to-day as if 
 they were old friends. 
 
 It was my turn to ask who she is. Jack informed
 
 A WORLD TO MEND 69 
 
 me that my surmise was correct ; she is Miss Katha- 
 rine Brown, but he seemed disinclined to say any- 
 thing more about her. 
 
 Jack is so much with me during these days that 
 I have a feeling as of something wrong when he is 
 away from me, a feeling of his belonging to me. I 
 am sorry that I did not know him when he was six; 
 when he was ten, fourteen; I have, idly, I suppose, 
 spent much time pondering the boy he was. A 
 strong affection has grown up between us, though 
 we do not speak of it. 
 
 In accordance with his mother's request I am still 
 silent in regard to the war; I do not even express 
 to him my own feeling as to our great duty undone 
 here. Nor am I saying much about those deeper 
 problems that I am confronting; the duties of a 
 citizen in a free country in the matter of constantly 
 endeavoring by word and deed to make his country 
 still more free. Yet I have an idea that it was when 
 I stopped talking with Jack about these things that 
 my influence began to tell. Really, the old oracles 
 showed profound knowledge of the way in which to 
 play upon human nature, either by keeping still, or 
 by expressing themselves in unintelligible terms! 
 Perhaps I can best further my cause by silence; 
 nobody had ever had quite so much reputation for 
 wisdom as the Sphinx. 
 
 Jack invited me to-day to go out with him in his 
 runabout, and, as my thumb is still troubling me, 
 because of that unfortunate prick with the awl, I 
 shut my shop door and went. I fancy that he 
 wanted, in his young chivalry, to be seen in public 
 with me, because of unkind suspicions that are afloat 
 concerning my previous career.
 
 70 A WORLD TO MEND 
 
 We had a fine long drive by the sea, and my al- 
 most oppressive sense of responsibility in regard to 
 my new citizenship lifted. We chattered like two 
 boys. 
 
 On our way home we passed the Brown estate, 
 Round Towers, a huge and rocky pile, where a 
 medieval baron might defend himself for weeks 
 against a rival. With the great main house, the vast 
 servants' quarters, the spreading greenhouses, and 
 the encompassing grounds, it out-Englished the 
 English, out-Frenched the French, out-Italianated 
 the Italians. All history was in that jumble of house 
 architecture and landscape architecture, not for- 
 getting Greece and Babylon. 
 
 I saw Miss Brown, going out to ride on a fine 
 Kentucky mare, with a grooin in attendance, and 
 then I caught a glimpse r* Jack's face. So that is 
 what has happened! My first feeling was one of 
 dismay, for it seemed improbable that recognition 
 could be given by this prince's domain to Sands' 
 Emporium, or anybody connected therewith. 
 
 As the girl rode away, between the massive stone 
 piles of the entrance, I could not help feeling that 
 she did not belong to this place. It was too new, 
 too ostentatious, not in good enough taste for her. 
 She looks a thoroughbred, and as if she ought to be 
 in some plain, fine, ancestral home, suggesting gen- 
 erations of the best and choicest American life. I 
 wondered what had made her so different in look 
 and manner from all that surrounded her, and de- 
 cided that it was perhaps the finishing school, 
 though this explanation did not seem wholly satis- 
 factory.
 
 71 
 
 July 27. 
 
 My shop is in more disorder than ever, one side 
 having been thrown open for the building of a 
 chimney and an open fireplace. Here is a call back 
 to practical reality from my romancing in regard to 
 Miss Katharine Brown and Jack. 
 
 There are plenty of other calls, for, in and out of 
 Mataquoit, in and out of my range of vision, drift 
 people of many types who show me what freedom 
 has done for her sons and daughters, what freedom 
 has not done. 
 
 It is the daughters of freedom who trouble me 
 most keenly. A woman drove in from the country 
 to-day to ask if I could mend the yawning holes in 
 a pair of rubbers, an impossible task. Thin as a 
 broken reed, with scrawny neck and arms, face, eyes, 
 hair all the faded brown of dried grass, she went 
 dejectedly back to her lean horse and skeleton 
 wagon. The little girl, whose pipestem legs dangled 
 from the wagon seat, sat awaiting a destiny akin to 
 her mother's. I watched them as they went > 
 woman, child, and horse back to the sorrows of 
 their several kinds. 
 
 Loneliness ; an utter isolation ; one could not mis- 
 take in the woman's face the haunted look of those 
 who do not share their thoughts. What democracy 
 gone wrong shows in the lives of thousands upon 
 thousands of American women! Marooned in iso- 
 lated houses, with only fields and woods stretching 
 about them, they miss the warm, human, half-dis- 
 putatious life of Italian country folk; they have 
 small chance for neighborly intercourse, still less for 
 civic duties and responsibilities. In that life of al- 
 most unbroken silences, poverty with all its hard-
 
 72 A WORLD TO MEND 
 
 ships is taken for granted as are sun and wind and 
 lightning. Why should a woman like this, who has 
 obviously done her part in giving a child to the 
 republic, have no feeling of a part to play in its large 
 life and no strength to play it? 
 
 The many investigators who are studying the 
 problems of the immigrant population with a view 
 to bettering conditions have apparently given little 
 thought to these victims of our alleged civilization. 
 
 We cry out against the war-outraged women of 
 Francs and Belgium; who will cry into our ears 
 shame upon us for the outraged souls of thousands 
 of American women, mostly farmers' wives, whose 
 lives are one long, grinding monotony of unremitting 
 toil, who face life, childbirth, child-rearing, death in 
 loneliness under an unanswering sky? 
 
 Can a democracy which sanctions such conditions 
 as bring Miss Katharine Brown to a pass where she 
 is all but smothered with luxury, and which leaves 
 this other woman to her rag of calico, her fate of 
 baking sun and gnawing cold, be indeed a true 
 democracy? Are such cruel contrasts indeed the 
 people's will? What is wrong with our system? 
 Have we lost our way? 
 
 Verily, my mind is filled with questions, even as 
 my shop is filled with boots, shoes, and scraps of 
 leather. With each person who unlatches my door 
 some new problem enters ; there are moments when 
 I wish that my customers would stay away.
 
 July 28. 
 
 Even before any words were uttered I knew that 
 upon my threshold stood a very angry man. No such 
 person of importance had stood there before in my 
 day. He was tall, gray-haired and gray-bearded, 
 and over-correctly costumed in all that most ex- 
 clusive tailordom could devise for an elderly gentle- 
 man. I wondered why he looked oddly familiar; 
 perhaps it was only his prosperous type. 
 
 His speech was not as elegant as his attire ; there 
 was a brusque directness about it that betokened 
 the successful man's power to come to the point at 
 once. He had heard that I was bringing influence to 
 bear upon his daughter; what did I mean by it? 
 What had I been giving her to read? 
 
 The storm of wrath was at full height when he 
 stopped, open-mouthed, staring. 
 
 "You, Masters?" he gasped. "What in the name 
 of the living Jupiter are you doing here?" 
 
 It was Billions Brown. 
 
 "You see," I answered, holding up a child's shoe 
 on which I was working; "cobbling." 
 
 "But, man, what's happened to you? Have you 
 lost your money?" 
 
 To this I made no answer; Billions had never 
 been noted for his good manners. 
 
 Old Billions Brown; I knew him when he was
 
 74 A WORLD TO MEND 
 
 nineteen, at college. He waited on table; did 
 gardening; mowed lawns. He had pluck, resource; 
 brains, also, but these he did not waste in college 
 work. He did not need to, and Billions was never 
 one to make any unnecessary expenditure whatever. 
 College education was for him an investment that 
 meant ultimate gain; he intended to get, at the 
 lowest terms possible, the degree of a university with 
 an old and honored name. He had just crawled 
 through. Luckily for him, an elective system made 
 it possible for him to graduate on a negligible 
 amount of work. 
 
 I had never heard from him or about him since 
 those days. This was not strange, for I had not 
 known him well. He was not in my set; we had not 
 the same tastes or traditions. The fact that he was 
 working his way through had nothing to do with 
 this; I had for bosom friend a man as poor. But 
 Billions' kind of game was not my kind of game. 
 
 I remember Billions at college, rough, a bit un- 
 kempt, and scrawny, sometimes in overalls, garden- 
 ing for Prexy, sometimes in ready-made suit in class, 
 hastily trying to master the assignment for the day, 
 while some fellow student recited; never was there 
 any one who could make a few scraps of information 
 go as far as could Billions. Billions was making 
 quarters hand over hand; scrupulously honest, of 
 course. Everything he touched turned to silver. 
 Already the stamp of success was upon him; you 
 read his future in his shrewd and shining eyes; in 
 the set of his jaw; in his eager, unflagging alertness. 
 He was never tired. He had not a penny except 
 what he earned; he often, I think, went hungry, 
 saving for the days to come, but we called him
 
 A WORLD TO MEND 75 
 
 Billions Brown, for we foresaw the future. And 
 apparently we had foreseen it correctly; I smiled, 
 realizing how nearly our jesting prophecies had 
 come true. 
 
 "Well, you have come down in the world," he 
 was saying. 
 
 "I am not so sure of that," I told him, but I let 
 him think that it was an economic, not a spiritual 
 necessity which impelled me, for the latter he would 
 never understand. I could almost read what was 
 going on in his mind; there was sympathy there, 
 mingled with satisfaction. He had thought of me 
 doubtless in college days as a bit of a snob, as I 
 had been. He had thought of me as overweeningly 
 proud of my family, as I had been. He had thought 
 of me as merely "lit'ry," as I had been. But what 
 was I now? 
 
 I could have laughed out as I sat there with the 
 shoemaker's wax on my roughened fingers, for I 
 saw Billions falling back into something of the old 
 attitude of being a bit afraid of me. 
 
 "But to come back to your daughter," I suggested. 
 His face grew dark, but he spoke hesitatingly. He 
 had been told that his daughter had been coming to 
 my shop; that she had been seen to meet young 
 Sands there. 
 
 "A shop," I told him meekly, "is public ground. 
 I can not turn people out, so long as they are well- 
 behaved." 
 
 He snorted; the snort of the successful man. 
 
 "The young are active," I suggested. "Their 
 shoes will wear out." 
 
 "My daughter," he thundered, "has no need to 
 wear a pair of shoes a second time, if she does not
 
 76 A WORLD TO MEND 
 
 want to. She could throw them away every day; 
 there are plenty more where they came from." 
 
 "Your daughter," I told him, "wouldn't unless 
 I am greatly mistaken in her while so many go 
 shoeless." 
 
 "Shoeless! Let them work, then, and get them- 
 selves shoes. I began with nothing, didn't I?" 
 
 "Billions," I answered, "whatever you began with, 
 it looks to me as if you were going to end with less 
 than nothing." 
 
 "What kind of ideas have you been putting into 
 my girl's head?" he demanded. 
 
 "I have simply been telling her a few facts." 
 
 We talked for half an hour and shook hands at 
 parting. Tim was greatly puzzled during this inter- 
 view; he could not tell whether to bark or to wag 
 his tail. It was the first time I had ever seen him 
 at a loss. 
 
 
 July 30. 
 
 The last few days have brought me a realization 
 that I must turn my thought resolutely back from 
 certain individuals in whom I find myself becoming 
 personally interested to the larger purpose for which 
 I came. My task is with the rank and file of my 
 fellow men, not with my friends alone. 
 
 There is much chance here for observation ; under- 
 neath all question and answer and weather comment 
 a difficult problem makes itself incessantly felt : how 
 to learn to reverence human nature in its varied 
 manifestations, for the divinity that is in it. Not 
 its culture ; not its gifts ; not merely those who have 
 the great insights, the great passions, those who 
 make the great achievements. What is needed is
 
 A WORLD TO MEND 77 
 
 respect for any human soul, if not in its actualities, 
 in its possibilities, the hidden greatness that is there. 
 
 With philosopher and poet, I can reverence men 
 when I sit alone, thinking ; the breath of the sea, the 
 fragrance of my pine tree mingle in my finer mood. 
 But when my shop door creaks, and my neighbor 
 enters, my fine abstract love for man often flies 
 out of the window. It is difficult to reverence cer- 
 tain people in Mataquoit. 
 
 Noah Price, the grocer, who manipulates the 
 scales a bit when he weighs sugar, and gives you 
 light weight. 
 
 Widow Frayne, my landlady, who sits alert at her 
 window, looking for one more person about whom 
 she can say unkind things. 
 
 If I make in my ledger a list of all the people in 
 Mataquoit toward whom I have a feeling of religious 
 respect, and, in another column, state my philo- 
 sophic belief in the essential sacredness of the human 
 soul, how will my long page balance? It is a 
 troublesome problem: often it keeps me awake till 
 the outgoing tide perhaps puts me to sleep. My 
 religion has been reverence for certain chosen souls 
 through whom I have known the divine. 
 
 But these people 
 
 Men stand with bared heads in the presence of 
 the dead, of whatsoever lives; we do not ask 
 then what a man's past has been. Why not in 
 presence of the living? 
 
 How can we build stable governments, resting 
 upon the will of men, unless we have, man to man, 
 a deeper insight and a deeper faith, a knowledge of 
 the "common soul?"
 
 78 A WORLD TO MEND 
 
 July 31. 
 
 It is a great sight to see Billions Brown driving in 
 state through the village or along the country roads, 
 whether in his speeding Mercedes, with the French 
 chauffeur, or with his highbred horses driven by his 
 experienced British coachman. He has no outriders, 
 though it seems as if he should have ; but coachman 
 and footmen are properly uniformed, and there is 
 something of medieval state about his coming and 
 going. 
 
 Villagers and country folk are greatly impressed ; 
 now and then a rural nag stands on his hind legs 
 to do homage to the lord of the manor in his swift 
 car, yet I fancy that Billions does not get full satis- 
 faction out of this state progress. After all, the oc- 
 cupations of the medieval lord have vanished ; here 
 is no hunting, no hawking, no fighting, no border 
 foray, no dash upon a castle to carry off Heaven 
 forfend a bride. 
 
 Only the habits of the desk, the office, the re- 
 finery ; not a taste, or a habit, or an aptitude to carry 
 into the sporting world of idleness into which his 
 wealth has projected him. His life must lack those 
 roots from which all things that make life worth 
 while grow. 
 
 August 1. 
 
 Though I still read much regarding the war I 
 hardly allow myself to think of loss and gain on the 
 battlefronts ; my fighting line is elsewhere. Yet, as 
 the second year of the war draws to a close, it is 
 impossible to ignore the successive disasters to 
 Allied arms, or to keep from asking the question 
 whether they who are waging the greatest war for
 
 A WORLD TO MEND 79 
 
 the right since the dawn of time fight a losing battle. 
 The tense anxiety of the Allied powers is reflected 
 in all the tidings that reach us, especially in what 
 is not said. 
 
 Here in America is peace ; harvest fields of plenty ; 
 smiling and untroubled faces; luxury unchecked, if 
 all reports be true, in our cities and our towns. I 
 find that I resent the comfort of my townspeople; 
 I resent my own. Haunting pictures of that well- 
 known and beloved land of tall poplars and wide 
 fields in its tragedy disturb my dreams, coming in 
 swift and terrible glimpses. 
 
 I sit on my doorstep in the sunshine; Andrew 
 Martin, the grain merchant of the town, stands com- 
 fortably in his shop doorway, while over there, 
 mayor and devoted priest are stood up against a 
 wall and shot. 
 
 Mrs. Sands comes daintily down the street, pick- 
 ing her way to keep from stepping in the little pools 
 of water from a recent rain; over there are sister 
 women who walk through pools of blood. 
 
 Shouting, uproarious children are playing games 
 in the field beyond my shop, bareheaded, barefooted, 
 gay; over there are the white children of Belgium, 
 of France, of Serbia, dying of hunger, and murdered 
 children lying in meadow, on hillside. 
 
 How long, Lord, before we rise to help? 
 
 One knows, of course, that it has not been the 
 way of nation to help nation, save in self-interest. 
 Even our England did not save Persia. None have 
 lifted a hand in the matter of the Armenian 
 massacre. But may not our country have a higher 
 vision, a fairer aim, than has come to any country 
 heretofore? When has America belonged to the
 
 80 A WORLD TO MEND 
 
 world that has been? Rather, she rightly belongs 
 to the world to be. 
 
 To give our aid now, if need be, our all, disinter- 
 estedly, would be a stepping-stone to a higher des- 
 tiny than any nation has ever had. 
 
 But nations are made up of individuals, and my 
 share is establishing the entente cordiate here in 
 Mataquoit between myself and Noah Price and his 
 like. To my task!
 
 XI 
 
 August 2. 
 
 Again I must remind myself that perhaps I have 
 as yet seen only surfaces and have not dug down 
 into the bed rock of civic character here. It is time 
 for me to begin my sensational article about the 
 noble citizens of Mataquoit, my virtue-raking ar- 
 ticle which will use the method of the muck-raking 
 article, but to much finer ends. 
 
 I have been making inquiries to see whether I 
 could begin with Billions and have discovered that 
 he gave the town the little park about the library. 
 So far so good, but in all my investigation I cannot 
 find that he has given any citizen's service that has 
 cost him time and effort, blood and tears. It is the 
 old feudal attitude ; largesse for the village folk who 
 live at the foot of his feudal castle; and Billions is 
 off and away on his fiery steed, High Finance. 
 
 There is one man here, named Melton, a hard- 
 ware merchant, who is working hard on a scheme for 
 improvement of the water front, better wharves and 
 a better street back of them ; I must try to find out 
 whether this is disinterested or even partly disin- 
 terested, or whether, after the fashion of most large 
 enterprises in this country, some vast personal gain 
 is the real objective. Rumors come to my ears of 
 one inhabitant of the town, Alexander Wallace, a 
 lawyer, about whom every one, even Widow Frayne, 
 has a good word to say; he is away now, in Canada,
 
 82 A WORLD TO MEND 
 
 on the first real vacation he has ever had, people 
 tell me, since he came to Mataquoit some twenty 
 years ago. 
 
 With the thought of the future development of 
 democracy in our country constantly in mind, it is 
 impossible to keep from thinking much about the 
 young men, especially Jack. 
 
 Every one likes him; he is one of humanity's in- 
 stinctive comrades, born to understand his fellows; 
 born a friend of all and sundry with whom he comes 
 in contact. 
 
 I sometimes think that he is a distinctive product 
 and the best, he and his kind, of a democracy. No 
 older order of society could have produced a man of 
 this class, so approachable, so much a hail-fellow- 
 well-met, so much a man among men, and yet so 
 exclusive, selecting, rejecting, carrying his caste 
 within himself and preserving it with a steady in- 
 dividual sense of values. There is about him a fine 
 wholesomeness of body and of mind; he holds his 
 inner standard high; even in looking at him one is 
 aware that he would not do or say anything touched 
 with taint of evil. 
 
 Often I wonder how he came to be, with his gen- 
 erosities, his Tightness of attitude toward his fellows. 
 I think of his father with that narrow and selfish 
 belief in the paramount importance of his own busi- 
 ness; of his mother, with her bourgeois sense of 
 social importance, her determination to impress 
 herself on all who come in contact with her, to take 
 a foremost part, a shallow, "viewy" woman, one of 
 the kind who cannot hear anything stated in her 
 presence without saying that she has always known 
 it.
 
 A WORLD TO MEND 83 
 
 He is unpretentious, simple and fine in his direct 
 approach to life and to human beings: "Gentleman 
 born before his father," as Shakespeare says. 
 
 Then I realize that it is because of the one great- 
 ness in those two people that he is what he is. The 
 love of parents is a wonderful thing; it is, I think, 
 the one and only spot of unselfishness in these two, 
 and it is unselfishness absolute. 
 
 All their gain has gone to his bettering; they have 
 lavished upon him everything that they possessed, 
 material and spiritual. They have sent him from 
 them when they wanted him near; all that their 
 own childhood and youth lacked he has had. He 
 will take his place among men and serve his kind as 
 they could never do. So, through individual love 
 and willingness to sacrifice for love, the great na- 
 tional growth comes, the race mounts upward to a 
 finer type. If parental love is a wellspring at which 
 higher citizenship may be fed, our hope is great, 
 for there is no possibility of the supply being ex- 
 hausted in our country. 
 
 August 5. 
 
 I had to-day an unpleasant encounter with a sub- 
 citizen whose name I will not give. He was a farmer 
 from the Green Hill region, delivering ten pounds 
 of butter, and his goods were under weight. He 
 little thought as he stood there in his butternut 
 brown coat, with a look of silly triumph on his face, 
 that the Widow Frayne was in her pantry, weighing 
 his commodity upon those awful scales, tested, and 
 as accurate as those that will be used upon the day 
 of judgment. Many a time, in divers places, have 
 I seen an expression like this upon many a face, a
 
 84 A WORLD TO MEND 
 
 reflection of our American conviction that the one 
 thing to do is to arrive, to "put it over." Such tribute 
 we pay to our national Moloch, Success! 
 
 When the facts were reported to me I told the 
 farmer my opinion of him in language which was, 
 perhaps, overweight. 
 
 I find democracy a hard creed; the actual prac- 
 tice is strikingly different from the printed formula. 
 Sometimes the difficulties in the way of arriving at 
 any satisfactory basis of dealing with human kind 
 appall me. It is well nigh impossible to make my 
 instinctive feeling keep pace with my higher 
 thought; the idealist and the human being in me 
 are unequally yoked together. 
 
 And so to bed, with my unachieved democracy. 
 
 August 7. 
 
 I strolled far on the rocks to-night to escape noise 
 and heat. There are times when the multitudinous 
 sounds and sights and odors of a democracy obscure 
 my thought of what a democracy should be. At 
 such times I find nothing so efficacious as the horizon 
 line of the sea in restoring my vision. 
 
 There was a breeze; there was an incoming tide, 
 and my spirit freshened. Tim made joyous dashes 
 over the rocks, starting up the gulls, then began 
 barking furiously, and I knew that, behind the rock, 
 was either a human being or a weasel. I really must 
 teach him to distinguish! He has his moments of 
 boorishness, of which I find it hard to cure him; I 
 am trying hard to teach him to be a gentleman. 
 
 As I feared, it was a human being, and my rebuke 
 to him was all the more severe because it proved to 
 be none other than Miss Katharine Brown.
 
 A WORLD TO MEND 85 
 
 Here was a dilemma ! Should I obey the mandate 
 of Ami K. Brown, the magnate, not to hold com- 
 munication with his daughter, or should I greet the 
 daughter of my old college classmate, Billions 
 Brown, as one greets the daughter of a friend? In 
 all my life no social question so perplexing had been 
 presented to me. 
 
 The matter was taken out of my hands, for Miss 
 Brown, after giving me a friendly greeting, detained 
 me with an imperious little gesture, as one who is 
 accustomed to be obeyed. How swiftly, in America, 
 these reigning houses learn to rule! 
 
 She had, it seemed, several questions to ask. So 
 we took up the discussion begun the other day in 
 my shop at the precise point where we had dropped 
 it. I found myself saying more than I had meant 
 to about the great issue; about the part every one 
 of us could play in helping on the crusade of cru- 
 sades; about our wakening sense of the responsi- 
 bility of man to man, which should make the days 
 of peace following this struggle greater than the 
 days which preceded it. 
 
 At first she stood listening, with her intelligent, 
 gray, asking eyes upon me, the pupils slowly dilating, 
 a light coming and going in her face like flame. 
 When she spoke, it was with a passionate intensity 
 that belied the quiet repose of her bearing. The 
 smile that played now and then about her lips bore 
 no relation to her real feeling, but was rather, in 
 its conventional sweetness, a social mask which she 
 had been taught to wear. 
 
 In my turn, I became the listener, or rather the 
 watcher, for her swift sentences were as a sudden 
 flashlight upon the troubled soul of a girl. It was
 
 86 A WORLD TO MEND 
 
 not that she said much; her training forbade that 
 in this chance meeting with an humble personage 
 who was almost a stranger, but she made me aware 
 of an eagerness to find her working place among 
 mankind, and I found myself saying over, concerning 
 her, words that had come to my mind in seeing the 
 faded, sun-baked countrywoman but a few days ago : 
 loneliness, and utter isolation. It were hard to tell 
 whether the daughter of extreme poverty or the 
 daughter of extreme wealth, exiled among material 
 possessions, was the more wretched. 
 
 There should be no such loneliness in a common- 
 wealth, no such separation of interests between high 
 and low. 
 
 Our interview terminated rather abruptly; pos- 
 sibly Miss Brown realized that she had said more 
 than she intended. She thanked me with a wistful 
 sweetness as I lifted my hat and started to move 
 on. Two splendid, red-brown Irish setters came 
 leaping to escort her on her farther walk, and I 
 watched her as she mounted the rocks and paused 
 for a minute on the highest, with the breeze playing 
 about her. 
 
 As she stood on the headland, all in white, with 
 the wind in her fluttering white draperies, she 
 brought again a suggestion of Greek reliefs, of the 
 freely moving feet and limbs of Greek maidens in 
 sacrificial procession; and I reflected that the feet 
 of womankind never move with utmost joyousness 
 until they find the way of sacrifice. 
 
 After she disappeared, I went on my way with my 
 plebeian Tim, thinking. 
 
 It is strange how much you can tell about some 
 people by merely looking at them. I knew that this
 
 A WORLD TO MEND 87 
 
 young creature was a bit headstrong and determined, 
 yet sweet and fine; I knew that, if the flame of faith, 
 conviction, were but once lighted in those gray eyes, 
 it would burn steadfastly through life to death, 
 and after. 
 
 I pitied now the little questioning flickers there, 
 youth, trying to find out, uncertain of its place. 
 Men talk of these early years as the happiest time; 
 how often it is the hardest, because of the tangled 
 paths, the difficulty in finding the way! 
 
 The possibilities that were in this girl that would 
 never be wakened by the present conditions of her 
 life were clearly apparent to me, as was an elemental 
 impetuosity under her finished manner; God has 
 given me eyes for a certain understanding of my 
 kind. She is capable of staunchest adherence to a 
 belief, to a line of action, as well as, if fate will but 
 grant the right one, to an individual; capable of 
 passion for a man, for a faith. 
 
 And I know that, when Billions Brown's daughter 
 does find her way, things present or things absent 
 or things to come, nor height nor depth nor any 
 other creature, not even Billions himself, can stop 
 her. 
 
 August 10. 
 
 Alas! The overwhelming magnitude, the com- 
 plexity of experience at this moment is too much 
 for individual consciousness to grasp. No man, no 
 group of men, no nation really understands. This 
 midsummer air, apparently still, is quivering with 
 the tensity of the moment in which humanity is 
 being weighed in the balance as never before. 
 
 It is not the war only that makes a crisis in our
 
 88 A WORLD TO MEND 
 
 race development. For a period of a few years pre- 
 ceding the war many of us were conscious of a tense- 
 ness, an immense unrest. There was an unwonted 
 quarrelsomeness among people, even in the world 
 of ideas and ideals, a clash of tendencies, and with 
 it a something sensational in life and in art, of which 
 the outre, the bizarre in poetry and hi picture are 
 illustrations. There was wide-spread irritability, a 
 spiritual querulousness, a sense of things falling 
 apart. 
 
 Doubtless many shared the conviction which the 
 pre-war period brought to me that the race has gone 
 too swiftly, with headlong speed that threatens to 
 carry us over the precipice. There has been more 
 invention, more discovery of material fact than we 
 can assimilate. How slowly the wounded and de- 
 serted soul of man limps after the over-triumphant 
 body, speeding in automobiles and in aeroplanes, 
 unconscious of its loss, unaware that it has thrown 
 overboard that eternal passenger for whom the 
 journey of existence was undertaken! 
 
 Is it often the case, I wonder, that the end of a 
 period, the beginning of another, makes itself so 
 clearly manifest? Those pre-war days, full of the 
 dry sultriness that precedes a storm, the air empty 
 and waiting; and this appalling tempest which 
 deafens our ears with its crashes, will give place, 
 we hope, to fairer weather, to a long day in which 
 the young of to-day may mature, may see their way 
 clearly, may do their work. 
 
 The creaking of the wheels of change is loud 
 within my ears in this still air of Mataquoit.
 
 XII 
 
 August 12. 
 
 Yesterday I saw Jack and Miss Katharine Brown 
 playing tennis together; to-day, as he and I were 
 sitting on the bench by my shop door, she was driven 
 past, and I watched his face as he greeted her. Not 
 a word was said, but the look in his eyes made me 
 aware that never, in all my many years, have I come 
 so close to vital forces, to life in the making. He 
 never speaks of her to me; his silence tells more 
 than words could do. 
 
 I have been tempted to ask of Mrs. Sands release 
 from my promise to keep from giving him any 
 admonition in regard to the world struggle and our 
 duties therein, but I have not done so. Yet there 
 is, and has been from the first, a curious understand- 
 ing between us, and my enforced silence deepens it. 
 Even if I say no word, he is increasingly aware of 
 my inner conviction that, not to have understood, 
 not to have taken sides, not to have helped, will be 
 to have failed utterly in the greatest crisis since 
 the dawn of time. Better never to have been born 
 than to have failed to make a decision, to have 
 ranged oneself on the side of the right. 
 
 Here is Jack, with the splendid young strength 
 of him, and the splendid young heart of him, waiting 
 to be roused, waiting for a chance to spend his force 
 in the battle of humanity. The great struggle is
 
 90 A WORLD TO MEND 
 
 here ; it has to be fought. How can he face himself 
 in later years if he takes no part in it? 
 
 But my lips are sealed. 
 
 I am shocked, startled by the intensity of my 
 f eeling in regard to this boy ; it is more disinterested 
 than any I have ever known, for it asks nothing in 
 return, yet at the same time it is more elemental, 
 more savage than any emotion I have ever felt. 
 The thought of any evil influence coming near him 
 before his nature flowers fills me with potential rage. 
 The fear that he may fail to fulfil his highest des- 
 tiny brings me at times a poignant suffering. It is 
 at once the most passionate and the most spiritual 
 emotion that I have ever had. 
 
 Whence comes this resurgence of primitive man 
 in me, this hand clenched to ward off a blow which 
 nobody threatens? It is as if, in putting off all the 
 artificial things of my life for a disinterested intel- 
 lectual purpose, I had come unexpectedly upon the 
 primal human emotions. 
 
 How ironic is this effort to understand my kind! 
 I do not understand even myself. 
 
 August 13. 
 
 A flying drift of talk comes in through my open 
 windows; a little foam and spray break constantly 
 on corner and curbstone as people stand or stroll. 
 Within how small a space, in how inconsiderable a 
 village, may one see reflected the ways of thought 
 of an entire people ! One could gauge public opinion 
 in regard to the war the country over by chance 
 comments that one hears in Mataquoit. 
 
 I cannot help feeling that an individual's aware- 
 ness of the present struggle and of its significance
 
 A WORLD TO MEND 91 
 
 is, in a way, a measure of his fitness to become a 
 citizen in the democracy that is to be. Surely we 
 are all facing an issue that is a supreme test of our 
 sense of others' need. 
 
 Here, as elsewhere, growth toward understanding 
 is uneven; all stages are represented. Doubtless 
 human progress is always something jagged and ir- 
 regular; the differing strata are curiously imbedded, 
 one with another, and variously interwrought. Dif- 
 ferent people in the village have come to symbolize 
 for me different phases of the awakening through- 
 out the entire land. 
 
 Old Madam Strong, in the big house on the hill, 
 with the stone gateway crowned with balls, has not 
 yet heard of the war, I am told. At least, when her 
 maid mentioned it to her in August, 1914, she was 
 forbidden to speak of it again, and she has obeyed. 
 Unpleasant recent occurrences are allowed no plajCe 
 in her ancestral world. Whatever reading matter 
 Madam Strong needs is drawn from her large library 
 of eighteenth-century works, bound in calf; news- 
 papers and all other periodicals she disdains. 
 
 The Honorable Hiram Banks, our Congressman, 
 who lives near Madam Strong, son of an old and 
 honored family here, says that the war is no con- 
 cern of ours; let them fight it out; it is England's 
 job, and that of France. That we are benefiting in 
 our continued safety by their anguish he is aware, 
 but a good American, he thinks, should take all he 
 can get honestly- He has an idea that no dis- 
 aster could ever reach him inside his iron-wrought 
 fence. 
 
 John Sands thinks of it only in connection with 
 his chain of department stores in Maine towns; he
 
 92 A WORLD TO MEND 
 
 is afraid that it is going to hurt his business. So, 
 the country over, many men. 
 
 Mrs. Sands is still in her state of stupid superiority 
 to the whole tragedy; there are many of her kind. 
 But you cannot rest content with striking a moral 
 attitude in the face of an appalling calamity like 
 this; you have got to help. It is no time to stop, 
 in the midst of a great conflagration, to say that 
 you do not believe in fires. 
 
 Billions, undoubtedly, dislikes the war because it 
 interferes with the service at his house, drawing 
 away some of his trained domestics; and because it 
 has somewhat disorganized his vast oil enterprises, 
 as experts have gone back to fight under their re- 
 spective flags. 
 
 A certain provincialism enfolds Mataquoit, a sense 
 of being an individual entity, set off by itself, with 
 no share in the larger world, no need of the larger 
 world. This village feeling of the isolation of the 
 village and of its supreme importance, as, in a way, 
 the center of a universe, is doubtless reflected more 
 or less clearly in every town and every community 
 from Canada to Mexico, from sea to sea. 
 
 Yet all these people whose attitudes I have been 
 studying are older folk; it is the young who really 
 matter. As yet, those I have observed show too 
 little concern; they are busy with the mere plays 
 and games of life; yet they shall not escape the 
 greater destiny that is coming irresistibly toward 
 them, to sweep them from the ball field, the soda 
 fountain, the moving-picture theater, out to the edge 
 of the world, to stand face to face with death. 
 
 The most hopeful sign of the times is given by 
 the war charities which flourish up and down the
 
 A WORLD TO MEND 93 
 
 land. War work is everywhere; women are sewing, 
 knitting, and rolling bandages ; and men and women 
 are giving generously of their substance in response 
 to every plea. Even though we are not as yet in 
 the struggle, the soul of America is awakening; we 
 can not all reach the marching line at the same 
 time. ... I have not seen Jack for four days. 
 
 August 16. 
 
 Miss Katharine Brown walked down the village 
 street to-day in her white freshness, and behind her, 
 in pallid, spectral procession, those martyred girls of 
 France and Belgium who had suffered worse than 
 death and still were living. I saw their eyes, with 
 youth dead in them. 
 
 The vision of these comes often, with the deepest 
 arraignment of any of our alleged civilization. One 
 grows a bit fanciful living alone, unaware, at times, 
 of the difference between what one actually sees and 
 what the memory of printed words brings to mind. 
 
 I wince a bit now at seeing young girls, thinking 
 of those others whom the manhood of the world has 
 failed to protect. Men have had the ruling of the 
 world since the dawn of time; to all men comes 
 a special shame at the thought of these things, nor 
 shall we men of America hold up our heads in future 
 days if we pass by on the other side of the wounded 
 and the suffering. 
 
 Perhaps I write over- vehemently ; I could not 
 have written thus in my youth. If I had, my Eng- 
 lish teachers would not have permitted me to leave 
 such expressions on paper, my English teachers who 
 tried to teach raw lads to analyze human nature in 
 the cool and unconcerned fashion of Henry James.
 
 94 A WORLD TO MEND 
 
 I am not writing, however, as vehemently as I 
 feel; the sting to my manhood of the knowledge of 
 unspeakable cruelties that demand swift punish- 
 ment, the consciousness that these things be and 
 that I may not go to help, keeps pain alive and 
 quick within me through all my quiet nights and 
 days. To know this hour and not to be matched 
 with it; to get the full anguish of observing, of 
 waiting; to see the strong and beautiful young of 
 other lands go out, singing, to meet it ah, there 
 are many ways of being crucified for one's kind! 
 
 August 18. , 
 
 The village, as I have said before, has its library, 
 small, stone, Carnegie. Fortunately the vines are 
 growing over it, so that it does not look wholly an 
 alien and extraneous thing, but begins to blend with 
 the mellower tones of the old town. I never cross 
 the green spaces of Billions Brown's little park, or 
 pass under the inscription over the entrance of the 
 building to the liberality of the donor, without won- 
 dering what joy there could have been for these two 
 philanthropists in standing in the crowded ways of 
 human life and picking one pocket in order to thrust 
 its contents into another. Conscience tells me that 
 I am overstating; doubtless all the business enter- 
 prises of both kings of finance have been strictly 
 within the letter of the law; but do the faces of the 
 thousands of lads who, thanks to Carnegie's benefi- 
 cence, need never go without an education, make up 
 for the starved faces, intellectually and spiritually 
 starved, of the lads who worked under the iron hand 
 in Homestead long ago? However, this is no way 
 for me to talk, who go, many an afternoon, to read
 
 A WORLD TO MEND 95 
 
 in the Carnegie Library, conscious that in so doing 
 I am sharing a bit of the spoil of souls. 
 
 When I went in this afternoon both Jack and 
 Katharine Brown were there, reading, at the same 
 table, and I wondered if Billions Brown knew that 
 his daughter was using common books in a common 
 library. It amused me to think of some of the great 
 steel baron's loot being thrust into the delicate 
 pocket, or hand bag, or whatever it was, of this child 
 of luxury. But, if she wanted books, she doubtless 
 had to come here ; there would be every thing except 
 books in the huge house on the cliff. 
 
 From my position in the stacks I watched them. 
 I saw Jack rise from his seat and go over to place 
 the book he was reading before Katharine, pointing 
 to an item; it was the Bryce report on the Belgian 
 atrocities. She read, and read again; their eyes 
 met, and the same flame was in them both : passion 
 to serve; passion to atone, flame kindling flame. 
 
 In no eyes of youth of my generation, or in the 
 years between my own youth and to-day, have I 
 seen such an outgoing of life, such a forgetting of 
 self as in the eyes of these two. Perhaps because 
 the library rules enjoined stillness they said no word, 
 but I hardly think they would have spoken had 
 they been under the open sky, with no one near. 
 
 I thought of Paolo and Francesca, with their 
 heads bent over a book whose words enchained the 
 two together for all eternity : "that day they read no 
 further"; but here was no kiss, no mere personal 
 passion. 
 
 They shook hands. The young of to-day are 
 oddly businesslike and matter of fact in their de- 
 meanor! No one but myself saw in this anything
 
 96 A WORLD TO MEND 
 
 but an ordinary handshake, I fancy; after a few 
 minutes the two went their different ways. But I 
 saw in it a pledge to act, to be of service, to help 
 undo the wrong. Not for revenge ; those two young 
 faces showed but the divine impulse of youth to 
 atone, to wipe out the wrong-doing of their prede- 
 cessors, to make all things fair and new. 
 
 As I limped down the village street I felt like one 
 from whose shoulders a great burden has been rolled. 
 
 August 22. 
 
 A foggy morning ; Mataquoit is wet and cheerless. 
 Water condenses and drips from ears, hair, from the 
 straw hats of my neighbors. 
 
 The air is heavy in my shop, even as my mind is 
 heavy ; for the first time I almost regret my coming. 
 Who am I that I should thrust my hands into other 
 lives? Has my own life been so worthy and so 
 successful that I should try to influence others? 
 Who am I that I should come to Mataquoit to set 
 the fathers against the children and the children 
 against the fathers? Or to try to fathom even a 
 little that impenetrable mystery, the human soul? 
 
 What the devil is democracy, anyway? 
 
 Billions is angry with me ; doubtless his daughter 
 is proving rebellious, and he has discovered that she 
 has had further talk with me. No medieval lord 
 could have given sterner greeting to a disobedient 
 vassal than Billions gave me to-day; I wonder if he 
 will exercise his feudal privilege and have me 
 dropped into boiling oil. 
 
 Mrs. Sands is evidently also displeased ; she wears 
 an anxious and foreboding look upon her face. Yet 
 these two should not hold me to too great an extent
 
 A WORLD TO MEND 97 
 
 responsible: did I create youth or the heart of 
 youth? 
 
 And the war goes wrong; with it the whole world 
 goes wrong. It has been a sorry second year of 
 fighting, with loss on every side except that inner, 
 indestructible front, "man's unconquerable mind." 
 
 These idlers in the streets, about the grocery, 
 shambling past my windows, calling out imperti- 
 nences to one another what have I to do with all 
 this commonness? Why not stand far away and be 
 clean of it all? 
 
 Ah, my faltering love for humanity, how can it 
 be made strong? 
 
 About eleven o'clock the fog lifted; a breath of 
 life came on the rising breeze; there was a bit more 
 stirring on the street. 
 
 Then I saw a curious sight ; one of Brown's finest 
 equipages was driving past, with coachman, foot- 
 man, and superb horses, polished and shining. In 
 the trap, erect, unbending, sat a tiny little old lady, 
 plain, severe, with snow-white hair under an old- 
 fashioned bonnet. She wore simple, antiquated 
 clothes, all black, save for a white frill in her bonnet. 
 
 In front of her was an ancestral rocker, of the 
 Governor Bradford type, wedged in tight, for there 
 was barely room for it. 
 
 The postman, who was at my door, burst out 
 laughing and told me that it was Billions' mother. 
 Every year she visits him for a month or two and 
 whenever she comes she brings her own little sewing 
 chair with her, because, she says, there is nothing 
 in her son's house comfortable to sit on. What ar- 
 rangements are made for bringing it on the train 
 with her, nobody knows.
 
 98 A WORLD TO MEND 
 
 "A spicy little old lady, all right/' said the post- 
 man; "it's easy to see where Brown got his brains 
 and his stick-to-it-ive-ness." 
 
 I think of Miss Katharine Brown and wonder 
 whether Heaven has sent her an ally.
 
 XIII 
 
 August 25. 
 
 Strolled along a bypath at the edge of the 
 marshes out to the bridge that spans the tidal river. 
 I go there now and then of an evening to sit on the 
 parapet and smoke my pipe, Tim at my heels, as 
 always. Now and then a passer-by nods to me, and 
 a neighbor has been known to sit down beside me 
 and talk of town affairs, the last appropriation 
 made at town meeting, or the church debt. From 
 the far-stretching green of the marsh grasses to the 
 gulls that float and fly with sunset on their wings it 
 is a world of incredible peace and beauty. These 
 young lads who pass, in their best clothes, intent on 
 calling and on courting, betray no shadow of the 
 menace of these hours, no look of apprehension in 
 regard to the days to be ; may life grant them some 
 tithe at least of the hopes they wear upon their 
 faces ! 
 
 Sometimes, as I sit or stroll here alone at twilight, 
 my mind turns back to its old habit of speculative 
 thought, the old inquiries as to the why and where- 
 fore of existence. I sternly recall it, however; there 
 is no time in this world of war for such questioning. 
 It is strange that the days of deepest stress, of most 
 overwhelming disaster are the ones in which we 
 cling most resolutely to a conviction that there is 
 meaning somewhere in life. It is in the most awful
 
 100 A WORLD TO MEND 
 
 moments that we know most clearly that we must 
 not let go. 
 
 At these times I often wonder at the anxious days 
 of my youth spent in intellectual doubt and ques- 
 tioning, in trying to work out my thought of Christi- 
 anity. There was with me a troubled feeling of 
 being outcast, because of formal tenets, theological 
 assertions that I could accept, as did those dear 
 to me. I could not conform without accepting them, 
 nor say I believed without believing them. How 
 far away and unimportant now seems all anxious 
 thought about shades of assent to mere doctrine! 
 It is no longer a question as to how we shall receive 
 Christianity; the supremely important thing is that 
 we shall receive it. No, that is too passive a word. 
 that we shall reach out and hold it, with pas- 
 sionate strength of purpose. The anguish of the 
 moment compels a deeper faith than I had ever 
 dreamed; the issue is no longer between different 
 intellectual aspects of belief, but between Christi- 
 anity and a horrible paganism, potent through 
 modern science as paganism has never before been, 
 conscienceless through Christianity cast off as 
 paganism has never before been; for the finer 
 standard, known, and repudiated, works havoc as ig- 
 norance of the standard never could have done. 
 Whatever happens, those who hold the faith in any 
 form must band together to fight shoulder to shoul- 
 der against the monster something that comes creep- 
 ing up out of primeval darkness, bringing hate and 
 force and lust in its train. There is, fundamentally, 
 but one thought in the world to-day, consuming all 
 other thoughts, Christianity. 
 
 Never, in all the intervening centuries, has the
 
 A WORLD TO MEND 101 
 
 significance of Christianity shone out so clearly, not 
 as a mere creed, but as a life ; never has its one deep 
 meaning of love, great even to sacrifice, been so 
 clear or so compelling; never before has the world 
 understood as it understands now the full import of 
 the herald message: "Peace on earth." Many of 
 us have thought of that as a sweet and melodious 
 greeting, and, interpreted for us by many an art, 
 it comes to us in a thousand ways, on the wings of 
 music, on the wings of poetry, on the wings, and 
 none are quite so beautiful (the gulls just reminded 
 me) as early Italian art. Perhaps none of us have 
 ever realized that the herald angels were making, in 
 the name of the future, in behalf of the powers of 
 Heaven, the one promise through which a higher life 
 could become possible, pointing out the one way 
 through which hates and grudges could die, and love 
 could come to mankind for its salvation and its 
 healing. And it is for us to make that promise good : 
 Peace on earth. 
 
 How is it, then, that I find the pastors of the 
 two rival churches here, the Congregationalist and 
 the Unitarian, preaching at each other, trying to 
 mend and strengthen the fence between their re- 
 spective freeholds in the kingdom of heaven instead 
 of trying to tear it down? These two men are much 
 in my mind as I attempt to carry out my task of 
 ascertaining how my fellow townsmen are fulfilling 
 their high duties of citizenship in a democracy. I 
 have listened to much reasoned demonstration from 
 each of them ; they are both trying to advance legal 
 proof of the substance of things hoped for, the evi- 
 dence of things not seen, and this in a world crying 
 out for assurance of things divine.
 
 102 A WORLD TO MEND 
 
 August 26. 
 
 Jack and Katharine Brown are much in my mind, 
 and I often take refuge from my many troublesome 
 lines of thought in my growing affectionate interest 
 in them. Humanity sometimes has to stand and wait 
 while I ponder on these two young people. How 
 many times they have met, or what they may have 
 said, what chance word or look has drifted from one 
 to another I do not know. There has doubtless been 
 a certain amount of social intercourse presided 
 over by the conscript matrons of Mataquoit; 
 there are circles which a cobbler may not penetrate. 
 Ami K. Brown, I am told, graciously condescends to 
 the social activities and is much praised therefor; 
 both his elder daughter and her younger sister Clare 
 are seen at gatherings of people of their years. Of 
 the two in whom my interest deepens day by day 
 I know only what I have seen and heard, which is 
 little, and what I see in the two faces, which is much. 
 Lonely people sometimes learn to read faces. They 
 stopped to chat for a moment on the street corner 
 the other day, then went smiling their different 
 ways. Jack's state of mind is clearer than the hand- 
 writing on the wall; that which has been inevitable 
 from the first moment of their meeting has hap- 
 pened, but I have no way of knowing whether Miss 
 Brown's feeling toward him is more than a friendly 
 liking. 
 
 Only, I tremble in my boots, in all my boots on 
 floor and wall, at the thought of the two when I 
 see Billions driving past. Judging not only by 
 what he said to me, but by all his baronial ways and 
 appurtenances, there is trouble ahead. Is there any 
 place in all his massive pile it is indeed a pile
 
 A WORLD TO MEND 103 
 
 where he will wall his daughter up alive, if he finds 
 that she is not only thinking thoughts that are not 
 his, but is setting her affection on the son of a man 
 less wealthy than he? 
 
 Jack is as friendly as ever, but he talks only of 
 surface things, automobiles, golf balls, the autumn 
 sporting events at college. Yet, under all this, I 
 am aware of a deepening and enlarging something 
 in him. When he is not chaffing, his face takes on 
 a seriousness that I have never seen there, though 
 he immediately begins to whistle if I catch his eye. 
 
 The thought of the two brings me a feeling of 
 freshness, of exhilaration, and casts a little ray of 
 hope across the future. 
 
 August 29. 
 
 I was greatly surprised this morning by a visit 
 from the mother of Billions Brown. If my calls in- 
 crease at this rate I shall soon believe that my shop 
 is the social center of Mataquoit. She was just as 
 erect, just as detached from her surroundings as 
 when I had seen her in the trap. She walked ; I did 
 not ask her why, but I decided that she did not care 
 to trust, oftener than need be, the bones of an 
 earlier generation to the perilous equipages of this. 
 
 Her errand was a curious one, and it took one 
 back a generation. She had worked for her son a 
 pair of old-fashioned, flowered carpet slippers, and 
 had brought them to me to have them soled. Her 
 keen old eyes twinkled as she gave them to me; I 
 could not help thinking, in the light of what I had 
 been told of her, that she had made them partly to 
 tease Ami, by bringing a reminder of his old and 
 homely surroundings into his new world of splendor.
 
 104 A WORLD TO MEND 
 
 Her business done, she hesitated a minute, and 
 then, saying that there was something she would 
 like to talk over with me, she introduced herself. 
 I hastily assured her that this was unnecessary and 
 begged her to be seated in my armchair. 
 
 Her granddaughter had told her about her talks 
 with me and about her father's vexation that she had 
 made friends with the cobbler. Billions, it would 
 seem, had informed her of his old acquaintance with 
 me, but had said nothing of this to his daughter. 
 
 "Katharine was afraid she had done something 
 wrong," said the old lady, looking at me in friendly 
 fashion from a pair of shrewd dark eyes : "I wanted 
 to see for myself." 
 
 Then, like a general, she went straight to her ob- 
 jective point. She would like to know something of 
 this young man of whom her son had been speaking. 
 Who was he? What did I think of him? 
 
 I told her at some length. 
 
 "Then you think it is all right?" 
 
 I assured her that, from my point of view, the 
 undefined "it" was all right. She nodded. 
 
 "I thought from what my son said about you that 
 I could trust your judgment, though he does not 
 himself, in this case. He used to talk about you 
 when you were boys; he had a great idea of your 
 opinion in those days." 
 
 Then she changed the subject; no society woman 
 could have done better. She was glad of the books 
 I had lent her granddaughter; her son's attitude in 
 regard to the war troubled her. She herself had knit 
 more than a hundred pairs of stockings for the Allied 
 soldiers; somebody in the family had to do some- 
 thing to help, she said sternly.
 
 A WORLD TO MEND 105 
 
 Nodding under her old-fashioned bonnet, she told 
 me to go on; to do whatever I could for the girl. 
 All the time she was with me, I felt as if some one 
 were writing a character sketch of Katharine; the 
 keen directness of look, the way of speaking, the 
 fine simplicity recalled her granddaughter and 
 largely solved the problem of the young girl's per- 
 sonality. Looking at her I felt assured that the 
 girl would find her way out of her mental puzzles 
 into a straight, clear-cut path. 
 
 As she went, she honored me by a handshake; 
 her hand, in its black silk mitt, was in itself a monu- 
 ment, and a noble one, of American democracy. The 
 somewhat bent fingers, the marks of toil, the un- 
 wearied motherhood of the hand touched me deeply. 
 
 I thought of Billions and cried out to myself that 
 it was not fair. She who had striven so heroically 
 to create should have been permitted to create some- 
 thing more in her own likeness, for the stamp of 
 those who hold ideals, principles above all else, was 
 upon her. That which is finest in our American tra- 
 dition was clearly visible in her, but I could not see 
 it in her son. 
 
 August 30. 
 
 Dog day. Not Tim's kind of dog, but some 
 tired and discouraged dog. Dog-tired. Bad weather, 
 and but little good news. A damp, warm, stagnant 
 air that in some way changes the leathery smell of 
 my shop to a disagreeable odor. Shoes are hard to 
 mend, lives are harder, and governments harder still. 
 
 All my finer thought in regard to the relation of 
 man to man, both that which is my own, and that 
 which has come from many days and nights of read-
 
 106 A WORLD TO MEND 
 
 ing of the great idealistic theories concerning human 
 betterment, breaks down. Excellent on paper, they 
 fail to make connection with man as he is. ... 
 My sojourn in this backwater of American democ- 
 racy, a stagnant New England town, has undone 
 me. ... As yet I fail to see how the vision of the 
 thinker in his study can be made to square with the 
 facts of human life and human temperament. 
 
 I confess to days of utter revolt against democracy 
 and its results, against the commonness of people, 
 their lying down upon freedom as if it were a feather 
 bed where one may take one's ease endlessly. At 
 times my awl refuses to go straight, because it longs 
 to be off pricking and waking up Mataquoit, slip- 
 pered, lazy Mataquoit, gossiping over fences, leaning 
 on hoes, rocking on front porches or back, standing 
 on street corners with hands in pockets, and hats 
 set sideways on the back of the head. The easy 
 chairs in this country are too comfortably hollowed 
 for a government by the people ; freedom, for many, 
 has become a mere individual indulgence; no other 
 form of government could have produced a people 
 at once so prosperous and so down at heel. Hu- 
 manity, perhaps, needs a prod or goad of misery to 
 make it keep on wanting to progress. 
 
 I have moments of almost intolerable longing for 
 my own world of caste, of special privilege, of in- 
 terest in things of the mind, of asceticisms, denials, 
 simplicities, unworldliness, if you will, of hard fine 
 work of mind and brain. Tim, divining something 
 of my thought, reminds me, by a cold nose on my 
 hand, that in that case, I should never have found 
 him. 
 
 Then I realize that this world of my past is as
 
 A WORLD TO MEND 107 
 
 hard to relate to the needs of modern democracy as 
 is unlovely Mataquoit. We were of those who re- 
 ceived all and gave nothing. There was in that 
 narrow and sheltered life no perception of the values 
 of democracy, no real admission of its existence. We 
 thought and spoke in terms of the aristocracies 
 social, intellectual, and artistic of the world. 
 Democracy occupied the position of a poor relation, 
 not mentioned, standing outside the gates. - 
 
 Will this unrecognized democracy come with a 
 storm and a rush, sweeping all before her, with the 
 fury of one scorned? How can we tame her and 
 make her wise? 
 
 September 1. 
 
 A month of the third year of the war has gone ; 
 Allied drives are under way in the East, the West, 
 the Alps. The relief I feel in the fact that our side 
 has thus taken the initiative is wholly out of pro- 
 portion to any success as yet won; no too sanguine 
 hope must be permitted after the long months of 
 defeat, yet there is a new freshness, an exhilaration 
 in the air. I cannot help venturing a hope that the 
 tide may be turning, may be coming our way. 
 
 It is not, however, any good fortune on the field 
 of battle that should strengthen our resolve ; rather, 
 the many disasters of the past year should bring an 
 increasing sense of necessity that we gather up the 
 loins of the spirit, fighting with mind and soul for 
 that hope of a fairer working order which we have 
 chosen to call democracy. I must brace myself in 
 more determined fashion for that spiritual battle in 
 which I have enlisted, conquering the distaste 
 which at times I feel for my task. The problem
 
 108 A WORLD TO MEND 
 
 is, in many ways, overwhelmingly discouraging to 
 the looker-on; it is for the actor to replace the 
 looker-on and so change the face of the spectacle. 
 We must ourselves create this democracy which we 
 wish to find. Too little, perhaps, have I realized 
 that I am here not merely to receive impressions, 
 but to make them. Not only among my present 
 acquaintances, who grow in number, but in such 
 public meetings as are open must my voice be heard. 
 Ever since I came I have been digging a bit into the 
 theory and the practice of the local and the State 
 government, and I have made progress. 
 
 I will start an offensive of my own on the front 
 of Mataquoit.
 
 XIV 
 
 September 3. 
 
 Went to town meeting last night and for the first 
 time heard my fellow citizens in public debate. The 
 subject of the water front was up for consideration, 
 and discussion grew heated as those who had prop- 
 erty to sell for the proposed improvement and the 
 town officers wrangled over plans and terms. 
 
 When the dispute was at its height a man whom I 
 have not seen heretofore rose and in a brief speech, 
 a bit whimsical, keen and friendly, set forth the 
 issue so clearly, suggested so definitely the right 
 course, that the would-be profiteers looked a bit 
 shame-faced and intimated a willingness to modify 
 their terms. It was one of the deftest bits of gen- 
 eralship that I have ever seen, the unknown speaker 
 striking a higher civic note than had been struck, 
 waking, through sympathy and through humor, a 
 new, disinterested sense of the common good. 
 
 I say "unknown," but I found out after the meet- 
 ing that I am the only person in Mataquoit to whom 
 he is unknown. This is our missing fellow towns- 
 man, Alexander Wallace, back from his vacation in 
 Canada, a fine-looking, genial personage of advanc- 
 ing middle age, erect in bearing, a something sol- 
 dierly lingering there, for his boyhood saw service in 
 the Civil War. There is a charm in his manner,
 
 110 A WORLD TO MEND 
 
 coming largely from a sympathy one feels in him, 
 sounding in his voice, irradiating his whole person- 
 ality. Withal, there is a twinkle in his eye. 
 
 I must make the acquaintance of Mr. Alexander 
 Wallace as soon as may be. 
 
 September 5. 
 
 Billions, at I am sure the instigation of his 
 mother, invited me to come to his house. He showed 
 me the whole of his princely estate, from the highest 
 Gothic tower, looking over miles of sea, to the elec- 
 tric refrigerating plant in the basement where cool 
 air is manufactured for the preservation of his food. 
 A great staff of men was at work on the grounds; 
 another great staff inside. Lawns, conservatories, 
 corridors, drawing-rooms, and old grandmother 
 Brown wanders as one lost about this costly wilder- 
 ness with her knitting, a little, old-fashioned shawl 
 folded across her flat chest. 
 
 Her younger granddaughter, Clare, a fair-haired, 
 long-legged girl, was hovering about her with affec- 
 tionate care, but Billions and his mother seemed to 
 be bodies separated by a vast distance, moving in 
 wholly different orbits. Looking at the two, I read 
 a sad page in our national history. The swift de- 
 velopment of vast material resource in our country 
 has wrought tragedy in many families, creating a 
 gap between parents and children, as suddenly 
 acquired wealth has thrust itself between. Some- 
 thing is snapped off; the laws of normal growth 
 are broken. 
 
 The irony of Billions' success! He has succeeded 
 only in separating himself from the human being 
 whom he probably cares most for, with the excep-
 
 A WORLD TO MEND 111 
 
 tion of his daughters and I am not entirely sure 
 about the exception in all the world. 
 
 The memory of this call upon my old classmate 
 resolves itself into a panorama of polished wood and 
 gleaming satins and shining marble. Against this 
 background Billions stands out, with his many ser- 
 vants, of whom he is greatly in awe, grouped about 
 him. There is Billions with his butler, his English 
 butler, who tells him what to do; Billions and his 
 gardeners; Billions and his coachman and his foot- 
 men. There is also Billions with his French chauf- 
 feur, who speeds; I fancy that Billions is afraid to 
 tell him to stop. Billions draws the line at a valet. 
 
 After we had inspected all possible aspects of my 
 lord's magnificence, a beverage reminiscent of col- 
 lege days was served on a verandah which extends 
 to the edge of the rocks. Under its mellowing in- 
 fluence, we talked of old days and new. 
 
 I could see that he thought that, through my own 
 Quixotic folly, I was in hard straits, and he made 
 fumbling suggestions about helping me. This 
 touched me, and I found it hard to resist the temp- 
 tation to let him think I was really in need. I had 
 never liked Billions so well; so unexpected was his 
 sympathy that I was inclined to prey upon it. 
 
 As we talked of past changes and impending 
 changes I marvelled that a man whose life in ma- 
 terial ways had so greatly broadened could keep a 
 mind so narrow. He is puzzled by all suggestion of 
 altered conditions; he considers those under which 
 he made his fortune the best possible; wealth for 
 him represents brains and character. His political 
 ideal is that of the late eighteenth century, liberty 
 of the individual to forge ahead and do everything
 
 112 A WORLD TO MEND 
 
 that means gain for himself at whatever cost to 
 others; the thought of possibility of growth in that 
 ideal would seem to him sacrilege. A man's country 
 is a something that protects him from attacking 
 powers; Billions' country has protected him, hence 
 he takes a certain pride in it. America, in his 
 thought, has certain responsibilities toward him ; he, 
 few or none toward it. 
 
 Like many another wealthy potentate in this 
 country, he has his generosities and, in leisure mo- 
 ments, gives some thought to the relief of the ne- 
 cessities of the poor; but the higher generosity of 
 helping on some change of conditions that may 
 lessen his own profits while giving his needy neigh- 
 bor a chance has never occurred to him. 
 
 Is the illumination of this darkened mind also 
 my job? Would that fate had sent me as a mission- 
 ary to the Hottentots rather than as a prophet of a 
 higher civic law to Billions Brown! 
 
 September 7. 
 
 Of what is happening in the romance which I 
 have seen begun I know but little; the story moves 
 on, but I am no teller of stories and could not de- 
 scribe, even if I were a witness, the meetings be- 
 tween Jack and Katharine Brown. Perhaps, for 
 courtesy, I should write her name first, but his name 
 takes precedence of all others, I find, in my thought. 
 
 With an evident growing seriousness of thought 
 Jack's boyish charm deepens. The gleam in his blue 
 eyes has as much of humor as ever, but the mouth 
 has a new look of determination. Once or twice, 
 after watching me in silence for a time, he has 
 started to speak, flushed, and said nothing; confi-
 
 A WORLD TO MEND 113 
 
 dence is waiting me, I am sure, but I must not force 
 it. It is more than the thought of Katharine that 
 fills his mind ; there is something beyond. 
 
 A reflection of the new look of Jack's face is on 
 Katharine's, both the softer look in the eyes and 
 the sterner expression about the mouth. Whether 
 there is trouble at the great house in the matter of 
 their friendship I do not know, but I judge, partly 
 from a half-apprehensive shadow flitting across 
 Katharine's face at the mention of Jack's name on 
 the day of my call, that this is the case. 
 
 What supreme folly ! Of all the foolish social pre- 
 tensions that I have ever seen, and I have seen 
 many, the most foolish is the pretence of social ex- 
 clusiveness on the part of Billions Brown. 
 
 I know from the tilt of old Grandmother Brown's 
 bonnet that she is on the side of the angels, and 
 that she is having difficulty. I saw her to-day out 
 in Jack's runabout, defiantly chaperoning her grand- 
 daughter on a drive. And I know full well what 
 terror must have possessed her, for automobiles 
 must be fearsome things to her, and Jack will speed. 
 
 Meanwhile, I have my unshared moments and my 
 lonely hours. Jack's early sympathetic curiosity in 
 regard to me, his interest in my work, have vanished. 
 The wakening affection he had for me is still there, 
 I think, but is in abeyance. He is completely ab- 
 sorbed in the thought of this young girl, watching 
 for a glimpse of her, sitting absent-mindedly by the 
 window, waiting for her to drive past. 
 
 I am beginning to realize dimly the challenge of 
 the years. It comes now when, at moments, I feel 
 a bit old and tired and wistful for the voices that 
 used to speak my first name. As all that draws in
 
 114 A WORLD TO MEND 
 
 outward ways, the affection of others dims and 
 lessens; as one learns not to ask the love once poured 
 out so plentifully, one realizes more fully the stern 
 opportunity of life, the chance to give all, asking 
 nothing. The supreme test comes at the moment 
 when you begin to know that all you cling to slips 
 things, people, experiences, work, achievements at 
 that moment which says: "You must let go." 
 Surely, as one moves down these later years, striving 
 more and more to "love without the help of anything 
 on earth," one more and more believes in the greater 
 Love, giving all, demanding nothing. Perhaps one 
 is even able to fashion one's small remnant of life 
 in the light of it. 
 
 Now to my unfinished boots, and my forever un- 
 finished task of loving my neighbor as myself. 
 
 September 8. 
 
 No customer to-day. I shut my door and cobbled 
 shoes, somewhat diminishing the row against the 
 wall, waiting for the stitches that will enable them to 
 walk away and start again upon the human high- 
 road. I had much troubled thinking, as well as 
 difficult cobbling to do; the country is shaken from 
 end to end by a great impending railway strike, 
 which comes, cutting like an ugly threat, across my 
 slow-growing hope for a more unified Americanism 
 in this country. 
 
 My day was spent in the heart of this long and 
 wearying labor and capital struggle, old lines of 
 thought and earlier investigations converging here, 
 with present apprehension. This is a problem 
 toward which I have directed much mental energy 
 in the past, but in a remote, theoretical way, as one
 
 A WORLD TO MEND 115 
 
 casually interested in economic questions. I am 
 conscious in myself of a new attitude, of deep per- 
 sonal concern, a fresh sense of the individual re- 
 sponsibility of every citizen to work toward har- 
 monious adjustment of troubles here. This thunder 
 of battle which shakes the earth has stirred within 
 many of us depths of human feeling of which we 
 were unaware. 
 
 No less, this threatened civil war at a moment 
 of great crisis is thrown into high relief by the con- 
 flagration which is consuming the world. I have 
 keen sympathy with real sufferers in the world of 
 workers, but I admit that suffering labor is not the 
 labor that is most in evidence to-day. It is a cruel 
 thing that a vast number of American citizens are 
 choosing to be less than citizens, are willing, appar- 
 ently, in cold blood, to tie up transportation the 
 country over, inevitably bringing distress and death 
 to many of their fellow citizens ; this modern slogan 
 of money and still more money for oneself is alarm- 
 ingly replacing the old victory or death, for one's 
 country. There was no cry of time and a half for 
 over- time in 76! Where is the earlier sense of 
 common citizenship, the sense of loyalty to the land 
 of one's birth and all who dwell within it? Equally 
 cruel has been the selfish following of individual 
 interest in great enterprises, with no thought of 
 civic responsibility, which is largely responsible for 
 the present lamentable state of things; the dragon's 
 teeth have been thickly sown and are springing up 
 in abundant harvest. Where have we fallen short, 
 we, whose ancestors started out with so fair a hope 
 of justice, of equality, of opportunity for all? Of 
 the fact that we have failed, the present crisis is
 
 116 A WORLD TO MEND 
 
 abundant proof; we have indeed split up into the 
 masses and the classes. What other result could 
 have followed from the attitude that I and mine 
 have taken, from the exploiting of the people that 
 Billions Brown and his kind have done? Those who, 
 having power to guide, have failed to guide, intel- 
 lectually and spiritually, are guilty, even as those 
 who have shown practical greed, and should be ar- 
 rested, if not by the United States government, at 
 least by then 1 own consciences, as fomenters of 
 strikes. 
 
 It is distasteful to me to agree with Billions in 
 regard to any economic matter, yet I find myself in 
 accord with him in condemning this strike. My 
 reasons, however, are different from his; he is in a 
 high financier's fury about it because of the jolt it 
 gives to commerce; I am thinking of two things: 
 
 First: The waning of the old sense of the sacred- 
 ness of agreements. Surely this is the most alarm- 
 ing symptom of our national disgrace, this lack of 
 grasp of abiding principles, set high above the 
 thought of gain or loss, to be held through evil for- 
 tune and through good. Is it not true that, in a 
 recent struggle, the railway men accepted arbitra- 
 tion as a principle to rule in disputes between man- 
 agement and men? Now, arbitration is refused 
 because of a chance for greater gain. The basic foun- 
 dations of all abiding government are threatened by 
 such opportunism. 
 
 Second: This placing of money wage above all 
 other considerations ; this new ethics of holding man 
 largely excused for stealing, or working girl for losing 
 her honor, because the purse is thin, of excusing 
 labor for exercising its strangle hold upon the human
 
 A WORLD TO MEND 117 
 
 throat, is a mark of decadence, of a loss of distinc- 
 tions fundamental to the moral well-being of a 
 people. Honor and coin are not interchangeable 
 barter. 
 
 It is small consolation that thinking men say in 
 regard to labor's cry of wage and yet more wage at 
 any cost: "What can you expect? The money- 
 getting of the old order naturally repeats itself 
 here." Yet I question, letting my mind turn back 
 through what is known of progress in ages past, and 
 forward, through what it hopes, to future years. 
 There is hardly a doubt that a momentous change 
 is coming and is very near, the triumph of the 
 workers the world over. It is sad that they have 
 not set their hopes above those of their predecessors ; 
 the hard years of denial and of discipline should 
 have borne better spiritual fruit. If the financiers 
 of the past have kept their eyes upon their money 
 bags, should these same money bags limit the vision 
 of the men of the future? Growth, the new order, 
 should mean something finer and higher, dispos- 
 sessing the old by its beauty, if it dispossesses it at 
 all. Unless this be true, unless change means funda- 
 mentally a far greater inner beauty, it means 
 decadence. 
 
 The crying need of American life, especially the 
 crying need of labor, coming into power, is a higher 
 motive. 
 
 September 9. 
 
 This afternoon I had the honor of a second visit 
 from Billions Brown. I fancy he came partly be- 
 cause he likes to hear his old college nickname, and 
 that not because of its prophetic suggestion, but be-
 
 118 A WORLD TO MEND 
 
 cause it belonged to his youth. For, in gaining the 
 whole world, he has lost his youth. 
 
 His manner to me is an odd combination of a half- 
 fearful admiration and a half-respectful contempt. 
 His old feeling in regard to me, reenf orced by Grand- 
 mother Brown's approval, struggles with the disdain 
 of an over-successful man for a man whom he con- 
 siders a failure. 
 
 Our talk about our boyhood led to the considera- 
 tion of the present generation of youth, and Billions, 
 with some hesitation, perhaps remembering in what 
 unsparing terms he had ordered me not to talk with 
 his daughter, confided to me that he is greatly puz- 
 zled about Katharine. With an astonishment that 
 left him breathless he told of his recent discovery 
 that she rebelled against the present conditions of 
 her luxurious life and envied girls who had to earn 
 their own living. Talking with him to-day, she had 
 actually cried about it, he said, though he had 
 hardly seen her shed a tear since she had grown up. 
 She envied his stenographer her busy hours and her 
 independence ; she envied the farmer's daughter who 
 supplied the village store with strawberries; she is 
 ashamed to be rich. 
 
 Billions' mind was all in a maze when he told 
 me this, sitting in my armchair and keeping his 
 questioning eyes upon me as I worked. You would 
 think that Katharine would be as happy as the day 
 is long, he said wistfully, with nothing to do, and 
 nothing left that she could ask for. When he said 
 this I could not help wondering at what point in 
 the dizzying ascent of his career the country boy 
 had dropped his common sense. Any one should 
 see, I reflected, that the strength, the practical
 
 A WORLD TO MEND 119 
 
 power of her forbears was chafing within her, with 
 nothing to exercise itself upon. The cumulative 
 energy of generations of hard-working folk was 
 brought to a sudden standstill; what wonder that 
 the dammed-up powers fretted behind the barriers, 
 trying to beat a way out? 
 
 Billions went sadly away when he had told me 
 his dilemma; Katharine's discontent was his failure. 
 I could see that she had been, since her babyhood, 
 the chief treasure of his heart, partly, doubtless, be- 
 cause of her likeness in look and in character to his 
 mother. If she did not find satisfaction in his castle, 
 his wide demesne, his army of servants and all his 
 splendor, of what avail was his success? 
 
 After he had gone I thought long about our 
 American habit, at least in the wealthier homes, 
 and certainly also in the homes of some of the less 
 wealthy, of bringing up the daughters of democracy 
 as if they were daughters of princely houses in 
 Europe. Our system is even worse than that of the 
 old countries where something of feudal custom still 
 lingers. For there, in the houses of the great and 
 titled, daughters are taught to serve, to feel a re- 
 sponsibility for those beneath them, privilege con- 
 ferring duty as if it were an order. Noblesse oblige, 
 but there is no oblige about middle-class American 
 ideals hi regard to daughters. 
 
 I was greatly relieved that Billions had nothing 
 to say about Jack.
 
 XV 
 
 September 10. 
 
 There is a softness in the air to-day, a gentleness 
 such as one meets only at the shore; the golden 
 light of early fall is in the air and on all growing 
 things. Perhaps the look of sky and earth and sea 
 has something to do with the feeling I have that 
 this is indeed the spot for which I was looking in 
 order to exercise my craft. In spite of all perplex- 
 ities, of the many difficulties in thinking out human 
 problems in the light of actual human personalities, 
 I am glad that I came to Mataquoit. Much that 
 I have read and studied in the past of social and 
 political theory takes on concrete form, gains new 
 interest in the light of my present deepening knowl- 
 edge of human beings. 
 
 The human comradeship which I have found here 
 more than compensates me for all my toil. Children 
 greet me shyly on the street; my friend, the police- 
 man, forecasts the weather; Jack puts his head 
 through the door to chaff me: 
 
 "Now, Socrates, shall we have a little set-to about 
 the duties of a citizen in a republic." 
 
 My growing absorption in Jack and Katharine 
 makes me wonder sometimes how I can keep my 
 interest toward my fellow creatures in general, how 
 keep my impersonal quest? I find deep satisfaction 
 in watching these two, and in sharing, through an 
 understanding that is almost startling to myself,
 
 A WORLD TO MEND 121 
 
 their new life. A look on Jack's face, his step I 
 am interested in seeing how expressive people's feet 
 have become to me since I made them my profession 
 his whistle, a glance that passes between the two, 
 a glance withheld, tells more than I have any right 
 to know. This growing older has its compensations ; 
 one is, as it were, disembodied bit by bit; the wall 
 of flesh breaks down; one becomes more keenly 
 aware of other souls and what goes on in them. 
 
 I have seen Jack and Katharine several times 
 walking together; once I caught sight of them out 
 on the bridge over the tidal river ; once on the green 
 head of the gray granite cliff, looking out over the 
 sea. It seems to me that the faces of both wear the 
 look that the twigs wear in early spring. 
 
 At each glimpse I get of them together, my 
 grumbling in regard to the upbringing of this gen- 
 eration subsides. One can but marvel at the im- 
 perishable stuff of which youth is made that they, 
 whose parents have done their best to spoil them, 
 are still unspoiled. I glory in these two who have 
 so flowered in this free air of liberty; fresh winds 
 seem to follow them wherever they go; they move 
 like young gods in pure air. Yet they are but two 
 young human beings, practical, clean-cut, white- 
 shod. 
 
 The white feet of the young go shining through 
 these days, and on the endless way. It is but a 
 case of canvas shoes, but they are a symbol. 
 
 September 12. 
 
 I have had a call from Alexander Wallace, who 
 not only came but spent an evening with me before 
 the fire hi my shop, for the sea air was chilly. Twice
 
 122 A WORLD TO MEND 
 
 lately I have encountered him, once at the hut of 
 old Mrs. Mooney, to whom I had gone to take a 
 much-needed gift of shoes, and once at the palace 
 of Billions Brown. I fancy he is the only inhabi- 
 tant of Mataquoit who has both these places on his 
 visiting list. 
 
 He came in with a half-smiling seriousness, saying 
 that he had wanted to look me up ; that he was the 
 busybody of the town, who always took care of 
 newcomers. As he talked of Mataquoit and its in- 
 habitants, the town came alive for me as it had not 
 been before. Much of its civic history, during the 
 days that he had known it, became as real as a 
 drama played before my eyes. Its struggles, dis- 
 putes, town meetings, its selectmen's discussions, its 
 New England way of half accepting and half shirk- 
 ing its responsibilities were set forth with a graphic 
 touch that made me feel as if I had taken part 
 therein. 
 
 As my guest talked on I became aware in him of 
 a new attitude, something which I have never 
 encountered in the world in which I have lived here- 
 tofore, nor, as yet, in Mataquoit, a sense of citizen- 
 ship as a first concern; he is on guard, always 
 waiting; no government automatically releases him 
 from his individual responsibility. He gives disci- 
 plined, instant obedience when ordered into action, 
 and the order comes always from within. 
 
 Listening, I said to myself, "God has sent me a 
 citizen for my encouragement." The thought came 
 warmly into my mind, and Tim wagged his tail in 
 response to it, as is often the case. He has a way 
 of wagging an accompaniment to any especially 
 friendly thought of mine toward any one.
 
 A WORLD TO MEND 123 
 
 My guest spoke of himself laughingly, stretching 
 out his feet toward the fire, as the man who had no 
 slippers. There was never an evening, or rarely one, 
 when he could sit by the fire and toast his toes, 
 for there was always something, going on, in church, 
 town hall, or neighbor's house in which he had to 
 help, or some lonely person on whom he had to call. 
 
 I watched him by the light of the leaping flame. 
 That winning, whimsical, sympathetic smile; the 
 keen, yet tender eyes, that miss no shade of human 
 peculiarity, that subordination of all thought of self 
 and of individual concern, letting every man's in- 
 terests come before his own, I had to rub my 
 eyes a bit to see if I was making him up, for it 
 seemed almost as if he might be a figment of the 
 imagination, created to meet the need of Mataquoit 
 or of America. If, peradventure, I said to myself, 
 out of one hundred and ten millions, one in ten 
 thousand could be like this man, the country would 
 be saved. 
 
 Matters seem looking up in the world, with better 
 news from the western front, with Jack, and Wallace, 
 and Grandmother Brown in Mataquoit. 
 
 September 15. 
 
 I have dined with Billions and his family. Doubt- 
 less he invited me because he did not dare to do 
 otherwise with his mother there; it was plain that 
 she had insisted. 
 
 I doubt if any social occasion was ever more per- 
 plexing. Billions was sulky and wore, under his ac- 
 quired, great financier manner, an amusing air of a 
 big boy being made to do something he does not 
 want to do. In a way I think he was glad to see
 
 124 A WORLD TO MEND 
 
 me, but the hopeless confusion in regard to social 
 relations which my coming would rouse in the minds 
 of his servants staggered him. There are evidently 
 no rules in his book of etiquette for a situation so 
 complex. And I, when I fathomed my state of mind 
 to the bottom, found remnants of my old feeling of 
 a slight condescension on my part in dining with 
 Billions. 
 
 The butler was a study; to him the presence of 
 the village cobbler was an outrage. He was used to 
 Billions and his monstrous ways such were Ameri- 
 can millionaires but the cobbler ! He might have 
 mutinied but for the commanding eye of old Mrs. 
 Brown ; there was never an instant's departure from 
 respectful obedience when that was upon him. 
 
 The old lady was absolutely unafraid of Billions 
 in all his glory, and his entire staff, the collected 
 inmates of the huge servants' quarters, could not 
 daunt her. Her rebuke to the butler because he 
 failed to produce the baked potato and creamed beef 
 which were her very sensible substitute for the 
 over-luxurious dinner that was served furnished 
 comedy refreshment of a high type. Evidently the 
 chef was put through his paces to suit her ; his bread 
 was never light enough, she told me, nor could he 
 make raised biscuit to meet her standards. 
 
 The butler received his discipline with a meek- 
 ness which surprised me, and which he did not show 
 to any one else, for he was a bit haughty with 
 Billions. Perhaps he remembered another white 
 kerchief, somewhere in England, folded this way. 
 
 In a quite surprising way Mrs. Brown dominated 
 the conversation, to the evident amusement of the 
 two girls, Katharine and Clare, who twinkled at
 
 A WORLD TO MEND 125 
 
 each other now and then over their grandmother's 
 reminiscences. She told us about Billions' joy in 
 his first pair of "bough ten" shoes; about the ready- 
 made suit which was purchased for him when he 
 was fifteen, the first suit not made over from his 
 father's clothing; it was a fine shepherd's plaid. 
 
 I could almost swear that the butler winked at 
 Grandmother Brown when she told how Billions did 
 three days' hard work in the hay field to get money 
 enough to go to Barnum's circus. She was fond and 
 proud of Billions, but apparently realized that he 
 needed "taking down," and, though she did her task 
 over-thoroughly, making him wince now and then, 
 she showed fundamental good taste in not wanting 
 the humble origin concealed. I am sure that the 
 butler, whose good taste was impeccable, recognized 
 this ; he showed her greater deference that he showed 
 any one else. 
 
 Billions' energetic face had become a mask, out 
 of which looked the same bright eyes which I re- 
 membered from long ago. They were hopeful and 
 determined then; now, somewhat different in ex- 
 pression, wary, watching to see if he were doing 
 things right. He kept his eye on the butler as if 
 alert for signals ; the butler has evidently given much 
 time and thought to the education of his master. 
 
 Doubtless we were all glad when the last course 
 was over. As Billions ushered me to a far corner 
 of the verandah and offered me the choicest cigar I 
 had seen for many a month, I saw the slender young 
 girl Clare, in her filmy, spangled blue gown and 
 dainty slippers, grasp Mrs. Brown's hands and dance 
 about her, crying out: "Granny, you are a darling!" 
 Katharine smiled demurely, and I forthwith con-
 
 126 A WORLD TO MEND 
 
 eluded that the old lady's conversation had given 
 pleasure to her granddaughters. 
 
 That evening gave me a new insight into my 
 host's life and its difficulties. Poor Billions! His 
 days and nights are one long study of how to spend 
 more money. When he plans some pleasure, a 
 yachting trip or a long motor journey, he has to 
 stop to consider how to make it more expensive. 
 Even in going on a simple journey to Washington 
 or Philadelphia, for instance, he has to put his whole 
 mind on the problem of a maximum of outfit for a 
 minimum of result; so with his furnishings and his 
 landscape gardening; nothing else would befit his 
 dignity. 
 
 He ponders over schemes for excessive philan- 
 thropies and is evidently giving away his money in 
 large and abstract fashion, yet he finds himself no 
 nearer his kind for all his huge checks. His gener- 
 osity springs largely from his realization that the 
 tide has turned against multimillionaires and toward 
 those who are working for human welfare; Billions 
 wishes, above all things, to do what is being done. 
 
 As he talked of his past activities and of his plans 
 for the future, I realized afresh his power. If he 
 could have given his ability, his genius for organiza- 
 tion, to the making of his country, what vast results 
 there might have been! Here is another of the 
 many instances of the best mental energy of the 
 land, during the last decades, being drawn into ma- 
 terial production, when it should have been drawn, 
 at least a large share of it, into intellectual and 
 spiritual production, into study of civic need, into 
 statesmanship. There has been vast business ex- 
 pansion, but alas! what needs expansion is America's
 
 A WORLD TO MEND 127 
 
 mind, America's character, America's institutions. 
 The solving of the problems of human adjustment, 
 of the reconcilement of will to will, is vastly more 
 important than working out the best way to treat 
 pig iron, or to refine crude oil. 
 
 Grandmother Brown had gone to bed before I 
 came away, but Katharine was waiting, a slender 
 maiden athlete, at the top of the stone steps leading 
 to the driveway to give me a firm handclasp, and to 
 tell me, with evident sincerity, that it had been a 
 pleasure to her to see me in her home. Her eyes, 
 which, when I first saw her, were too patient for the 
 eyes of a girl, were kindled and alive with leaping 
 flame. 
 
 September 17. 
 
 I met Mrs. Sands on the street to-day, a suave 
 and cordial Mrs. Sands, with a changed face. It 
 was most surprising to see her outstretched hand and 
 to listen to a gracious inquiry about my health and 
 about my business. Jack had grown so attached to 
 me, she said, that she could not help feeling deeply 
 interested in me, and then, with becoming feminine 
 deference, she asked if I could tell her where to 
 find information about strikes in America during 
 the last four or five years. 
 
 She left me wholly bewildered by this change of 
 front, until it dawned upon me that she is aware of 
 Jack's feeling in regard to Katharine Brown and has 
 heard that, incredible as it may seem, the Cobbler 
 is a friend of the Browns and has even dined with 
 them. The realization of this brought me one of 
 my old attacks of disbelief in humanity; what can 
 be achieved in a country honeycombed by this kind
 
 128 A WORLD TO MEND 
 
 of vulgar and snobbish ambition? There is Billions, 
 hovering on the edge of the great world, and Mrs. 
 Sands, hovering on the edge of Billions, his greater 
 wealth the only barrier between them. The thought 
 of what was in Mrs. Sands' mind as she went on 
 down the street, her heels higher than ever, so that 
 she seemed to be walking on tiptoe with hope, 
 almost tarnished the thought which is often in my 
 mind concerning Jack and Katharine. 
 
 Her sense of false values in regard to this matter 
 recalled to me vividly her sense of false values in 
 the matter of training her son for the struggle of 
 life, and this, with bad news from the front and a 
 chance encounter with my two young friends on the 
 beach, threw me into a state of mind in which I 
 forgot my promise to Mrs. Sands not to try to in- 
 fluence her son with reference to present issues. I 
 regret that I broke my promise, but here were my 
 two, full of strength and hope and promise, both, 
 thank God, incomparably better than their training, 
 discussing the question of neutrality in the war. 
 Hiram Banks, our Congressman, had declared him- 
 self a neutral and had counseled Jack, who had 
 spoken out hotly for the Allies, to follow in his 
 footsteps. 
 
 Then I forgot myself and told my young friends 
 with some vehemence that, in ethical questions, 
 there can be no neutrality. Belgium, or the Lusi- 
 tania alone, sufficed as ground for decision, as did 
 many another German deed. Or, if I had but the 
 one fact to guide me, that the English and the 
 French are led by their officers, that the Germans 
 are driven forward by officers with drawn revolvers, 
 I should know on which side to range myself. The
 
 A WORLD TO MEND 129 
 
 whole story is in this: one must join that party in 
 the long warfare which shows the most essential 
 respect for human beings, for in such respect lies 
 the key to the future. 
 
 Life is a battle, I told them, bound to be, from 
 first to last, a fight. We are happy when we can fight 
 only evil tendencies in ourselves and things that all 
 men would recognize as wrong. When a great mo- 
 ment comes, and the world has arrayed itself in 
 fighting camps, make your decision, fight on the 
 side which has more of right, for you have got to 
 fight with one or the other. Fighting, fighting, 
 fighting, leave your body by the wall, if necessary. 
 
 Then, after I had left them, I had a strong re- 
 action. Why should I harangue the young? Why 
 not myself, for shunting off the burden of life upon 
 them? Because I have failed shall I make them live 
 in my place? 
 
 Yes. 
 
 As they walked on, with the blue sea for a back- 
 ground, the sense was fresh within me of this flower 
 of human love, springing eternally on the edge of 
 that awful chasm, the enormous tragedy of 
 human life, made more apparent for the moment 
 by the war, but always tragedy. 
 
 My feeling toward both of them is strong. I have 
 grown fond of Katharine too, and I admire her 
 greatly, but with her I have no such sense of near- 
 ness as I have with Jack. I and he, there is a 
 kind of identity there. Sometimes it seems as if in 
 him I met my youth walking, fresh and unspoiled, 
 and could in him live my life again and live it aright ; 
 sometimes he seems my old prayers made visible. 
 
 Katharine is ardent, vehement, almost over-ener-
 
 130 A WORLD TO MEND 
 
 getic, her nature, I can see, a complement to Jack's. 
 He is slower, sunnier, less impassioned, and possibly 
 steadier when roused. He has not been repressed by 
 a conventional system of training, as she has; there 
 is in him less pent-up electric force, waiting for its 
 outlet. The best that is in him will be stung to 
 life by her, and together 
 
 They became mere specks, far down the yellow 
 sand; I watched them as long as the eye could see, 
 thinking, with a sense of hope for the future, for I 
 could not forget the glimpse I had had of the two 
 on that day in the library, that there was here some- 
 thing greater than in most romances, a burning with 
 one pure flame of patriotism, of desire for service, 
 a something that makes them greater than them- 
 selves.
 
 XVI 
 
 September 20. 
 
 My business flourishes, perhaps at the expense of 
 my constructive thought in regard to democracy, 
 though I must not let this be. This week I have 
 patched a pair of calfskin boots for a farmer who 
 lives half a mile out; I have resoled two pairs of 
 boys' shoes and mended rips in three pairs of girls' 
 shoes. The latter I like least of all; there is some- 
 thing flimsy and unsubstantial in the footwear of 
 womankind in this region, and I dislike the sym- 
 bolism. I have mended a pair of infants' slippers, 
 but very badly. Did they think that I had Cin- 
 derella's fingers when they brought me those? Most 
 interesting of all, I have put stitches in the soles 
 of a pair of prunella gaiters, yes, prunella gaiters, 
 belonging to old lady Simms, who lives in the tiny 
 colonial house on the hill with the great horse- 
 chestnut trees around it. She had darned the holes 
 in the sides herself with black linen. Into what aw- 
 ful era have these reminders of far-distant, sunny 
 days of peace lived on! 
 
 September 24. 
 
 My insight into the predicament of Billions in 
 all his glory grows with each visit I make to the 
 great house, each conversation I have with any of 
 its inmates. 
 
 In his desire to do himself well he has overdone the
 
 132 A WORLD TO MEND 
 
 matter in every way possible. He purchased so 
 much of the Maine coast for his summer estate that 
 he has no near neighbors; he is a solitary sphere, 
 revolving all alone in a vast and empty universe. 
 I am no astronomer, but I know that this cannot 
 be done ; all Billions' magnificent isolation is a con- 
 tradiction of cosmic law. 
 
 It would be an interesting idea for a novel in the 
 earlier manner of Mr. H. G. Wells, the story of a 
 piece of matter that had broken from all laws of 
 attraction and gravitation and was running wild in 
 the universe; Billions we must look upon as an 
 unruly comet, hoping that he will eventually be 
 brought out of his individual orbit and drawn into 
 obedience to the common law. 
 
 Loneliness strikes me as the note of every indi- 
 vidual existence in that house. Katharine has part 
 in the life of a fashionable shore colony a few miles 
 farther on, but I doubt if she cares for it. The 
 younger sister Clare evidently shares some of the 
 sports of the same set. But none of this comes to 
 Billions. From hints that he drops I gather that, 
 lost among the rich of the city, he had rather relied 
 on the summers for social recognition and inter- 
 course, and the summers have failed him. There are 
 none here who speak his language or think his 
 thoughts. He is as solitary, almost, within his high 
 walls as a convict ; there he is, immured in his riches, 
 sentenced for life, without even the relief of hard 
 labor. 
 
 Nowhere else in this country, to so great an ex- 
 tent, except in an occasional glimpse of the city 
 slums, have I felt the irony of present developments 
 in American life as I do here, in the presence of
 
 A WORLD TO MEND 133 
 
 this unachieved democracy of Billions' establish- 
 ment, this wealth that means more ostentation and 
 expenditure, bringing only cramping fetters, instead 
 of a real enrichment of life. In the raw and shining 
 crudeness here one finds far less justification of great 
 possessions than in cases where hereditary tastes 
 and standards dominate, making dollars serve the 
 higher purpose of feeding mind and soul. 
 
 Thinking of this last night, I went to sleep in a 
 mood that, I fear, bordered on complacency, but 
 wakened this morning in bright October sunshine 
 with a sharp realization that some of my criticism 
 would better be directed nearer home. My recog- 
 nition of the fact that I myself am not, as yet, in 
 any real sense, a citizen of America, have not earned 
 that right by virtue of helping make and keep others 
 free, has, at times, an unpleasant poignancy. Per- 
 haps it was the sting of conscience, or possibly it 
 was the pleasant frosty, nipping air that drove me 
 forth; for some reason I found it well-nigh impos- 
 sible to work, so I closed my shop door and walked 
 away from Mataquoit and cobblerdom. I spent the 
 entire day I had a sandwich with me walking 
 along the shore to remote spots that I had not seen, 
 past marsh and headland already wearing the first 
 flush of autumn coloring. It was hard scrambling 
 part of the way, and of this I was glad; there are 
 some mental predicaments from which only your 
 legs can deliver you. 
 
 In thinking of duty undone, I find it impossible 
 to keep from including others in the arraignment; 
 how many are the paths for our straying! I went 
 astray through the dilettante spirit and became the 
 critic, the amused spectator of my kind. My uni-
 
 134 A WORLD TO MEND 
 
 versity training did little but foster this refined and 
 exclusive selfishness. Billions has gone astray from 
 the simplicity of true American life through his 
 yearning for wealth and his love of ostentation. But 
 how much were we in college, with our youthful 
 snobbishness, our sense of caste and class, respon- 
 sible for the direction that his ambition took? I 
 can see him now, mowing old Professor Thomas' 
 yard, while we leaned on the fence, yelling derisive 
 directions to him that were meant to be humorous 
 but were, doubtless, only cruel. We accepted him 
 good-naturedly enough in all the situations of col- 
 lege life where we were inevitably thrown together, 
 but of our ancestral culture, our inherited finer 
 standards, how much did we share with Billions? 
 
 Jack's father has gone astray through a selfish 
 practical instinct. He is unpretentious ; he is honest ; 
 he does his duty by his business, and, in a way, by 
 the town. But he is narrow; he has failed to be 
 an American citizen of full stature in that the wel- 
 fare of the department store is to him of paramount 
 importance by the side of the welfare of the country. 
 He has little sense of the nation and less than no 
 sense of international duties, responsibilities, privi- 
 leges. These business men who are too absorbed for 
 any civic duty and are color blind as regards those 
 higher standards that are beginning to wave before 
 the eyes of men, what shall we do with them? 
 
 Jack's mother has gone astray through fashion 
 and surface culture. Yet we cannot blame women 
 for not being citizens until we make them citizens ; 
 I hold her and her sex absolved for the present from 
 all civic responsibilities. 
 
 Old Joshua Ridgeway in his great stone house on
 
 A WORLD TO MEND 135 
 
 the outskirts of the town has gone astray through 
 forgetting that he is not his own grandfather. An 
 interesting type of failure is old Joshua ; with wealth 
 enough for comfort, and to spare, he has shut him- 
 self up in his ancestral walls, sharing with no one, 
 saving for the sake of saving; there is no going in 
 or out of life in all that great desolate house. 
 
 It is odd, indeed, to fail to live, just because your 
 grandfather happened to live before you ! Was there 
 ever another spot on earth where people lived so 
 much in the past as they do here, so brooded over its 
 achievements, rested so supine in what their an- 
 cestors have done, even though their ancestors have 
 done but little? Old ancestor Ridgeway's highest 
 achievement was, evidently, receiving a grant of 
 land from the Crown. 
 
 But I must not throw stones; also upon my family 
 tree creeps this deadly rust. 
 
 Yet all this kind of thought is futile. I am far 
 better still, alas ! in telling how we went wrong than 
 in showing what we must do in order to go right. 
 Some days I have not shoes enough to mend, and 
 critics flourish best in times of idleness. This old, 
 critical, analytical habit of thought, how I wish I 
 could get rid of it! Creature of a period which 
 taught us how to pull apart, rather than how to put 
 together, I must try to forget the chief teaching 
 given me in my youth, and, at this date, train 
 my mind to habits of constructive thought. 
 
 If the Creator had paused on that first day to 
 analyze the component parts of chaos, instead of 
 beginning to shape the firmament, the universe 
 would still be uncreated.
 
 136 A WORLD TO MEND 
 
 September 26. 
 
 "I'm having serious trouble with my daughter," 
 Billions Brown confided to me yesterday. 
 
 My expression was, doubtless, both congratula- 
 tory and sympathetic; I would give a great deal to 
 have a daughter like that to have trouble with. 
 
 "I don't know what has come over her," he went 
 on ; "I'd wring your neck, Masters, if I thought you 
 were influencing her " 
 
 "No, no," I told him, but a bit guiltily; "it's the 
 other way about; nowadays the old learn of the 
 young; haven't you found that out yet?" 
 
 "She's gone on strike," said Billions. "It's not 
 merely a question of being dissatisfied with her lot; 
 she's acting. She won't wear the clothes I give her 
 nor eat the food my chef provides, except the 
 simplest. I see her morning and afternoon in plain 
 linen frocks, as plain as my sisters used to wear. 
 And she is behaving exactly like her grandmother at 
 table, asking for an egg or something of the kind, 
 ftnd passing most of the courses by. If you will be- 
 lieve it, she is questioning the right of possession; 
 says she doesn't want to own anything for herself; 
 wants to give everything away. How can she be 
 trusted with the fortune that will come to her some 
 day?" 
 
 There was a deep frown on Billions' forehead; 
 evidently the problems of refining crude oil had 
 never presented anything so difficult as these pro- 
 cesses whereby his daughter's spirit, through influ- 
 ences beyond his ken, was being refined. He was 
 almost paralyzed by the shock of what he was 
 watching, without understanding. 
 
 Through what he told me, the impression that I
 
 A WORLD TO MEND 137 
 
 already had of his daughter is deepened. She is 
 high-spirited, mettlesome, doubtless hard-bitted at 
 times; yet through all the years of her childhood 
 and girlhood she would have found it difficult to 
 discover an occasion when she could disobey her 
 father, as it was she who gave commands, and Bil- 
 lions Brown delighted to obey. Talk of the abolition 
 of slavery in America, and then regard the American 
 parent in the hands of the American child! Per- 
 haps this state of things is inevitable in a democracy 
 where the child's opportunity is greater than that 
 of the parent. There is often tragedy in this, but 
 not here ; this was comedy. Regard Billions Brown. 
 His daughter is affectionate; she is devoted to him, 
 but she rules him absolutely. Probably since the 
 time when she, like other babes of a year, had de- 
 sired to put her shoes and the flowers on her hat 
 into her mouth, no wish of hers had been denied. If 
 I feel in her less humor than Jack has, I know that 
 she has more keenness of insight, more sense of 
 irony, and more impetuous passion. She has de- 
 rived much from her old grandmother, much from 
 her father. 
 
 "Katharine," Billions said to me, "is obstinate." 
 
 "Strange, isn't it?" I answered, "considering her 
 parentage." 
 
 Strong, delicate, fine, proud, she is a good example 
 of the swift flowering of fresh and delicate blossoms 
 on sturdy old stock. When I see her and her father 
 together, I think of an apple blossom on a gnarled 
 and ancient bough. 
 
 I got further light on the dilemma to-day, for we 
 had a picnic on the rocks, Jack, Katharine and I. 
 It may have shocked Mrs. Grundy of Mataquoit, if
 
 138 A WORLD TO MEND 
 
 she were aware of it ; I do not know ; but Katharine 
 now, in the light of her father's friendship with me 
 and her grandmother's approval, openly claims me 
 as a friend. When, this afternoon, she stopped at 
 my shop with a message from her grandmother, and, 
 in response to my suggestion that she looked pale, 
 said that she was actually hungry, there was nothing 
 to do but to provide her with food. 
 
 "You see," she said, "there is so much unnecessary 
 expenditure at the house, such quantities of food 
 wasted, that I cannot endure it. I have tried and 
 tried to have it cut down, but nobody will listen. 
 I simply will not eat what others may not have; it 
 is sinful to buy those rich things when many people 
 are starving. 
 
 "The chef, when he is asked to cook simpler 
 things, says he will leave if we do not need him. 
 Anybody can cook common foodstuffs, he says; he 
 cannot prepare any but elaborate dishes. I really 
 think that Father is afraid of him; at any rate he 
 refuses to do a thing. He says he has earned the 
 money for all this lavishness and earned it honestly. 
 He says that I ought to like it. 
 
 "I have mutinied. I will not eat anything but 
 plain food that anybody may have, and it is only 
 at breakfast that this kind of food is to be had at 
 horned 
 
 So we picnicked on the rocks by Simmons Cove: 
 a loaf of graham bread; butter in waxed paper; 
 potted tongue; bananas; ginger ale, and the horizon 
 line of the blue sea. I doubt if Katharine Brown 
 had ever relished food so keenly ; she ate ravenously 
 and said that it all tasted like ambrosia. Obviously 
 she had never before come into contact with paper
 
 A WORLD TO MEND 139 
 
 napkins; an adventure in democracy for both of us, 
 and we enjoyed it hugely. 
 
 As I sat and smoked on the rock which I had 
 chosen for myself I watched the two chatting gaily, 
 Jack entirely happy except for the thought of his 
 approaching return to college, and Katharine for- 
 getting for the moment the struggle of her soul with 
 its clogging environment. My mind went back to 
 the puzzling problems presented by the railroad 
 strike, to the social revolution threatened in con- 
 stantly increasing industrial discontent, and then 
 to Katharine's rebellion against her father. If the 
 social revolution can only take, east, west, north, 
 south, the form it is taking in the household of 
 Billions Brown, there is hope for the country. 
 
 September 28. 
 
 A brisk west wind this morning and a customer 
 who revived my faith in humanity, after my recent 
 disillusionizing sojourn in the tents of the idle rich, 
 my self-castigation, and my disheartening recogni- 
 tion of the egotism, the selfishness of the vast army 
 of working men threatening to tie up the business 
 of the country. 
 
 My visitor was one who seemed unaware of the 
 money motive as the supreme force in existence; 
 it was a mother from a far-away, barren farm, who 
 brought me her boy's boots to see if I could in any 
 way make them last another winter. Both mother 
 and son, I learned, endure extreme physical hard- 
 ship for the sake of an intellectual ideal concerning 
 the boy's future. She rises at five, every morning 
 on cold winter days, to get breakfast by candlelight ; 
 he does the farm "chores," then walks five miles to
 
 140 A WORLD TO MEND 
 
 high school, where he is stubbornly preparing for 
 college. Next year he plans to go, without a cent, 
 to Bowdoin ; I have been busy all day with plans for 
 helping him without interfering with his indepen- 
 dence and his self-respect. 
 
 No country can be anything but strong which is 
 fed at such pure springs of aspiration as that of this 
 mother and son; those morning griddle cakes of 
 which I have heard have something of sacramental 
 quality as the two partake, the stars shining through 
 the window. For the boy, a few moments' warmth 
 and comfort, then the high trail! It is a relief to 
 come across, as I do now and then, these education- 
 inspired country folk, still holding the high aims of 
 those who founded our country as a spiritual aris- 
 tocracy, still uncorrupted by passion for wealth and 
 for pleasure. 
 
 This is but one of a number of incidents that are 
 making me realize more keenly the fundamental 
 bases of power in our democracy; and, in the face 
 of the heroisms of some of these unpretending 
 people, I begin to regret for my youth the lack of 
 hardship that might have made me a stronger man, 
 with deeper understanding than I have of my fellow 
 citizens, their difficulties, their privations, then- as- 
 pirations, with deeper understanding of the real 
 forces of life. Nothing can take the place of the 
 fight with circumstance that has made strong men 
 and women out of past generations. Realizing that 
 our leaders have, for the most part, come out of 
 humble homes, farms, parsonages, plain habitations 
 of plain men, my mind goes puzzling along the 
 ways of abstract systems that would equalize wealth 
 and banish differences of condition. I find in none
 
 A WORLD TO MEND 141 
 
 of them, however, any substitute for the challenge 
 to the individual that we find in our present 
 granted, very faulty system. 
 
 Yet Billions Brown and all his ilk of multimillion- 
 aires are wholly wrong ; no man should be permitted 
 to heap up stores upon stores of useless wealth; 
 wholly wrong is the unabashed luxury, the riotous 
 spending in useless ways of wealth, the country over. 
 God grant us insight to find our way out of our 
 dilemma !
 
 XVII 
 
 September 30. 
 
 Jack has gone back to college, after a farewell 
 visit to me, in which, at first, he assumed a jollity 
 which he was far from feeling. Then he grew shy 
 and silent, fingering the pieces of leather hanging 
 on my wall and behaving as if he wanted to consult 
 me, but he did not. A new Jack this, for, in the 
 earlier days of our acquaintance, he used to blurt 
 out everything that came into his head. This lack 
 of surface confidence does not trouble me, for it be- 
 tokens something deeper; there is no need of words 
 between Jack and me. He flushed a bit as he shook 
 my hand: 
 
 "You will look after things and people up there, 
 won't you, Socrates?" he asked, nodding in the direc- 
 tion of the Brown estate. 
 
 I promised to do my best. Now I am trying, not 
 quite successfully, to turn my attention to shoes. 
 My new friend, Alexander Wallace, drops in oc- 
 casionally for an hour's discussion of men and things. 
 I envy him, and I admire him, this man who has 
 no slippers, as the one genuine citizen I have ever 
 known; and he admires Billions! 
 
 Because he, an honest lawyer, has not acquired 
 wealth, he looks upon himself as a failure; and he 
 pays homage to this oil magnate who has so glori- 
 ously succeeded. He talks of himself at times wist- 
 fully, seeking, as he gives, sympathy, and I often
 
 A WORLD TO MEND 143 
 
 listen in amazement. One of the oddest bits of 
 human psychology that I have ever known is this 
 great man's estimate of Billions' achievement as 
 above his own. He is sensitive, a lover of beauty 
 and of fineness, human, lovable, with enough of im- 
 perfection to enable him to understand his fellows. 
 It pleases me to find in him some foibles and limi- 
 tations, for his praise is so much in all men's mouths, 
 that I had begun to fear that he might prove a 
 monster of perfection. He is quickly touched, too 
 quickly hurt, and one has to watch one's words 
 with him ; yet he is incapable of cherishing a grudge. 
 He is at once over-sanguine in regard to measures of 
 public benefit, and a bit over-easily discouraged 
 when things go wrong. Perhaps this last charac- 
 teristic is one of the reasons why we get on so well 
 together. 
 
 Meanwhile, I do not quite know how it is, per- 
 haps my old classmate's loneliness; perhaps my re- 
 gret for earlier days when I rather looked down on 
 him; perhaps it is the influence of Grandmother 
 Brown; perhaps it is Katharine; but I am much at 
 Billions' house. And he is much at my shop. He 
 shuts his eyes to a great deal, but so do I. 
 
 I like him better than I did in the college years, 
 though I wish he could get rid of his false stand- 
 ards, that hankering for the world in which I 
 was brought up, and which I have found so futile! 
 
 Billions is sorry for me, I can see, because of my 
 degradation through work, work even humbler than 
 he used to do. . . . Last night, awkward and much 
 embarrassed, he bluntly offered me money; he has 
 often hinted a willingness to help. When I refused, 
 he suggested that he set me up in a business more
 
 144 A WORLD TO MEND 
 
 appropriate. How would a book shop do? he 
 queried. It would not do at all, I said, in thanking 
 him. Henceforth books shall take a subordinate, 
 not a principal place in my life. 
 
 But I was touched and was also a bit remorseful, 
 as one who is sailing under false colors, in that he 
 should think me in need. 
 
 As he and I talked on his verandah, or in my shop, 
 in the evening, I realize more keenly than I have 
 ever done how life is dominated by what we want 
 in the days of youth. 
 
 Billions wanted to be a multimillionaire. 
 
 He is. 
 
 I wanted to be a calm, superior critic and con- 
 noisseur. 
 
 I am. 
 
 And I curse the day when, because of false con- 
 ditions, the idea first came into my head. I should 
 prefer to be a ploughboy, doing my bit; achieving; 
 turning up the honest furrow in the soil. 
 
 How shall an older generation, which has greatly 
 failed, find the way to shape the desire of the young 
 toward the best and simplest? How waken in them 
 that sense of civic responsibility which we have so 
 greatly lacked? 
 
 Billions, with his great palace on the shore, and 
 his stables, and his servants' hall, his wide acres, 
 has achieved everything that, as a boy, he had de- 
 termined to achieve. He had set out to be a great 
 trust magnate ; he had never set out to be a citizen 
 of his country, bearing his responsibility; doing his 
 part. 
 
 I wondered how he liked it, Billions with his three- 
 hundred-acre orchard of Dead Sea fruit.
 
 A WORLD TO MEND 145 
 
 "Look here, Billions," I said one day, when we 
 were sitting on his magnificent verandah, "you are 
 not an American citizen at all." 
 
 "You are a thundering idiot to say that," said 
 Billions. "Don't I pay huge taxes?" 
 
 "Not as large as you are going to pay," I said 
 firmly. This was rude. It is strange how one's un- 
 dergraduate manners come back at times in the 
 presence of men who were boys with you. Or per- 
 haps it was the influence of Tim; it was like one of 
 Tun's short, sharp, decisive barks. 
 
 "But don't I don't I " 
 
 "Don't you what?" I asked suavely, for he could 
 not think of one civic duty that he had been in the 
 habit of rendering his country. 
 
 "I spend my money here, don't I?" 
 
 "That's something," I admitted. 
 
 "I vote," but he was thinking. 
 
 "Billions," I said, "you have a great deal to say 
 about the country's going wrong; but what part 
 have you ever played in trying to make it go right? 
 What duties of citizenship have you ever taken up? 
 Have you had any share in sound politics, in trying 
 to get the right men into the right places? Our 
 multimillionaires have the reputation of standing 
 completely aside, except for slipping something now 
 and then into the pocket of a senator or congress- 
 man to speed things up for business " 
 
 This was a chance shot, but it struck home ; I was 
 surprised to see Billions turn white, but he was not 
 angry. Curiously, the more we lash each other with 
 our tongues, the nearer we come to an understanding 
 intimacy. 
 
 Soon after this I went home. Perhaps I was afraid
 
 146 A WORLD TO MEND 
 
 that Billions might turn to ask me what I had done 
 for my country; my response would have injured 
 the cause in which I was enlisted. It is significant 
 that the Hebrew prophets always talked about other 
 people's pasts, never about their own ; other people's 
 present sins, never their own. I doubt if it was 
 good taste that kept them from talking about them- 
 selves; it was better for the cause for them to be 
 reticent. 
 
 But I am astonished, now that the bonds of my 
 old dilettantism are broken, to find how many con- 
 victions I have; how strong they are; how much of 
 my grandfather there is in them. The same in 
 principle, in kind, even if different in form and in 
 application, as those of the stern old gentleman 
 whose portrait hangs on my library wall. They have 
 outlived my long years of silence; of reserve; even 
 my college education. 
 
 October 8. 
 
 A tang in the air and a swift sea wind; marshes 
 and hills beyond royal in red and brown and gold ; 
 both sea and sky intensely blue; a great cawing of 
 crows in the pine woods back of us, and solemn crow 
 processions to the rocks in search of food. 
 
 Through Grandmother Brown's flattering ap- 
 proval of me, and through the girl's evident wish, I 
 am permitted to talk freely with Katharine Brown. 
 Her controlled reserve, the conventionality that is 
 but a mask placed upon her by the finishing school 
 have vanished for the most part, and I am discover- 
 ing how sweet and unspoiled she is. Sometimes I 
 see in her a little merry, gray-eyed girl of sunny 
 roadsides on her way to school, and she laughs at
 
 A WORLD TO MEND 147 
 
 times as if she were but ten years old. What would 
 Billions say if he saw my mental picture of Katha- 
 rine trudging along the daisied roadsides with a 
 dinner pail? 
 
 For all her correctness of manner and her more 
 than unimpeachable attire, she does not fit into this 
 world which Billions has created for her, and her 
 restlessness increases daily. She and her grand- 
 mother wear the alien look of two wild, bright-eyed 
 birds shut in a gilded cage. Katharine has much 
 of the older woman's essential simplicity, but is not 
 as yet so sure of herself; she is a bit bewildered by 
 her surroundings, alert, watching for a way of es- 
 cape. There is trouble ahead for Billions, spite of his 
 daughter's evident affection for him; meanwhile, it 
 is charming to see her try to take the place of two 
 daughters, now that Clare is away at school. 
 
 My respect for her deepens with each glimpse I 
 have of her. Here is a woman, fine, practical, strong, 
 of great potential power. That power is wakening; 
 here is but youth, stumbling, trying to find the path. 
 I watch her, understanding; day by day registers 
 something of her struggle: there are some aspects 
 of life, thank God, with which one can sympathize 
 without effort. 
 
 When she questions me I answer her, but I try 
 not to preach, yet much of my new-found philos- 
 ophy about the interdependence of human beings 
 she has extracted from me. I feel humble in her 
 presence; perhaps nature intended us to feel so in 
 the presence of womankind. She, who is practical, 
 as Billions' daughter would needs be, will make good, 
 where I only theorize, for when I think of myself, 
 my mind is still full of an ironic sense of failure.
 
 148 A WORLD TO MEND 
 
 The feminine will is swifter and truer in its ac- 
 tion than ours. 
 
 We talk of Jack, and she speaks of him frankly 
 and freely, as she would of a girl-friend. Her eyes 
 are fixed on something beyond Jack; whether he is 
 included as an essential part of the picture I have 
 yet to learn; I am not so sure of this as I was. I 
 wish that I could read her dream. 
 
 October 10. 
 
 I was greatly pleased this afternoon, when I went 
 to the post office before supper, to see that the little 
 group of men gathered on the street corner discuss- 
 ing confidentially the news in the evening papers, 
 instead of ceasing to speak when I passed them, 
 looked in a half friendly fashion toward me and 
 even gave me welcome. 
 
 "Here's Masters," said Phil Landers, the express- 
 man: "let's ask him." 
 
 They were talking about the offensive on the 
 Western Front, and my opinion was of no value 
 whatever; but our remarks regarding the present 
 situation led to a discussion of the principles at 
 stake, and, by common consent, we adjourned to 
 Noah Price's grocery. To be invited to sit on a 
 barrel head by men who have previously rather 
 shunned your acquaintance is no small honor; so 
 might one feel upon entering an exclusive club. 
 There was a certain thrill of satisfaction as I ac- 
 cepted; perhaps I have never before felt so much 
 at one with my kind. 
 
 Joe Hincks, the policeman, guarded the doorway, 
 one eye on the street, one on the group inside; my 
 tow-headed friend, Phil Landers, stood checking
 
 A WORLD, TO MEND 149 
 
 entries in his order book as he listened; the pro- 
 prietor of the shop lolled over the counter, his fat 
 face displaying a sleepy interest in what was going 
 on; perhaps a dozen others were grouped about, on 
 chairs, or counter, boxes and barrel heads. 
 
 Ever since I came I have looked enviously at the 
 gatherings of men at the post office, or on some 
 street corner, and I was vastly delighted to find 
 myself within the charmed circle. Tim wagged his 
 tail with an energy of friendliness that betrayed on 
 his part the fulfilment of a long-deferred hope. I 
 took care not to say too much, but listened with 
 much satisfaction to a rough but unanimous con- 
 demnation of might as right. Here, I kept saying 
 to myself, are the men behind the lines; here are 
 those who represent that for which the nations are 
 fighting. Here is a chance to sum up for or against 
 democracy as represented by the rank and file. Do 
 these men make good? And I admitted that, funda- 
 mentally, so far as opinion went, they made good. 
 
 I came home vastly pleased, feeling that I am 
 making progress; I have learned to say "hello" to 
 quite a number of people ; I am a man among men. 
 I find more hope in the fact that these neighbors of 
 mine ask me to join them than I should find in pos- 
 session of power to answer all their questions. Many 
 of these represent problems for which I have no so- 
 lution, yet I feel that they are as good as solved if 
 we can go puzzling our way along together, in 
 friendliness, toward a finer citizenship, and thus to 
 a fairer government.
 
 150 A WORLD TO MEND 
 
 October 12. 
 
 A letter from Jack, the first I have received. I 
 have been waiting for this with tense expectancy; 
 whether this is be'cause of desire for gratification of 
 my affection, or because I am watching for the 
 growth of a man in him I am unable to say. He 
 is to me as the very soul of my youth, a finer and 
 stronger self; and my whole present life is wrapped 
 up in the hope that he may waken to a sense of a 
 man's duty at this crisis, may make the great choice. 
 The letter ran: 
 
 Dear Socrates: 
 
 You must have seen that we came out on top in 
 last week's football scrimmage. 
 
 It was great. 
 
 Fine times here; I go to as many as a third of 
 my lectures, which is something new for me. Got 
 to get wise, you see, if I am going to talk to you. 
 
 How's boots? Hope to see you within ten days. 
 
 JACK 
 
 P. S. Three of our class enlisted with the Cana- 
 dians. I may. 
 
 So men as well as women, I reflected, write letters 
 for the postscript. This is the first intimation he 
 has ever given of serious purpose to join the crusade. 
 
 I sat with this letter in my hand through the en- 
 tire evening, and I thought of Abraham and Isaac. 
 I am trying to build my altar whereon to offer up 
 that which has become most precious to me of all 
 living things. I know that this kind of love is a 
 feeling that will not waken for any other human 
 being; there is, in a life-time, one and one only vi- 
 bration upon these chords. It seemed to me last
 
 A WORLD TO MEND 151 
 
 night, as I sat watching the street lamps flicker and 
 go out, that perhaps my contribution to this great 
 struggle for fairer dealing among men will come in 
 the sacrifice I must offer in getting the boy to go. 
 All night under my patchwork quilt, all day at my 
 bench, and later, alone with the surf on the rocks, 
 I have fought my fight. I am stung by the intensity 
 of my desire that he should rise to the challenge, 
 should make good ; I am appalled by the immensity 
 of my personal loss if he does indeed go.
 
 XVIII 
 
 October 15. 
 
 A clash has come between father and daughter. 
 I do not know all the steps in Katharine's patriotic 
 and personal rebellion, but I know that the war for 
 independence is on. 
 
 It was Billions himself who told me; his splendid, 
 over-splendid equipage stopped at my shop yester- 
 day; coachman and horses champed and chafed as 
 the master bent his head to enter my humble door- 
 way. Billions prefers horses and carriages to 
 motors, though he has the latter, because they are 
 what all men want. But in his youth, dreaming of 
 his future, he dreamed of horses and carriages, and 
 horses and carriages are now his. Alas for a country 
 whose youth dream only in terms of things ! 
 
 He came in muttering about the serpent's tooth, 
 and it was some time before he could tell me what 
 was wrong. At last I gathered that his daughter, 
 his pampered daughter, had broken to him the fact 
 that she intended to enter a nurses' training school 
 in the hope of going to France to care for wounded 
 soldiers. 
 
 Billions was furious at the thought of Katharine's 
 doing something useful. "Can't they hire people to 
 do these things?" he stormed. 
 
 He looked years older than when I had seen him 
 last ; his face had lost its sleekness. She, for whom all 
 the efforts of his life had been spent in heaping high
 
 A WORLD TO MEND 153 
 
 his wealth, was nullifying all that effort in a mo- 
 ment. He had taken her up into a high mountain 
 and shown her all the kingdoms of the earth and 
 the glory thereof, and she would have none of them. 
 Would I try to bring her to her senses? I had in- 
 fluence with her. 
 
 What irony of life was this? Here was the man 
 who accounted me partly responsible for his mis- 
 fortunes turning in helpless appeal to have me undo 
 what he thought was my own work! 
 
 "I shall do nothing of the kind, Billions," I said, 
 taking up my needle. "You ought to be very proud 
 of her." 
 
 He went out, slamming my door. 
 
 To-day I met Katharine on the street; she half 
 stopped, as if to speak, then merely nodded and 
 went on. The girl's eyes were bewildered; doubt- 
 less the absolute slave has turned into the stern 
 parent, and, practically for the first time in his life, 
 is issuing orders. I thought that I could read in her 
 face successive phases of her struggle, anger, de- 
 fiance, sorrow at making her father suffer, and ab- 
 solute determination to disobey, if need be, and live 
 her life in the light of a higher ideal. 
 
 October 17. 
 
 Jack has been home for the two days, quite as 
 vigorous and as jolly as ever, yet in some way 
 changed. There are faint lines of thought on his 
 forehead, and his whole face, a bit thinner than 
 when I first saw him, is being shaped and molded. 
 How far has he gone, I wonder, toward taking up 
 the holy quest? In spite of his recent letter, we 
 did not speak of this. I have the feeling of standing,
 
 154 A WORLD TO MEND 
 
 waiting by the roadside, watching for one who, I 
 know, will come this way. 
 
 We met for a few minutes in the Browns' garden, 
 for Billions dare not forbid the boy to come to the 
 house while his old mother is there. I left him with 
 Katharine by the huge yellow chrysanthemums and 
 came back to my shoes. 
 
 That mysterious inner reason why I must share 
 Jack's life with him explains, though it itself is for- 
 ever inexplicable, a curious excitement which I have 
 from the first felt in Katharine Brown's presence 
 when he was there. There have been times when 
 I have watched with tense anxiety; times in which 
 I have held my breath; times in which utterly un- 
 accountable joy has come to me, and I have won- 
 dered, I whose life has been rather barren of swift 
 heart-beats, why; times in which, in great suspense, 
 I seemed to be waiting for I know not what. Know- 
 ing the strange bond between us, I should have un- 
 derstood sooner. 
 
 It is curious that, when I am alone with Katha- 
 rine, I am aware only of the waiting mind and the 
 beautiful soul of her; when Jack is near, to this is 
 added an almost too poignant sense of her loveli- 
 ness of face and hair, her grace of motion, the fine 
 strength and slenderness of her. I do not really 
 know whether she is outwardly beautiful or not, for 
 I never actually see her with my own eyes. 
 
 "Did Katharine tell you her plans?" I asked Jack 
 when he said good-by. 
 
 "Yes," said Jack solemnly; "she did," and was 
 silent; he did not need to say more. 
 
 Through the growth of these two I became aware 
 of growth in choicer spirits, the country over, in un-
 
 A WORLD TO MEND 155 
 
 derstanding of the present crisis and in determina- 
 tion to help. 
 
 October 20. 
 
 It is difficult these days to sit and cobble; I prick 
 my fingers more than is my wont. Perhaps it is 
 restlessness, perhaps it is increasing regard for 
 people; something, at any rate, has driven me out 
 to see more of my kind. It never occurred to me 
 before that people, plain people, could be so inter- 
 esting; doubtless Alexander Wallace is partly re- 
 sponsible for opening my eyes, with his character 
 sketches, full of imaginative insight, of the inhabi- 
 tant of Mataquoit, his stories, tragic or otherwise, 
 of their past lives. I have been trying, in a quiet 
 way, to find out if there are any actual sufferers in 
 town; hence my acquaintance with the interior of 
 the hut of old Mrs. Mooney, and with that lesser 
 chaos, the kitchen of Sam Hicks, the odd-job man. 
 I made poor work in mending a boot which he 
 brought me a few days ago; when he took it away 
 this afternoon I saw disappointment in his face. 
 Outside he met the postman, and I heard him say, 
 though I am sure I was not intended to hear: 
 
 "He's a damn bad cobbler, but he is a white man, 
 all right." 
 
 I feel inordinately proud. 
 
 October 21. 
 
 The crisis at the great house deepens, for Katha- 
 rine persists in her purpose, as any one who knew her 
 would expect. Billions, for the first time in his life, 
 scowls at her; her sister Clare, home for a week- 
 end, looks at her with adoring eyes.
 
 156 A WORLD TO MEND 
 
 Billions has cut short his daughter's allowance, 
 refusing to sanction her plan in any way; mean- 
 while, old Grandmother Brown is flinging her brave 
 person into the breach. She said to Billions a few 
 days ago : 
 
 "Let your daughter do as she wants; you have 
 minded me all your life: you are not going to begin 
 at nigh sixty to disobey me, are you?" 
 
 It was Billions himself who told me this; my 
 appreciation of his mother is one of the things that 
 make him like me, for I can see that he does like 
 me. 
 
 Billions wears a puzzled face. When the abject 
 slave of more than twenty years starts out to be the 
 cruel, tyrannical parent, he has naturally some diffi- 
 culty in establishing his position. 
 
 I was sorry for Billions. To have tried merely to 
 spoil her; to have missed his chance to be a father of 
 that girl ! Billions Brown, the most successful man 
 on the Atlantic seaboard, is a complete failure in 
 life. 
 
 His face was a study when he came upon Grand- 
 mother Brown and me conspiring together to-day 
 in the smallest room we could find at Round Towers. 
 She has, it seems, something more than a thousand 
 dollars in a savings bank, not the gift of Billions; 
 it was left her by her husband. This she proposes 
 to give to Katharine to defray the expenses of her 
 training, and she was listening with some astonish- 
 ment to my counter proposal. 
 
 I waited patiently until my host had finished, but 
 seized on the first opportunity to speak. 
 
 "Billions," I said, "you must do as you choose; 
 you are wrong, however, in thinking I have incited
 
 A WORLD TO MEND 157 
 
 your daughter to disobey you. I knew her decision 
 after it was made, not in the making. If she chooses 
 to risk her life in France, I can only admire her, and 
 neither you nor I can admire her enough. 
 
 "And I will add this: if you cast her off, and she 
 will permit me, I will advance whatever money is 
 necessary to secure her training." 
 
 Billions grinned. 
 
 ''You will support her, I suppose, on your two 
 dollars and forty-seven cents a week?" 
 
 I told him that I should not need to ; that I have 
 plenty of money. 
 
 "Then what tomfoolery is this?" demanded 
 Billions. "What are you masquerading here for?" 
 
 "It is the tomfoolery of trying to learn to be a 
 human being," I answered. He looked genuinely 
 concerned. 
 
 "Are you crazy?" he asked. "I thought you had 
 lost everything you had." 
 
 "What I have lost," I retorted, "was lost where 
 I meant to lose it, some in ambulances on the west- 
 ern front ; some in Belgian food supplies. I fitted 
 up a ship and sent it over." (I should never have 
 made this admission to any one except Billions.) 
 
 "Like you, I had a great deal more money than 
 any one human being has a right to have; there's 
 enought left to lie heavy on my conscience. How 
 about yours?" 
 
 Billions snorted and left us. After he had gone, 
 Grandmother Brown accepted, with a twinkle, my 
 offer of a loan to Katharine to defray her expenses 
 in the training school; but the loan is to be made 
 in her grandmother's name. 
 
 "It won't run long," said the old lady, taking up
 
 158 A WORLD TO MEND 
 
 her knitting. "My son always comes round after 
 a little while." 
 
 October 26. 
 
 For several days I have not seen Katharine, but 
 I know with what vigor she is going about her prep- 
 arations, now that her decision is made. She is one 
 who will ride straight and swiftly toward the goal, 
 when once the goal is known. There are not genera- 
 tions enough of artificial life between her and the 
 soil to stamp out a primitive strength of energy and 
 will, and her slender body is all a-quiver with vi- 
 tality, inherited from ancestors who toiled out of 
 doors. Now, with the awakened soul active within 
 her, she has become an irresistible force; this call 
 of the great present, which is slowly but surely 
 rousing Jack, is proving a restraint to Katharine, 
 giving steadiness and direction to what might be 
 over-impetuous action. 
 
 Billions' continued opposition is as obstinate as it 
 is futile; he can do nothing with his daughter, and 
 he does not pretend that he can do anything with 
 her. He comes to me for consolation, and I am 
 indeed sorry for him, but my pity is tinged with 
 something that is not compassion; how completely 
 this over-successful man, with all his business in- 
 sight, has failed to see the point of life! Perhaps 
 it is only through hurt as keen as this that his vision 
 can be cleared. 
 
 October 28. 
 
 To-day Grandmother Brown sent for me to tell 
 me that she is going home; her old face bore the 
 look of an exile whose term of banishment has ended.
 
 A WORLD TO MEND 159 
 
 Her predicament at Round Towers has always filled 
 me with a sense of pity and of admiration, for she 
 bears her trials gallantly and is obviously willing to 
 face them because of her love for Billions. Billions 
 cannot visit her, or thinks he cannot, in her story- 
 and-a-half cottage home; it was ridiculous, his 
 mother said, that he felt himself too great to come 
 to the place where he used to spade up the garden 
 and mend the picket fence himself. 
 
 She would not leave before Katharine was fairly 
 launched, she told me, except for the fact that her 
 health was suffering; the food was not such as she 
 needed, and a-t home she was accustomed to do a 
 certain amount of work every day, thus getting 
 needed exercise. I could see that she wanted her 
 own stove, her teakettle, and the little mahogany 
 table on which she has her tea. 
 
 Katharine she entrusted to my care during the 
 remaining time of her stay here, she hoped that 
 I would write her now and then during the winter, 
 and she. gave me the girl's address. It seems that 
 a great physician in New York City, who was once 
 a country boy helped by Grandmother Brown, has 
 secured for Katharine a place in a hospital where 
 she can secure training sufficient to send her to the 
 front in much shorter time than the Red Cross de- 
 mands. 
 
 Mrs. Brown thanked me for having helped her 
 granddaughter discover her deeper self, though 
 Grandmother Brown did not, of course, use these 
 words. 
 
 "She's a good girl; I can see her grandfather in 
 her. He never would have stood for anything that 
 was sham, and I'm afraid that Ami "
 
 160 A WORLD TO MEND 
 
 She looked about, with the air she always wore 
 here of complete detachment from her surroundings. 
 The oak panelling, the Japanese vases, the furnish- 
 ings of the room were not in themselves sham, but 
 I knew what she meant. 
 
 We had a long and confidential talk in which we 
 came to a complete agreement in regard to Jack. 
 
 Then she went back to her knitting. There was 
 about her as she sat there an expression seen some- 
 tunes in the fortunate old too few, alas ! of 
 having come into a bit of Golden Age, after the 
 difficulties and endeavors of the fighting years, of 
 having time to watch, enjoy, and understand. 
 
 It is such a look as a ship sometimes wears in a 
 sunny harbor. 
 
 She has earned her days of rest. Of all the people 
 I have encountered in Mataquoit, not even except- 
 ing Alexander Wallace, old Grandmother Brown 
 seems the one who has most ably and devotedly ful- 
 filled her duties as an American citizen, she who is 
 not legally even a citizen. 
 
 She has faced unflinchingly every responsibility 
 presented to her. Every demand of life upon her, 
 physical, mental, moral, spiritual, she has met; 
 all that has been entrusted to her by church or 
 state, community or family, she has performed. 
 
 A gallant creature who if the expression may 
 be forgiven has taken every hedge, however high.
 
 XIX 
 
 November 15. 
 
 October has gone, and Indian Summer has set a 
 seal of silence on our lips. I do not know why it is, 
 but the season makes words seem futile ; the hushed 
 expectancy of nature imposes a mood that reaches 
 beyond the confines of human experiences. Great 
 inner harmonies become almost audible, and the 
 listener feels that he may perchance in another mo- 
 ment hear a greater voice than our own. 
 
 The sea wears a subdued and hazy blue; the 
 many colors of marsh and headland blend in dim 
 loveliness near and far; the horizon line of ocean 
 and land seems to enclose a world w r hose every path 
 should be a path of beauty alas ! 
 
 Billions Brown has taken his luxurious way to 
 his distant city establishment ; Katharine is in New 
 York, beginning her training, the look on her face 
 when she said good-by was like that of frosted glass 
 over incandescent flame. Jack I see now and then 
 at week-ends, but Tim and I are much alone. It is 
 impossible to keep from realizing that Tim is glad 
 that everybody that counts has gone away, except 
 himself. 
 
 Loneliness follows this sweeping of people from 
 the stage; not one is left to connect the scenes, as 
 in French fashion. With my friends away, and with 
 daily fewer feet coming to be shod, I am more often 
 than I like thrown back upon my old occupation of
 
 162 A WORLD TO MEND 
 
 thinking, and I realize that now comes the test of 
 me and my steadfastness of purpose. With the nov- 
 elty of my first days of experience here worn off, 
 and my curiosity in regard to my fellow citizens 
 somewhat satisfied; with the young folk gone, who 
 have absorbed my interest and made life more vital 
 to me than it has ever been before, so that I have 
 frankly taken refuge in them from the troublesome 
 lines of thought which I have started, I am sheer 
 against my task, facing it really for the first time, 
 the hard task of knowing my neighbor; the harder 
 task of wanting to know my neighbor; the hardest 
 of all, making my neighbor want to know me, so 
 that I may share with him whatever the gods have 
 granted me and gain from him whatever wisdom he 
 has learned of life. 
 
 I went last night to a church sociable. . . . The 
 net result of this human intercourse is not ready for 
 record, for I am not sure where it belongs in my 
 ledger. It's a long, long way to that land of under- 
 standing and of sympathy toward which we travel : 
 I must hasten my pace. 
 
 Much comfort comes to me on chilly autumn 
 evenings from the open fire in my rough fireplace, 
 yet all this seems a thin and shaded existence, for 
 I miss Jack increasingly. When I read, printed 
 words no longer satisfy as they used to do, and my 
 own life seems again to lack grip on reality, to be 
 fading into a theory. 
 
 "The great spectacle of modern democracy de- 
 ploying its forces is more moving than any pallid 
 ideals of the past," I read last night, in a student's 
 book; "it has the grandeur and breadth of the large 
 phenomena of nature; it is wide as the sunrise; its
 
 A WORLD TO MEND 163 
 
 advance is as the onset of the sea and has like 
 rumors of victory and defeat." 
 
 To-day I walk on the beach, pondering these 
 words. They are great words. I find it easy to re- 
 late them to my thought, my hope for man; I find 
 it hard, at times, to relate them to the Mataquoit 
 town meeting ; the Mataquoit election day ; to many 
 types of people with whom I share the streets of 
 Mataquoit. 
 
 November 17. 
 
 Working in my shop, or lying under my patch- 
 work counterpane at night, I hear constantly the 
 sound of passing feet; doubtless my new profession 
 makes me more aware of footsteps and of their 
 significance than I used to be. There are swift 
 running feet of children; slow feet; halting feet; 
 sometimes the shuffling feet of the old; feet that 
 know their goal, and feet that stray this way or that, 
 uncertain of any aim. I listen most intently to 
 the footsteps of the young, as a group of youths go 
 past, a group of young girls, or two young lovers, 
 learning to keep step. 
 
 Listening, I seem to hear the tread of the coming 
 race, bringing in the democracy to be. Often I dis- 
 cern but confused and aimless tramping, but there 
 are times when the sound of the sea blends all the 
 varied footsteps into harmony, and then I hear, far 
 off, the tread of an innumerable host, stepping to 
 the music of a common ideal, marching toward a 
 great goal, a government based upon an understand- 
 ing sympathy, a generous and harmonious ruling of 
 the people by the people, for the people, not for 
 self interest.
 
 164 A WORLD TO MEND 
 
 Such moments come for the most part at night, 
 when vexing sights and sounds are absent. It is 
 easier to believe and to hope, in these quiet hours 
 when the soul's eye has keener vision because the 
 sight of the bodily eye is withdrawn. I wonder if 
 great faiths, as well as great art inspirations have 
 not been conceived at night. .Certain it is that, if 
 I am soothed to sleep by an imagined music, sweeter 
 than the music of the spheres, I waken to hear the 
 angry tread of men disputing, perhaps John Wil- 
 kins wrangling over the axe which he loaned yester- 
 day to old Joe Peters, and which came home dulled. 
 How shall mankind learn to walk beyond its sense 
 of private grievance? Voices here echo voices of men 
 the country over; it is still the old slogan of men's 
 rights, not men's duties, their civic responsibilities. 
 
 How can people live near the sea and learn so 
 little of its vast harmony? 
 
 November 20. 
 
 With Jack away, and fewer people tramping the 
 streets of Mataquoit to wear out their shoes, I find 
 time to see much of my new friend, Alexander Wal- 
 lace. Even to exchange a jest with him as he goes 
 to his work in the morning has a heartening effect, 
 and I find myself waiting with eagerness for his 
 shrewd yet kindly comments upon people. He has 
 an affectionate appreciation of the foibles of human 
 kind; he could not serve his fellows half so well 
 without this keenness of insight. It has become 
 something of a duty to lure him out for extended 
 walks, as his office hours are all too long, and his 
 practice of humanity eats up his leisure time. 
 
 Upon nearer acquaintance, my admiration in-
 
 A WORLD TO MEND 165 
 
 creases; this man has a genius for living. I berate 
 myself as I walk by his side, listening; I can find 
 absorbing interest only in the few people for whom 
 I deeply care; toward the others I merely try to do 
 my duty. Here is one who really loves his kind, who 
 did not have to learn sympathy. He listens to his 
 neighbor's grievances and relieves them if he can. 
 He lends an ear to human claims, and, if he finds 
 them righteous, tries to satisfy them, this in both 
 the professional and the unprofessional sense. To 
 me he says that he is an unsuccessful lawyer; from 
 my neighbors I have learned the secret of whatever 
 lack of prosperity there may be; they tell me that 
 he always reconciles the disputants if he can, bring- 
 ing together the husband and wife who sue for di- 
 vorce, inducing farmers who quarrel over boundaries 
 to shake hands and make up. He searches continu- 
 ally for channels down which human nature can run 
 smoothly, trying to guide it through its proper beds. 
 Thanks in lieu of fees hardly swell a bank account, 
 yet I foresee that they will mount up heavily when 
 I settle the long columns of my ledger. Even if 
 I have to leave the final accounting to the Recording 
 Angel, I have no fear of the result as regards this 
 man. 
 
 Nothing human can fail to interest him. He 
 lends the entire force of his manhood, officially and 
 unofficially, to the community in which he lives, en- 
 tering into it, not in one aspect only but in all, polit- 
 ical, social, religious, taking part in every assembly 
 that is endeavoring to govern, giving the whole 
 strength of body and of soul to civic need, as he gives 
 it to any individual in trouble, man, woman, or 
 child. He makes acquaintance with everybody, is re-
 
 166 A WORLD TO MEND 
 
 sponsible for everybody, from the washerwoman to 
 Billions and to old lady Simms, who waits eagerly 
 for his monthly call. I marvel at the power this 
 one man's personality has to knit the town into 
 unity; his very faults and weaknesses, which he con- 
 fesses with utmost frankness, are a part of his power, 
 strengthening his hold upon his neighbors, as they 
 deepen his charm for his friends. 
 
 Young men of Mataquoit whom I have passed by 
 as wholly uninteresting (alas! my old snobbish tra- 
 dition, my old training!) he takes into a friendly 
 intimacy, some even of those who have vexed me 
 by standing idle at the curbstone, with their hands 
 in their pockets, their hats on one side of their heads. 
 Hats are set at a better angle, hands come out of 
 pockets upon acquaintance with him, and I can- 
 not help thinking that a straighter thinking accom- 
 panies the more erect posture that ensues. There is 
 a loveliness in his relation to young men, in his way 
 of making friends with them, sharing his standards 
 with them, finding out their troubles and their temp- 
 tations. It is not didacticism that he offers them, 
 but friendship. 
 
 When we are together we talk endlessly about 
 people, about institutions and the way in which they 
 work, rarely about abstract themes. My new friend 
 has a wistful way of speaking about Christianity 
 not as a theology he cannot conceive of it as an 
 abstract theme but as a life that has in some way 
 missed being carried out by the inhabitants of the 
 world. It is a continual, puzzling surprise to him 
 that people in general do not try to live up to it, 
 that in nineteen hundred years it has not come true. 
 
 When I am with him I hardly dare mention the
 
 A WORLD TO MEND 167 
 
 war. This failure between the nations is for him 
 a tragedy so deep that he will not talk about it. 
 
 November 23. 
 
 I am feeling encouraged; Tim's tail, which moves 
 so inevitably in accord with my inner feelings, is 
 beginning to wag oftener; to-day it even recorded 
 a stare of friendliness toward Melton, the hardware 
 man, whom I have from the first somewhat dis- 
 liked. In so far as I am a mere person I care little 
 for him still, but in so far as I am a citizen I am 
 evidently achieving a cordial feeling toward him. 
 
 I really miss this supreme means of self-expres- 
 sion, a tail, far less than I used to, now that I have 
 Tim's. Besides setting me an example in displaying 
 that ideal friendliness with human nature which is 
 the basis of true democracy, he is a great help in 
 practical ways, for he often recognizes people when 
 I do not. At his first wag, I bow, whether or not 
 I know to whom I am bowing. 
 
 November 25. 
 
 To-day I must do a bit of balancing in my ledger, 
 to see if these months of troubled speculation and of 
 baffled endeavors to help since the day of my ar- 
 rival in Mataquoit have brought me anything to put 
 on the asset side. At least they have stirred deeper 
 thought within me than has ever been stirred be- 
 fore ; they have made me dig down beneath this op- 
 pressive sense of war to things profounder, searching 
 for fundamental bases upon which right relations 
 between man and man may rest. That long tragedy 
 in many acts, of human governments, the difficulty
 
 168 A WORLD TO MEND 
 
 of establishing right relations between nations and 
 between individuals, is more real to me than before. 
 
 Thinking of the immemorial struggles, and of 
 the brave hopes with which our forefathers started 
 to build a new and better order, I can but recognize 
 the fact that, in our one hundred and forty years of 
 freedom, we are far from having made the progress 
 that we should in the shaping and the right-ordering 
 of our national house of life. The aspirations of 
 which they builded its walls should have resulted in 
 a nobler structure ; the seeds planted about its door- 
 ways should have come to fairer flower long since. 
 
 A government by the people, from the village 
 loafer by the post office in this present world of 
 mine, to the delicate-minded connoisseur among his 
 choice buildings in that world which I have left be- 
 hind me, how little we have realized the demands of 
 this brief Article hi our forefathers' creed! The 
 present, in many ways shocking condition of things 
 is wholly our own fault; we are all guilty alike of 
 shirking civic duty; the thought of what we have 
 left undone comes beating back upon my mind as 
 the waves beat on the shore. Those heroic ancestors 
 fought and bled to win liberty; we, their descend- 
 ants, at least the great majority of us, thereupon 
 lie down upon it, conceiving it a something secured 
 once for all, a couch for our own rest. 
 
 It is far from that; it is a constant duty, an in- 
 cessant achievement, calling for such effort, such 
 sense of the relation of man to man as few of us 
 have had. No mere form of government can make 
 free those who do not daily and hourly struggle to 
 make and keep themselves and others free. What 
 care have we taken, we citizens of many privileges,
 
 A WORLD TO MEND 169 
 
 that our best should be winnowed out of our vast 
 fields of men and sent to Washington, to Senate or 
 to the House, to govern us? Amused, apart, and 
 disdainful of politics, we have let many of our cities 
 fall into the hands of rings, where the corrupt play 
 the leading part; the citizen has made way, the 
 country over, for the professional politician ; and we 
 smile in watching that turbulent race, which is no- 
 torious for being unable to govern itself, establishing 
 themselves as Lords of Misrule among us. With 
 our cultured folk washing their hands of civic duties 
 and responsibilities; our artists, for the most part, 
 evading the themes that would count the most in 
 our national life; our writers failing to recognize 
 their supreme duty, to guide the minds of their 
 fellow citizens; with those best of citizens, the 
 women, oppressed and counted out, what govern- 
 ment by the people have we achieved? 
 
 As for that next Article, government for the 
 people; we of America have not gone far in our 
 divinely appointed task of bringing justice down 
 from the heavens to dwell among men. We have 
 let our industries swell unbelievably the criminally 
 great fortunes of the ultra successful. We have let 
 many a worker, in mine, sweatshop, or dye factory, 
 where breath is poison, suffer martyrdom on the 
 rack of our physical needs, of our vanities. We have 
 let labor browbeat us, paralyzing our life, threaten- 
 ing women and children with cruel suffering, in 
 order that wages should rise at once. Keenly sym- 
 pathetic with many aspects of the struggle to stamp 
 out injustice, I find labor in much of its endeavor 
 as narrow, selfish, un-American, as capital, in placing 
 its immediate profit before the welfare of the whole.
 
 170 A WORLD TO MEND 
 
 We have missed that unity of many in one which 
 was our forefathers' hope. Late years have brought 
 unmistakable evidence of decadence in our America, 
 an emergence of an evil thing that our ancestors 
 thought had been left behind, class struggle. 
 Whether imported from abroad, or of native growth, 
 it threatens the foundations of our democracy. How 
 have we fallen apart! Class against class, it is 
 an unthinkable conflict. How can we be brought 
 again to unity, to sense of a common aim?
 
 XX 
 
 November 28. 
 
 My letters from Jack, though brief and sometimes 
 so enigmatic in expression as to be almost unintel- 
 ligible, are not infrequent. Disturbed by being 
 robbed of complete understanding through this com- 
 bination of slang and the technical phraseology of 
 athletics, I am assiduously studying the sporting 
 pages of the newspapers and am beginning to follow 
 again the intercollegiate events on baseball and on 
 football fields, and on the water, with some glim- 
 merings of comprehension ; the phraseology of sport 
 has changed greatly since my day. Something of 
 the growth of Jack's mind creeps in between the 
 lines of the letters, as, in my more sanguine mo- 
 ments, I dare hope that something of intellectual 
 life in the college creeps in between athletic happen- 
 ings. The thought of the boy and of what he will 
 do is never long absent from my mind as I go on 
 cultivating the acquaintance of this neighbor and 
 of that in Mataquoit, always, I dare say, with some 
 unconscious reproach against him in my mind be- 
 cause he is not Jack. It is incredible to what ex- 
 tent I miss the lad. 
 
 A recent note says that a club has been formed 
 by a small group, himself among them, for military 
 training, presided over by a disabled French officer, 
 but of his purpose in joining he gives no explanation.
 
 172 A WORLD TO MEND 
 
 November 30. 
 
 To-day my mind is severely businesslike; I have 
 been sending out bills, and my mood is stern enough 
 for me to come to grips with practical suggestions 
 for settling the trouble in our national household. 
 
 Clearly, we need to get rid of two extremes; find- 
 ing some plan of doing away with our two great sins 
 of extreme wealth and extreme poverty, yet per- 
 mitting individual responsibility and individual in- 
 itiative. I am no politician or economist, but I can 
 see a state, in which, through huge taxes on large 
 possessions, through strict inheritance laws, for- 
 bidding any man to pass on more than a moderate 
 sum to another, great fortunes would become impos- 
 sible. One practical measure in which I have de- 
 clared my faith by practice is a limitation of in- 
 comes. By the minimum wage, by careful legisla- 
 tion regarding conditions of work, poverty, and suf- 
 fering in toil could be eliminated, the great mass of 
 the people being left scope for energy, enterprise, 
 originality, not stamped as by a factory with utter 
 sameness of condition, bound down by unnecessary, 
 arbitrary laws. We must have always some check 
 on man by man; must have always emulation, 
 desire to equal, to excel; competition is involved 
 hi the very constitution of human nature. 
 
 Still it is the old problem of finding how to leave 
 man his individual opportunity, with the incentive 
 to individual effort, and yet protect the other man. 
 Of many things I am not sure, but I am sure that 
 the greater amount of individual liberty that is com- 
 patible with righteous government the better. 
 Abuses must be reformed, hardships of mine and 
 of factory lessened, but no civilization of a formula,
 
 A WORLD TO MEND 173 
 
 no government-ordered uniform wealth and pros- 
 perity can ever discover the potential strength that 
 struggle brings out. Struggle is the very heart and 
 soul of life, rousing the energy, strengthening the 
 fiber of soul and of body; it is by struggle that men 
 are made men. 
 
 December 1. 
 
 A letter has come from Katharine, telling of the 
 intellectual and the practical side of her training, 
 which is well under way. As regards the former, 
 she is full of wonder and of interest in learning 
 something of the laws of life and of growth; ele- 
 mentary facts of biology and of physiology were 
 doubtless ruled out of her boarding-school training 
 as improper for a young lady to know. Billions, of 
 course, chose for his daughter's schooling the most 
 conservative, most elegant, most futile ancient es- 
 tablishment he could find. I am enormously pleased 
 by my first missive from Katharine; there is not a 
 note of self-consciousness in it; there is much of 
 herself as a potential nurse, but nothing of herself 
 as an important young person, only a touch of im- 
 patience in regard to the amount of theory that has 
 to be learned, the number of practical things that 
 must be known, before one may go to France. It is 
 amusing to see how swiftly and directly her mind 
 works ; feminine intuition has kept her from all hesi- 
 tation since she caught her first glimpse of the vast- 
 ness of the task to be done; Jack, it is clear, is still 
 a bit at sea in regard to the next step. 
 
 Katharine writes gleefully that she has learned 
 how to put on bandages and that she has scrubbed 
 a floor. Alas, poor Billions!
 
 174 A WORLD TO MEND 
 
 December 3. 
 
 Misgivings cut now and then across my increasing 
 belief in people as fit to play their part in the great 
 game of democracy. One thing impresses me here 
 among the street-corner and the sugar-barrel orators, 
 as it used to impress me at the club: the enormous 
 number of critics our democracy has produced, as 
 compared with the number of actors. Old Silas 
 Todd, who is supported by that hard-working seam- 
 stress, his wife, and Sam Thatch, the village ne'er- 
 do-well of seventy, can tell just how to run a re- 
 public and how to carry on the European war. From 
 the counter of the village store I have heard Joffre, 
 Hindenberg, and Haig out-generalled, and Lin- 
 coln outdone in statesmanship. These sidewalk 
 talkers who prefer being leaders of modern thought 
 to doing an honest day's work give pause for thought 
 as regards self-government. 
 
 As I meditate upon various aspects of our falter- 
 ing democracy I find that a great part of our failure 
 is due to the fact that we all want to be critics in- 
 stead of creators. Every man is, without lifting a 
 finger, a peerless statesman in his own opinion; 
 every man in office is a failure; all men know how 
 it should be done, this task which they make no 
 attempt to do. Cranberries and critics were ever 
 the New England crop! 
 
 This bitter New England tongue, bitter upon the 
 street corners even as the east wind is bitter! Is 
 there cause and effect here? Does the east wind 
 blow in this special state of mind with the fog from 
 the sea? One might think so, were not all parts of 
 the country alike in this effortless superiority of 
 "Words, words, words."
 
 A WORLD TO MEND 175 
 
 We have little thought, apparently, in denouncing 
 our public officials and other active citizens, that 
 the fact that the other man is hard at work in office 
 or in public meeting, and most of us idle on porches, 
 shows us failures. This smoky twilight omniscience 
 of the street corners betrays our lack of constructive 
 power, our failure to realize how much is asked of 
 us, how great an effort we must make if we are to 
 become citizens of a republic. The man we de- 
 nounce is at least trying to do something, has done 
 something. Even if he fails, he is better than we, 
 for he has acted. 
 
 Our chief trouble is that every man among us 
 thinks that the wrong is with the other man, not 
 himself. In this great and searching creed of democ- 
 racy he is unable to see the point that every man 
 is responsible for all that happens. I must try to 
 draw these men from their carping and pulling down 
 and set them at building. ... I must try to draw 
 myself, for, among those who are omnisciently in- 
 active, I am the chief of sinners. 
 
 December 8. 
 
 These cold winter days bring me, in spite of the 
 thermometer, a certain warmth about the heart. 
 Many of my neighbors have learned to stop and 
 toast their fingers at my open fire ; sitting here with 
 them, I dream happily, in spite of harrowing tidings 
 from the front, of a great human hearthstone where 
 the nations may gather in friendliness. If the 
 chasm between different social castes in this demo- 
 cratic country can be bridged, anything can be 
 achieved in the way of overcoming social barriers. 
 
 It is impossible to keep from realizing that I have
 
 176 A WORLD TO MEND 
 
 become a privileged character in Mataquoit, despite 
 my past, in regard to which there is still great un- 
 certainty, despite my humble calling, despite the 
 suggestion in regard to my being a German spy. 
 
 Much of this I owe to Jack, partly to his cham- 
 pionship, partly to his companionship, for Mata- 
 quoit has a great liking for Jack and confidence in 
 his judgment. Largely through him, I think, I have 
 become friend and adviser of many people whose 
 acquaintance I could never have won by myself. Not 
 only in my shop, but in the library and on the vil- 
 lage street, I am sought out by men who are be- 
 ginning to think it worth while to ask what I think, 
 what I would do. 
 
 Cyrus Weeks, the plumber, wanted to know what 
 my next move would be if I were in command of 
 the British on the Somme front. 
 
 I could not tell him. 
 
 Abraham Jencks, of the rural delivery, wanted to 
 know what I would do with the headstall of his old 
 gray horse. 
 
 I could tell him. 
 
 The hours that I especially enjoy are the hours 
 when Leavitt, the postmaster, Joe Hincks, the po- 
 liceman, Martin, the grain merchant, with a farmer 
 who has come creaking in over the snow in an an- 
 cient cutter, or others like them, join me at my 
 shop fireside and talk, less of the war than of the 
 days to be. Among these men, these plain inhabi- 
 tants of a plain town, I have a number of real 
 friends; together we decide what our government 
 should do; what institutions we should have, and 
 how they should be managed. We establish our 
 ideal State under the Stars and Stripes, for the con-
 
 A WORLD TO MEND 177 
 
 viction that America has a peculiar part to play in 
 the future of the world is strong upon us all. If 
 America cannot solve the problems that vex men's 
 souls, carrying human hope to higher ground than it 
 has reached before, what country can? Never did 
 statesman, politician, or philosopher, evolve a fairer 
 republic that we have evolved out of our minds and 
 a little tobacco smoke. 
 
 Once or twice Jack has been with us; he sits and 
 listens, and sometimes grins impertinently; I find 
 that I can build the future better when he is here. 
 Sometimes Alexander Wallace drops in, and per- 
 haps makes a suggestion, or, with a twinkle, hints 
 at possible limitations of humanity which I, in spite 
 of my new schooling, am prone to forget. 
 
 The chief aim in all this discussion is to see if we 
 cannot dig deeper into the soil of human nature 
 than this demand for rights, down to those roots 
 and sources of true citizenship which mean desire 
 for service. In our new republic, it would be each 
 man's first job, after governing himself, or while 
 governing himself, to help govern his country. He 
 should know that there can be no rule of justice 
 among men unless each man does his bit and keeps 
 on doing it. For government is a process, not a 
 state; a life, an activity, not an established fact to 
 be accepted as finished; there is no possibility of 
 success if we merely work out a constitution and 
 stop, congratulating ourselves on great achievement. 
 A man must enlist in a democracy as he would en- 
 list in an army, pledging his utmost service for the 
 period of the war, which means his lifetime. 
 
 It is easy to see the glory of that for which our 
 forefathers fought: freedom for the individual, the
 
 178 A WORLD TO MEND 
 
 open road,' the chance for man to find his destiny 
 with no man's shackles on arm or ankle; but the 
 weak part, if not in this dream of liberty, equality, 
 and fraternity, at least in our fulfilment of that 
 dream, has been in the matter of fraternity. Over 
 the ground of doing justice to one's neighbor in ma- 
 terial things I have gone many times; while my 
 neighbors discuss the problem, an undercurrent of 
 thought runs on within me regarding a finer justice 
 that should be added to the other. In a democracy, 
 a man's inmost and uttermost ideal for himself he 
 should insist on making good for his fellow men also. 
 The human personality, taken by itself, is a cul-de- 
 sac; non-civic virtues are questionable virtues; non- 
 civic-ideals are sterile ideals; every lofty aspiration 
 unshared becomes a canker ; as a repentant member 
 of a privileged class I write these words. My in- 
 dictment against myself is an indictment against 
 most of the thinkers, the idealists I have known 
 during my lifetime. I have buried myself hereto- 
 fore in too prolonged contemplation of the prin- 
 ciples of excellence, in art, in literature, in human 
 conduct, with little or no thought of its application 
 to the turmoil of human life. It is as if one had 
 worshiped a pagan god in and for itself, with no 
 consideration of the power of that duty to bless the 
 people at large. The secret of successful idealism 
 is a right adjustment between the passion for ex- 
 cellence and a recognition of human nature, its limi- 
 tations, its possibilities, a learning to share the 
 passion for excellence with the common man. Ideals 
 must not exist in the void, must not be cherished 
 in and for themselves; they must make good in 
 the stuff of human life.
 
 A WORLD TO MEND 179 
 
 Philosopher, scholar, artist, writer, in a demo- 
 cratic age, should remember himself always in the 
 presence of the eternal verities, but also in the pres- 
 ence of the immediate verities of home and country. 
 His form of expression should seek high service ; not 
 that he should treat always of political themes, but 
 that he should so work as to make his vision clear 
 to an increasing number of men. All, of whatsoever 
 trades, professions, lines of business, should re- 
 member first of all that they are citizens, but espe- 
 cially all artists, keeping in mind those old days of 
 the highest glory of Greece, of Renaissance Italy, 
 when the great arts of sculpture and painting were 
 a vital part of the life of the people. Perhaps upon 
 the writer devolves the deepest responsibility of all. 
 My conviction deepens that, unless those who have 
 intellectual power, spiritual insight, artistic inspira- 
 tion, bend their whole souls to sharing the best 
 that is in them with the masses, civilization is lost, 
 with all that is finer and higher in expression of the 
 life of man swept down into oblivion, trampled 
 under foot. 
 
 As I say these wise things I am put to shame by 
 Alexander Wallace, who listens in the greatest ad- 
 miration and tells me that he thinks my ideas won- 
 derful, he who has for a lifetime been living these 
 ideas unconsciously. In my next extemporaneous 
 lecture I am going to sketch his character as I read 
 it, and am going to say that of such souls are built 
 the walls of the perfect city. I warrant that he 
 will express a wish that he might meet this man of 
 whom I am talking; nor will the other people who 
 listen, I fear, realize that I am merely describing one 
 who sits among us.
 
 XXI 
 
 December 10. 
 
 Jack home for a week-end, with more time at my 
 disposal than is usual on these infrequent visits. 
 Glorious December weather, with hoar frost spark- 
 ling in the mornings on every twig and every brown 
 grass blade. I did not know that the boy was to 
 be here until he tapped on my pane; then my awl 
 went in one direction, my needle in another, it 
 is weeks since I have had a holiday. 
 
 We took a long walk together, Jack, Tim, and I, 
 passing Round Towers, with its boarded windows, 
 its muffled vines and shrubs, with the winter sea 
 beating at the base of the desolate cliff. 
 
 My remark that a recent letter from Katharine 
 stated that she hoped to sail next summer for France 
 brought no response; and Jack took but an absent- 
 minded part in the discussion that followed re- 
 garding athletics, ideal governments, and our hope 
 of ever outgrowing war. 
 
 Suddenly he turned. 
 
 "Do you think I ought to enlist with the Can- 
 adians?" 
 
 "It is for you to decide, not me," I told him. 
 
 "You might just tell me what you think." 
 
 "I promised your mother not to influence you in 
 any way." 
 
 "But how do you feel about it?"
 
 A WORLD TO MEND 181 
 
 "That, my young friend, is something which I 
 shall never confide to you." 
 
 "You silly old Sphinx!" said Jack, slapping me on 
 the shoulder; "as if I didn't know perfectly well 
 what you think!" 
 
 I wonder if there was ever a man who said he 
 was going to withhold his opinion, and then really 
 concealed it? I certainly discoursed at some length 
 in regard to a number of matters on the way home, 
 but I am not very clear as to what I said. It is 
 difficult for me to confide even to my journal-ledger 
 the joy I feel in watching the swift unfolding of 
 Jack's nature; it was a boy who sat in stockinged 
 feet in my shop while I mended his shoe on the 
 summer day when I first saw him; it was a man 
 who walked with me to-day on the rock path by 
 the shore. So right, so vital is his growth, that, as 
 I look at him with the wakening sense of his share 
 in the work of the world manifest in his eyes, he 
 seems God's forgiveness to me for my past years, 
 with their negligences, omissions, exemptions from 
 service. I have kept the promise not to urge him 
 to go, but from the first I have hoped that he would 
 not make the great refusal. 
 
 What he said to me shows that he knows my 
 mind perfectly, and I have had a bad hour debating 
 the question as to whether I am right or wrong in 
 standing, against his parents' will, by the new and 
 finer desire which I can see is growing in Jack's soul. 
 There is no doubt that his manhood would be 
 dwarfed if this were stifled, but his parents are his 
 parents; life is sadly entangled. 
 
 Tim lays his head upon my knee, as if wishing to 
 help me in my predicament.
 
 182 A WORLD TO MEND 
 
 I envy Tim his decision of character; he never 
 finds himself in a mental dilemma. He is a very 
 positive and decided character; if he wishes to bark, 
 he barks sharply, emphatically ; there is no mistak- 
 ing his meaning. If he wishes to be friendly, there is 
 always a little, ingratiating whimper and caress from 
 a swift, soft tongue. We have lost much in losing 
 instinct and are as yet far from fully attaining 
 reason. 
 
 Now, however much in this new life of mine I 
 want to bark, angrily, defiantly, definitively, I can 
 not. I have a wretched way of being polite, even 
 when I do not want to be. I take foolish refuge in 
 a gentle irony, very cutting indeed, but, nine cases 
 out of ten, wholly uncomprehended by the person 
 to whom it is addressed. My Damascus blade runs 
 through and through the person who needs to be 
 exterminated, and out again, without drawing blood. 
 He never notices his demise. 
 
 There is one deep growl which I envy Tim, an 
 ominous, throaty ultimatum, of which he is as prodi- 
 gal as was Germany of ultimatums in the early days 
 of August, 1914. There are innumerable occasions 
 when I could use an expression of this kind to ad- 
 mirable advantage if I could but command it. 
 
 Then there is his excited, yelping, tumbling-over- 
 one-another series of barks, expressing extreme, ex- 
 cited joy, tumultuous joy. It is not that I wish 
 that I could do just this; rather, that I regret that 
 life with its varied experiences has never brought 
 me a moment when I needed to bark like this, a 
 moment so joyous that I needs must burst unless I 
 express myself, choking, because there is not time 
 enough to voice my joy. ... If the course of
 
 A WORLD TO MEND 183 
 
 Jack's life runs as it should, perhaps such a moment 
 will come. 
 
 December 15. 
 
 The stream of life in Mataquoit flows on through 
 shop, and field, and roadway, through church, 
 market, town meeting, elections, tea parties, so- 
 ciables. As the weeks drift past, so much alike that 
 I find little in them to chronicle, I am aware of a 
 growing insight into the civic life of the place, into 
 the activities, the indifferences of the citizens of 
 Mataquoit, as well as of a growing acquaintance- 
 ship with individuals. With a deepening interest 
 in people comes a deepening constructive idea of 
 democracy, in spite of moments of discouragement. 
 
 And all the time, through gray days and through 
 days of sun, the war rolls on, sweeping more and 
 more of human life into its swift current. When 
 will the two streams meet? For the handwriting on 
 my wall at night from the bare branches of trees 
 tells me that we are irresistibly, inevitably, being 
 swept in. There is growing apprehension in regard 
 to it; street corner and post-office discussions, the 
 drift of chance remarks in my shop doubtless register 
 faithfully the increasing concern of the whole 
 country. Rankin of the drug store shakes his head 
 over his bottles; Banks, our Congressman, looks 
 mysteriously important; young men of Mataquoit 
 begin to talk of the fighting as if it concerned them. 
 Meanwhile here, as in the great social centers, if 
 reports be true, there is excess of gayety, a feverish 
 activity in the matter of organizing amusements. 
 
 Until further developments I hold myself sternly 
 to my task of understanding my neighbor and of 
 mending his shoes.
 
 184 A WORLD TO MEND 
 
 I have not forgotten the virtue raking article 
 which I long ago resolved to write, but which I have 
 had difficulty in beginning, because my list of vir- 
 tuous citizens refused to grow sufficiently. Perhaps 
 I lack eyes, or opportunity, to see the services ren- 
 dered ; perhaps the old inhabitants of the town, from 
 whom I constantly seek information in regard to 
 the history of Mataquoit, have better memories for 
 people's delinquencies than for their achievements. 
 
 Alexander Wallace is helping me here; he was 
 telling me last night of the long and distinguished 
 service of Andrew Martin, the grain merchant, on 
 the school board, a hard and thankless task, gal- 
 lantly carried out through many years, with small 
 recognition from any one, fighting corrupt local 
 politics and keeping high the standard in the matter 
 of teachers in the schools and of text books. My 
 negligent friend, Abel Marks, the postman, once 
 nearly lost his life, it seems, getting the mail across 
 the marsh at flood time, when the bridge over the 
 river was broken. I learned that Joe Hincks, the 
 policeman, though he does accept free lunches at 
 the restaurant, and "soft drinks" that are perhaps 
 not over soft at the drug store, has shown great 
 heroism on two occasions when there has been riot- 
 ing in the town. Melton, the hardware man, whose 
 heart I had thought as hard as his own tenpenny 
 nails, failed half a dozen years ago because of finan- 
 cial assistance given to Noah Price, the grocer; Mel- 
 ton knew that others were involved with Price and 
 tried to save the town. 
 
 These names I am jotting down on the asset side 
 of my ledger, while I wait for others that I know 
 will come, for the memory of Alexander Wallace is
 
 A WORLD TO MEND 185 
 
 a white list of citizens; no good deed is forgotten; 
 no right attitude is unrecorded there. The unsus- 
 pected heroisms and loyalties of which I am hearing 
 confirm my conviction that mankind takes a deal of 
 knowing; that governments must find ways of reach- 
 ing down for their basis to the ultimate sources of 
 strength in the human heart. 
 
 December 23. 
 
 Many days drift without an entry in my ledger; 
 they are all busy days. Still I go humbly, feeling my 
 way along the tangled paths of human life, consid- 
 ering, weighing, learning. It seems odd for one of my 
 training and tradition to sit at the feet of Tom 
 Hanks, the ragman, but, metaphorically of course, 
 I do, for I want to know how his mind works, what 
 impulses quicken him to action, and I do not want 
 to know by the modern psychology method. If 
 these makers of new political theories would cease 
 setting forth complete theories of social and political 
 regeneration, worked out in the void; if they would 
 study human motive in the concrete, perhaps they 
 could find some programme that would work. They 
 should scrutinize humanity with all the care of the 
 poet, novelist, or dramatist, who study with imagi- 
 native understanding, that they may fashion their 
 works of art after the very pattern of life. We have 
 had, helping or hindering government, theorists of 
 all kinds, scientists, economists, psychologists, 
 analysts all; God give us for civic guidance a race 
 of artists, with divining insight, who see, feel, create 
 in the light of human nature! 
 
 If the political economists of the late eighteenth 
 century made the mistake of conceiving man as all
 
 186 A WORLD TO MEND 
 
 stomach, what mistake are contemporary theorists 
 making? Our communist friends who conceive him 
 as something of a bodiless automaton which will 
 work with automatic correctness when once started, 
 and who fancy that he will put forth for some ab- 
 stract whole the effort that he will put forth for 
 wife and home and family, are trying to write in a 
 language whose very alphabet they have never 
 learned. Life for the normal man spells wife and 
 child and home, his own home, not the state's, 
 not the government's. For these sacred three he 
 will offer up all that is in him. The only thing 
 that will stir the ragman to any effort whatsoever 
 is his "old woman's" hunger; the commune of Mata- 
 quoit has never succeeded in making him work. Nor 
 do I see my friends, Abraham Jencks of the rural 
 delivery, or Enoch Ames, the truckman, or even that 
 official of the community, Joe Hincks, the police- 
 man, delivering joyously at the town hall for com- 
 mon use, as they deliver at their own doorways, 
 those garments and provisions which they have 
 earned for their own, in obedience to the behest 
 which nature has laid upon them. 
 
 Government must be built up on the whole of a 
 man, recognizing all powers and all aspects of his 
 nature, including the primal emotions, giving scope 
 for all, challenging all. They reckon ill who, in de- 
 vising systems of rule, leave out an understanding 
 of human beings and of motives which actuate them. 
 As I pass in review the most extreme of the new 
 schemes which I have been studying, I wonder on 
 what they have fixed their eyes, these theorists who 
 evolved them; certainly not on men. I, for one, 
 must think of governments in terms of human na-
 
 A WORLD TO MEND 187 
 
 ture, not of mathematical or pseudo-scientific ab- 
 stractions. No social or political order can flourish 
 which does not engage the deepest affection, the 
 profoundest emotion, of human kind. If we ignore 
 this, if we fail to capitalize the deepest and the best, 
 what lasting foundation has the state? 
 
 God forbid that I should plead for a selfish order; 
 my hope looks forward rather to a state of develop- 
 ment in which unselfish action marks what a man 
 wants to do, not what he is driven to do. Out of 
 normal human lives and affections grow larger un- 
 derstandings; most men try to learn how to grow 
 into friendliness with their neighbors; common ex- 
 perience should give us the key to the solution of 
 the larger problem. To learn to tolerate my neigh- 
 bor's creed, and perhaps half sympathize with it, at 
 least to sympathize with him in holding it; to un- 
 derstand him as a man, there is my citizen's task ; 
 there is the attitude that should be preserved in 
 national and in international relations. Life should 
 mean a constantly enlarging circle of sympathies, 
 of voluntary disinterested action ; man by man, na- 
 tion by nation, we should creep into larger under- 
 standing. 
 
 Life should mean this; why doesn't it? 
 
 Christmas Day. 
 
 Enormously pleased by the gift of a pair of socks 
 of her own knitting from Grandmother Brown, with 
 a card bringing greeting, and the simple statement: 
 "One hundred and thirty-first pair." Now what 
 does she mean by this? She told me that she was 
 knitting socks for soldiers; and I think she may 
 intend a delicate suggestion it would not be be-
 
 188 A WORLD TO MEND 
 
 yond her that she counts me too a soldier in the 
 war of service to humanity. I put them on, feeling 
 like a knight of old with a lady's token of favor, and 
 I am wearing them in celebration of the day, though 
 I am not used to woolen socks, and they somewhat 
 annoy my feet. 
 
 For the rest, I had a sunny note from Katharine 
 and a half hour with Jack, enough to make any 
 man's Christmas day. 
 
 Partaking of Christmas turkey, cranberry, and 
 mince pie, and all the "fixin's" of an old-fashioned 
 New England dinner, with the Widow Frayne and 
 five of her relatives, I found genuine pleasure in 
 coming into contact with the so-called plain people 
 at a moment when heightened feeling perhaps re- 
 veals deeper aspects of personality than do the 
 casual contacts of every day. Christmas is not a 
 bad day on which to realize that it is growing harder 
 and harder as time goes on to keep one's prejudices. 
 I find myself outgrowing cherished dislikes; my 
 slow-growing appreciations mark new discoveries in 
 the El Dorado of human nature. 
 
 Yet this is a fighting Christmas, which brings no 
 truce upon the battle field. We have heard much 
 of the will to war; what might not be accomplished 
 by a universal will to peace, a world-wide determina- 
 tion to get on with one's fellows, at any cost of 
 effort?
 
 XXII 
 
 December 29. 
 
 I have a curious realization in these days, as my 
 thought clarifies somewhat in regard to matters so- 
 cial and political, that my instinctive desire to draw 
 nearer my kind, to study men and women in order 
 to do my work intelligently as a citizen, was a sub- 
 conscious protest against that which I have come 
 to recognize as the greatest menace of our day, the 
 menace of collectivism. Feeling, perhaps half 
 blindly, led me to a goal which my intellect has 
 reached by slow and careful process through many 
 hours of work with books, and many hours of hard 
 thought by my bench, my fireside, or by the sea. 
 
 A something invaluable in our old civilization is 
 passing; the most precious thing in all the universe 
 is being crushed, individuality. From the mob, with 
 its ugly throwing of personal accountability for 
 crime upon the whole body, through strikes, where 
 a multitude of men perform cruelties that no one 
 of them would do alone, through many of the deeds 
 of the proverbially soulless corporations, on to the 
 world of thought and of much mistaken social 
 idealism, the tendency is to shift responsibility from 
 the individual to the mass. I fear the collectivism, 
 both practical and theoretical, with its lessening 
 sense of the weight of individual character in public 
 and private affairs, and, in the world of thought, 
 its increasing emphasis on externals, on government.
 
 190 A WORLD TO MEND 
 
 The "basic assumption," a friend tells me, of so- 
 cialism is "that individual action is hopeless to 
 remedy social wrongs. The point of all socialist 
 ideas is that collective action must attack collective 
 evils. Christianity, on the other hand, does lay 
 primary stress on personal action." 
 
 This "basic assumption" is to me a negation of 
 all history, all finer experience, a negation of Chris- 
 tianity itself, which, since its coming, has put the 
 eternal obligation of individual act and choice upon 
 every human soul- It condemns a doctrine toward 
 which I have had many kindly thoughts; my so- 
 cialist friend is the first who has fully revealed the 
 weakness at its core. Not thus can we be absolved 
 from our individual responsibility, or evade the task 
 which the Lord our God has put upon us in calling 
 us into life; not thus can we escape the high behest 
 of Christianity, to develop to the utmost disinter- 
 ested personality. This drawing nearer of humanity 
 in recent days means great gain, yet something is 
 being threatened which may outweigh the gain, 
 loss of a sense of personal accountability, both as 
 regards a man's conduct in itself and as it affects his 
 neighbor. For individual conscience there is no 
 equivalent in the universe; the conscience of the 
 state is no substitute for one's own. 
 
 January 15, 1917. 
 
 We are reading, my friends and I, in the leisure 
 hours which grow more numerous in winter, and 
 especially in our long evenings; the questions that 
 these men ask are quickening once more my interest 
 in books. Our Carnegie library affords a not despi- 
 cable shelf of volumes dealing with theories of gov-
 
 A WORLD TO MEND 191 
 
 ernment, new and old, not only theories but 
 dreams. For whatever else we need I send to my 
 bookseller; the rough shelves which are gradually 
 enroaching upon the wall space intended for shoe 
 and leather are filled to overflowing. The racy com- 
 ments of these men who read, or listen for I drop 
 my awl at times to read aloud show that the in- 
 tellectual freedom for which our forefathers fought 
 has justified itself in independence of judgment. 
 
 As we plan for the future I confess to great diffi- 
 culty in working out our Utopia; most dreams of 
 this fail to satisfy; that of Sir Thomas More, in 
 particular, has always filled me with horror, in spite 
 of my entire sympathy with the author as regards 
 contempt for wealth and jewels, and as regards a 
 profound hope for justice for all men. That state- 
 regulated existence where all men dress alike, marry 
 at the same age as directed, live in houses exactly 
 similar, in those towns as alike as peas in a pod, 
 pursuing their uniform occupations just so many 
 hours a day, suggests to me a monotony of horror 
 that Dante might well have imagined as the inner- 
 most circle of hell. Later theories of justice for 
 mankind coming through absolute uniformity of life 
 are less extreme, but all tend toward this; the 
 Utopia stands to me as a signpost of warning, say- 
 ing : "Salvation does not lie this way." Nothing has 
 ever been harder for mankind to imagine than an 
 endurable millennium, and nobody has yet suggested 
 one, though I must declare my preference for the 
 older dream of the lion and the lamb lying down 
 together over any of the communistic or socialistic 
 millenniums pictured in any book of to-day. At least 
 it was lion and lamb, not creatures compounded of
 
 192 A WORLD TO MEND 
 
 the two in unnatural identity, with all distinctive 
 differences wiped out. Respect was paid to individu- 
 ality in that dream of an ideal future. 
 
 The civilization of the narrow formula seems a 
 contradiction of nature itself, of the very law of 
 growth, which means, in every phase of life, con- 
 stantly increasing differentiation, no crystal, no 
 snowflake, no flower petal, no human finger print 
 being exactly like another, the perfecting of the 
 individual being the end toward which all natural 
 life tends. Any alleged progressive scheme of gov- 
 ernment which leads to sameness of life and habit, 
 reducing humanity to pattern, to one dull gray uni- 
 form of mental wear, threatens that development of 
 individuality which is the supreme aim of human 
 aspiration and the secret of human growth. It is 
 the machine, not life, which produces an endless 
 succession of similar products. If, in nature, all 
 development means a more and more subtle defining 
 of individuality, one might almost say of personality 
 in things, along the infinite ways of endless differen- 
 tation, the higher hope for the human race would 
 seem to me to point toward a world of beings per- 
 fected into utmost difference, living in a higher har- 
 mony than could come from blurring or blotting out 
 distinctions. 
 
 Searching socialistic and communistic theories old 
 and new, I find that these doctrines make the prin- 
 ciple of American government shine out with pe- 
 culiar glory, whatever our practice may have 
 become. With all its defects, and with all our sins 
 of omission and of commission, there is something 
 here which does not appear in subsequent theories 
 or in those organizations which bid fair to dominate
 
 A WORLD TO MEND 193 
 
 our future: realization of individuality as the point 
 of existence ; opportunity for man to be a free agent 
 in his dealings with his neighbor. Certainly the 
 labor unions show no conception of the meaning of 
 this principle; certainly socialism bears no mark 
 of it. These abstract schemes which give undue 
 power to the state have nothing to offer in extent 
 of freedom comparable with that of our government. 
 They menace the vitality and the integrity of men's 
 souls. 
 
 I am thus a more and more convinced American 
 citizen, though I admit that our great experiment 
 has been only partly successful, and I am often ap- 
 palled by the extent to which we have failed. This 
 my America is guilty of many shortcomings and 
 lapses, yes, of innumerable disgraces, but her con- 
 stitution, her possibilities of government to secure 
 the welfare and the full development of the human 
 race are far better than any of the theories and 
 schemes, socialisms, anarchisms, collectivisms, that 
 I have investigated. There is something here which 
 I find in no other, at least, to so great an extent: 
 not only opportunity for individual development, 
 but challenge to individual disinterestedness. 
 
 Thus, while men are thinking in terms of collec- 
 tivism, I, fully realizing that I may be an 
 anachronism, think more and more in terms of in- 
 dividuality, raised to the highest power, its highest 
 power of all being a profound sense of responsibility 
 for other lives. Our forefathers were not wrong in 
 conceiving the secret of government to be life's 
 secret, the chance to develop individuality; did they 
 fully understand that the secret of righteous gov- 
 ernment is the power to understand another's in-
 
 194 A WORLD TO MEND 
 
 dividual! ty and help bring it to fulfilment? I feel 
 that they did not, and that they did not make suffi- 
 cient provision for lifting the weights that crush hu- 
 manity; it is for us to supplement and complete 
 their plan. On the other hand our Constitution, 
 which represents the finest thought of the period 
 which produced it, is a magnificent declaration of 
 faith in human nature, an assertion of belief that 
 it will live up to its best; it is for us to justify this 
 faith. 
 
 This side of the great creed needs prophets and 
 priests to interpret it. As I study democracy in its 
 pure theory, as here expressed, and then in its ac- 
 tual working in a typical town, like Mataquoit, that 
 which strikes me most forcibly is the wealth of un- 
 used opportunity for high and disinterested citizen- 
 ship. Observation here, recollection of the earlier 
 days of my life, bring the same result: regret that 
 character has not risen to the tremendous challenge, 
 regret for privileges not utilized in this chance of 
 all the ages to secure freedom and right develop- 
 ment for all men, regret for the shirking of the 
 finest opportunity, the greatest responsibility ever 
 granted to men. The very conception of democracy 
 is essentially a spiritual one, startlingly akin to lov- 
 ing your neighbor as yourself. All is lost, if the 
 response to its opportunity here continues in future 
 to be, as it has been largely in the past, a material 
 one, if the privilege it gives is but privilege to make 
 individual fortunes, to pad comfortable places for 
 one's self and one's own. We want a social creed, 
 as full of generosity, of sense of justice, as that of 
 the socialists, yet full of challenge to the individual 
 conscience, and faith in that conscience; we want
 
 A WORLD TO MEND 195 
 
 individualism, but not the old, selfish individualism 
 we must be purged of that, holding high our 
 chance to serve, realizing that the only true freedom 
 lies in the escape of self into beneficent force. The 
 final development of individuality lies in supreme, 
 voluntary service. 
 
 Doubtless Alexander Wallace is partly responsible 
 for my new insight, making me realize what our 
 country might be were all men even as he. I rather 
 like the way in which the answer to some of my 
 questioning has come concretely, through person- 
 ality, for ours is, supremely, a civilization which 
 must be built on individual character, the country 
 over. Thinking of what we need, in public citizens 
 and in private, I see that this man points the goal 
 toward which my thought has been blindly striving. 
 He is of more service to his kind than a round dozen 
 of theorists who can work out and put down upon 
 paper those apparently logical systems of govern- 
 ment which are based, not upon human nature, but 
 upon some abstract conception of man as he is not, 
 systems as unworkable and as fragile as children's 
 mechanical toys. In him I realize that the true 
 ordering of a people's life is a matter of daily con- 
 science of all citizens, not merely of articles in a 
 constitution. 
 
 January 20. 
 
 Spent the morning over a pair of shoes belonging 
 to Enoch Ames, the truckman, with yawning rents 
 large enough to daunt the stoutest cobbler's heart 
 since the days of St. Crispin. I was on my mettle, 
 in a mood of determination that no wear and tear 
 should prove beyond mending, and I made good,
 
 196 A WORLD TO MEND 
 
 though the original substance has largely disap- 
 peared under the repairs. My task was so complex 
 that I should have given my whole mind to it, but 
 I did not; all the time I was thinking, going back 
 over the years. In those old days I never realized 
 that the destiny of the world was my job, every 
 man's job. Did it take so vast an upheaval, knowl- 
 edge of such boundless suffering, to rouse us? Truly 
 the shell of human nature must be hard to crack if 
 such tremendous blows are necessary to usher the 
 soul into life. 
 
 At noon I got a letter from Jack, a bit fuller in 
 expression than most of his letters. The military 
 training club takes an increasing amount of time; 
 didn't I think that it looked more and more as if 
 there might be need of its service, with the relations 
 between our country and Germany growing more 
 and more strained? For this reason it seems neces- 
 sary to go into the matter rather thoroughly; there 
 really is no end of things to be done. The college 
 authorities are making great concessions in the 
 matter of academic work so that the training may 
 go on. 
 
 "And the joke of it is," wrote Jack, "that I am 
 just beginning to wake up to the book side of things, 
 now when I am too busy to read. I can't get half 
 time enough for history; somehow it has come to 
 life; and the same way with literature. I'm a regu- 
 lar bookworm now, or I would be if I didn't have 
 so many stunts to do, getting up my muscle." 
 
 In and through all this I divined the struggle of 
 a young soul wakening to its responsibilities, wrest- 
 ling in the throes of the hardest decision that youth 
 has had to make in all the ages. The harshness of
 
 A WORLD TO MEND 197 
 
 the teaching by means of which we are roused to 
 new insights and new sympathies, as I have often 
 thought in watching the ways of sorrow in this life, 
 and now realize again in watching the world woe, 
 would suggest that nature has no Montessori 
 method, no kindergarten persuasions to offer her 
 pupils, but loss, and anguish, and bitter sharing of 
 another's grief. It is in our stronger moments only 
 that we dare adventure the heroic faith that the 
 great school mistress of us all is cruel only to be 
 kind.
 
 XXIII 
 
 January 25. 
 
 Some days, in this world of encompassing snows 
 and sweeping winds, I have, in spite of my widening 
 acquaintance with human beings, no one to talk to 
 but Tim. The odds in the matter of conversation 
 are not so great as you would think; Tim has a tail. 
 
 He came in to-day after furious barking, from 
 which I had been unable to recall him ; he had been 
 disputing some matter of village management with 
 a black and tan. He slunk under my rebuke into 
 a corner and lay down with his head on his paws, 
 his eyes fixed anxiously upon my face. 
 
 "Is it true then, Tim," I asked him, for I was at 
 town meeting last night, "that in a democracy the 
 loudest, most insistent voice dominates, and not 
 the wisest?" 
 
 He gave a single, penitent half -bark of assent , ...e 
 black and tan had gone away with his tail between 
 his legs. 
 
 "For shame, Tim; you are a mere demagogue," 
 I told him. "Look out, or you may find yourself in 
 the Senate or the House," for I have my moments 
 of discouragement, even in this time of increasing 
 faith, and this was a day when the thought of demos 
 weighed upon me with a sense of his deeds, instead 
 of inspiring me with a thought of his opportunities. 
 
 "And what, Tim, do you think of the fickleness of 
 youth?" I asked him, as the hours went on, and no
 
 A WORLD TO MEND 199 
 
 Jack came, for Jack was at home for the week-end, 
 and I had as yet caught no glimpse of him. Tim 
 listened, with ears pricked up. But there must be 
 no impatience in my mood toward Jack, or Tim 
 will fail to show his old affectionate cordiality, may 
 even be rude. Often he distresses me, though he is 
 civil to an increasing number of people, by begin- 
 ning to bark disrespectfully or shall I say criti- 
 cally? at people whom I have not yet learned to 
 like. Can not one have a dog without keeping one's 
 soul in a state of improper exposure? I must mend 
 my state of mind in regard to these people. 
 
 February 10. 
 
 Rocks, surf, and a freshening wind; this morning 
 one old crow cawed so loud from a scrub pine near 
 my shop window that he drove me out to see if I 
 could find the world outside as interesting as he 
 evidently found it. Made no new discoveries, but 
 the walk did me good, and the tingling salt air made 
 the blood run in my veins as it has not run since I 
 was young. 
 
 These crows interest me endlessly. A band of 
 seventeen live in the woods back of the town, and 
 on sunny days they come in search for food, flying 
 solemnly down to the shore in formation, following 
 a leader who clears the air ahead and defines the 
 pathway for their wings. 
 
 Where are we of Mataquoit, of all the towns and 
 villages of America, going to get leadership? How 
 are we to be made aware of our need of it? On the 
 whole I have faith enough in nature to believe that 
 it is not merely the crow with the loudest caw that 
 leads the band, but the one with the wisest head.
 
 200 A WORLD TO MEND 
 
 It would seem well if human folk should follow 
 nature's way; I had supposed, in looking back over 
 the pages of history, that a craving for guidance was 
 a fundamental human instinct, and a wise one, but 
 our modern tendency is to eliminate that which even 
 crows have, leadership; to be jealous of any superi- 
 ority whatever; to call one who resolutely follows 
 his ideal wise in his own conceit. I can never get 
 over my surprise at the passion for mediocrity which 
 dominates these days; the very schoolboy is 
 ashamed of finer mental endowment in himself and 
 intolerant of it in others; the college student who 
 shows signs of interest in intellectual matters above 
 that of the mass is branded as by the mark of Cain. 
 When the communists really come to power, wild 
 ducks and geese, I presume, will have to fly in level 
 line, no leadership permitted ; wolf packs must give 
 up their leader, and rule by a committee of the 
 whole. And human beings? but the "imagina- 
 tion boggles at" that which human beings will do. 
 I fear the menace of the days when the great insight, 
 that which might lead the race, will be destroyed, be- 
 cause it is beyond the common vision, above the 
 common will. 
 
 February 12. 
 
 Through all my intercourse with my neighbors in 
 Mataquoit runs a persistent questioning: how to 
 rouse in them deeper desires, nobler dissatisfaction, 
 how to break through this crust of complacency. 
 Men should hunger and thirst, feeling forever some 
 sense of lack, not rest content with their full larders 
 and smug pews and houses empty of books; with 
 their county fairs and moving pictures representing
 
 A WORLD TO MEND 201 
 
 the highest attainable ideal of human achievement 
 and human diversion. We need prophets of the 
 finer discontent. 
 
 Yet, even as I write, I am conscious that this 
 air of exhortation is not for me to wear, for 
 me, who have chosen the barrel head rather than 
 the platform as an approach to my fellow men. I 
 must drop this "they" and "them"; did I not long 
 ago choose to say "we?" 
 
 One great trouble with us in Mataquoit is that we 
 are characterized by a species of vulgar mysticism, 
 a rough, conceited certainty of direct inspiration, 
 source unknown, an assurance on the part of the in- 
 dividual of being able to arrive at truth by what is 
 called "gumption." This faculty is purely indig- 
 enous, as strictly American as is the Indian pipe 
 or the turkey buzzard; no other country, no other 
 race could attain it. It acts without knowledge 
 or desire for knowledge; it is colossal guesswork, 
 camouflaging abysmal ignorance; it is something 
 against Which reason shall not prevail. From street 
 corner, shop, platform I Hear the voice of the too- 
 easily omniscient and watch with misgiving on the 
 part of the listeners the content with mere assertion. 
 Our country over, from the remotest fireside to the 
 Senate and the House, we suffer from this cocksure- 
 ness, individual and communal. It is, as a dry 
 rot, checking growth, keeping us from asking things 
 high enough or hard enough: who will seek knowl- 
 edge when he knows all? Yet too easy self-satis- 
 faction spells failure for individuals, communities, 
 nations. 
 
 Our great danger is that this may prove an in- 
 vincible foe to the more vital citizenship which we
 
 202 A WORLD TO MEND 
 
 are trying to establish, checking all higher effort of 
 thought and of deed ; we must not drop back to the 
 average mood, the average aspiration of the average 
 man. This great heritage of freedom that was be- 
 queathed us was not given us that we might slip 
 comfortably down to low levels, but that we might 
 have opportunity to rise higher. How can democ- 
 racy be kept from being a landslide of common 
 desires and appetites, if the masses have their way; 
 worse still for at moments of this constantly men- 
 acing labor-struggle hidden apprehension will out 
 the satisfaction of old revenges, as the selfishness 
 of the old reigning class gives way to the selfishness 
 of the new, sweeping over everything and submerg- 
 ing the little already won for civilization? Will 
 it not mean lack of proper valuation of the things 
 of the spirit, emphasis on material satisfaction and 
 indulgence long denied? One thing is overwhelm- 
 ingly clear, clearer even than when I set out on 
 this quest: we must have leadership, for democracy 
 without high leadership is chaos. Plato was quite 
 right in making his ideal republic an aristocracy 
 of mind, for demos will never achieve his full rights 
 or be able to live up to his finer privileges by his own 
 unaided mental exertions. However desirable were 
 that liberty and equality of our forefathers' creed, 
 there can be no intellectual and spiritual equality 
 among men, no equality of personality, God for- 
 bid that there should be! Where were our aspira- 
 tions, were there none better than ourselves? When 
 every man is as good as his neighbor, none is very 
 good. 
 
 All greatest things for the race have come through 
 individual insight, through the divining power of
 
 A WORLD TO MEND 203 
 
 individual genius, through individual renunciation 
 or individual achievement, pointing the way for the 
 masses. The history of the world for me, all that can 
 be counted to the good, is the history of the great 
 leaders, Plato, Christ, St. Francis, Savonarola, Maz- 
 zini, Lincoln, and a choice other few, who have 
 founded the great faiths, enunciated the eternal 
 hopes, made the great decisions. No "committee 
 of the whole," even if it be the whole human race, 
 will ever work out the great imaginative conceptions 
 that guide the multitudes, or take the place of those 
 personalities which are set as beacons above life and 
 time. 
 
 Great intellectual, aesthetic, and spiritual stand- 
 ards must be held high before us; every man must 
 do his utmost as an individual to attain to his full 
 mental and spiritual stature; yet every man must 
 do his utmost to understand, sympathize, walk with 
 all men. These two great, even staggering aims 
 represent the central paradox of democratic faith. 
 How can we learn to reverence individual man and 
 still recognize his limitations, his need of guidance? 
 How can we reverence man sufficiently without 
 losing the deeper reverence for the beauty of the 
 Lord our God? 
 
 February 17. 
 
 Of these winter days, when the sea lashes Mata- 
 quoit, and long lines of breakers turn to white foam ; 
 when the war news lashes mind and soul, with its 
 record of fighting back and forth upon the Somme 
 front, and the apparent beginning of a German 
 retirement, I am making no record. Sometimes, to 
 tell the truth, my fingers are too cold to write. My
 
 204 A WORLD TO MEND 
 
 days are so much alike that they pass imperceptibly : 
 white days of snow, brown days of thaw, and gray 
 days or blue of ocean. 
 
 For this deeper striving of the soul about the war, 
 words are increasingly inadequate; nor can they in 
 any way express this desire which day by day grows 
 more intense to know more than I have yet known 
 of life and its meaning, of democracy that fairest 
 chance for justice among men, and its possibilities 
 to hope more than I have yet dared hope, before the 
 last days go, before my mental powers wane, and I 
 understand nothing. Each day I realize more fully 
 the difficulty of my task; each day I reaffirm my re- 
 solve to sell dearly in increasing effort my remaining 
 years, lest I find myself left behind in this greater 
 world which is in the making. With every gold- 
 colored dawn or gray I set out afresh, under the 
 sting of winter, to make good before it is too late, 
 to help discover the real America, serve her, reveal 
 her. 
 
 I have Tim, who now, to my great pleasure, gives 
 friendly greeting to the majority of the inhabitants 
 of Mataquoit, making me hopeful that I am out- 
 growing my old state of constant selection, pref- 
 erence, shutting out from my sympathy the less 
 fine ; I have my shop, my friends, my shelf of books, 
 and many a neighbor, chief among whom, if it is 
 legitimate to record a mere human preference, is 
 Alexander Wallace. I have, sometimes in the body 
 and constantly in thought, Jack, and the possibil- 
 ities of an awakened Jack, of all the fine young 
 manhood of the country. A number of the lads 
 about town drop in to talk with me now, some with 
 a touch of respectful shyness, some with kindly con-
 
 A WORLD TO MEND 205 
 
 descension. The two armchairs which I purchased 
 in October at Sands' Emporium, turning out much 
 junk and the section of a tree to make room for 
 them, are already hollowed from constant use; I 
 have to lure my fellow citizens by methods that 
 really appeal to them. So far has my intimacy gone 
 that I am now and then invited to sup with them at 
 their own firesides; it was with Abel Marks, the 
 postman, and his family that I partook of fried 
 oysters last night. 
 
 My lifelong literary study of man and his motives, 
 my psychological investigations, have not given me 
 as much insight into my fellow creatures as has this 
 attempt to know a few individuals not of my own 
 kind. I comprehend much regarding the motives 
 and the actions of these people because I live their 
 life; there is no moment of contact with my neigh- 
 bors that fails to bring me some wisdom. The com- 
 plexity of men's make-up astonishes me each day 
 anew and brings afresh the knowledge that it is 
 upon understanding of this complexity that govern- 
 ments must rest; statesmen should be required to 
 pass an examination in human nature rather than 
 in abstract theories of law and rule. 
 
 Through all these moments of human contact, 
 pleasurable or otherwise, the old problems occupy 
 me: how to secure right leadership ; how to get every 
 man to do his share ; how to win again for American 
 citizens our lost unity of aim. As for the first, the 
 conviction within me deepens that we who have 
 inherited high tradition, who have been intellec- 
 tually and morally trained for leadership, but have 
 made no effort to take up our duties, have been as 
 guilty of treason as a band of officers would be in
 
 206 A WORLD TO MEND 
 
 this war, who, while the battle was on, were quietly 
 disporting themselves in the Louvre in aesthetic 
 enjoyment. My three points blend and merge ; my 
 present intensity of thought and of feeling, which 
 makes me realize how little I have cared or under- 
 stood, how selfishly I have taken freedom for 
 granted, makes clear to me also that the one thing 
 needful for the salvation of our country is a sense 
 on the part of every human being of his individual 
 responsibility, a greater sense of his individual 
 opportunity. What moment, what crisis will come, 
 great enough to make every citizen bend every fiber 
 of energy that is in him to the achievement of a 
 common aim? 
 
 February 28. 
 
 Icicles hang at my eaves in the cold February sun- 
 light; it is a marvel that my roof can support so 
 many and such huge ones. Their drip, drip at noon 
 when the sunlight is warmest is as yet the only 
 prophecy of spring. 
 
 Still I have little mind for writing, though my 
 ledger lies upon my bench at all tunes and has grown 
 to be something of a companion. To tell truth, one 
 reason for my infrequent entries during the winter 
 is the fact, that, in my non-cobbling hours, I have 
 been so busy with town affairs that there has been 
 little leisure. At town meeting I have been put 
 upon two committees, one to organize the library on 
 a better intellectual basis ; one to consider the ques- 
 tion of a gymnasium for the youth of Mataquoit 
 and to raise funds for it, if the measure passes. 
 
 My old Socratic dialogue between my past and 
 my present self goes on now and then in the mo-
 
 A WORLD TO MEND 207 
 
 ments when no neighbor is occupying the chair at 
 my fireside, but both this and our constructive 
 plans for the bettering of government in Mata- 
 quoit and elsewhere are interrupted by a sense of 
 present crisis. There is growing tension in the 
 political situation, since Germany's announcement 
 on February first of unrestricted submarine war- 
 fare ; we are swept by the awful current of the time 
 nearer and nearer the war. Nor are we mere drift- 
 wood, floating passively on the current; the will of 
 the many throughout the country who have known 
 from the first that we were recreant hi not helping 
 is beginning to make itself felt. 
 
 March . 
 
 I do not know the day; I must get a calendar. 
 Tim, in a moment of belated puppyhood, ate my 
 old one. 
 
 There is a freshness, a sting in the air, a clarity 
 and sharpness; the sea is of a deep, intense, and 
 royal blue. There is no other color and sparkle akin 
 to that of the sea in March; the glory of great 
 waters rolls almost to our thresholds. It is doubt- 
 less pure imagination, but nature almost seems to 
 be sharing the tension of the moment, the whole 
 world, the frozen earth, waiting breathlessly while 
 America debates the great question of finding her 
 place in the world's struggle and sharing it. Since 
 the dismissal of Count von Bernstoff, Belgium, 
 France, England are turning toward us eyes in 
 which there is something almost like hope. Our 
 America is pausing, in surprise so great that a curi- 
 ous quiet reigns, on the verge of a great decision, 
 so vast that it holds within it the future destinies
 
 208 A WORLD TO MEND 
 
 of a great part of mankind. God grant that we, 
 challenged by a duty as glorious as it is hard, do 
 not make the great refusal. In the awful light 
 of a burning world our path lies clear, out of our self- 
 centered, material greatness, up Calvary, where 
 all truth treads. 
 I have a deep desire to see Jack.
 
 xxiy 
 
 April 6. 
 
 The sense of stigma is removed ; we can now hold 
 up our heads. Congress has declared that a state 
 of war exists between us and Germany. An intoler- 
 able burden of shame rolls off our backs as we take 
 up our legitimate load. For unnumbered thou- 
 sands in the country, as for me, who have hardly 
 admitted to myself how deep has been my convic- 
 tion that we should go to the rescue, there is pro- 
 found relief, after long anxiety. There is tragic irony 
 in the situation : we, the most pacific of nations ; we, 
 whose ancestors sought a refuge apart from the con- 
 tests and the fighting of Europe, are yet thankful 
 with deep thankfulness that the great decision is 
 made. We no longer stand apart, saying that we are 
 not concerned with this struggle, wherein so great a 
 part of human kind is at death grips with hell. 
 
 There is, so far as reports reach us, no jingoism 
 throughout the country at this supreme moment; 
 no glorification of war as war; there is little edi- 
 torial waving of plumes and clanking of swords. 
 From sea to sea a sober sadness reigns, an almost 
 universal feeling that the moment has come for us 
 to take up our responsibilities, to make the great 
 sacrifice. 
 
 Looking back at the long way which we have 
 traveled before reaching this point, I feel, I, whose 
 soul has for many months been burning with a sense
 
 210 A WORLD TO MEND 
 
 of shame because we were not helping, that our 
 critics, for whom our progress has been over-slow, 
 must not treat us too harshly. The baser side of 
 our hesitation I have recorded; there is a nobler 
 aspect which must be recognized. In our very in- 
 ability to believe it possible that Christian human 
 beings could go back to the sorry barbarian ways of 
 slaughter; in our horrified incredulity of August, 
 1914, was perhaps the best measure of our growth, 
 of what democracy has wrought hi the thought of 
 man for man. Small wonder that it was hard for us 
 to realize that, for the sake of the whole, it was our 
 duty to go back too. Those who have tried to think 
 that we stood above such conflict, by reason of some 
 special privilege of circumstance, geographic, be- 
 cause the seas are wide; historic, because of the 
 peace tradition of a free country, have slowly 
 gained clearer vision as to the significance of the 
 present hour. Only as it lifted itself out of the 
 struggle between old enemies, and declared itself 
 as aggression, threatening the liberties of the world, 
 did the conflict become ours. And it became ours 
 in a finer sense than has ever been the case in the 
 drawing of a great nation into war; it has 
 hardly touched our rights; we fight for a prin- 
 ciple : "to make honor respected and right triumph- 
 ant." How many are the mists that had to break 
 away before the long white road lay clear before us, 
 leading to the very heart of that tragic struggle, to 
 those vast fields where the souls of men are fighting ! 
 
 April 10. 
 
 A letter from Jack; he has enlisted. Went for a 
 walk by the sea.
 
 A WORLD TO MEND 211 
 
 April 12. 
 
 My first feeling upon learning of Jack's decision 
 was one of exultation, mingled with a bitter sense 
 of loss: Jack had "made good." 
 
 Soon after came a thrill of triumph, as I thought 
 of the parents, especially the mother, who had tried 
 to keep small what was meant to be great. 
 
 "You have kept everything hard from him/' I 
 remarked, in imaginary conversation, as I tapped 
 at the shoe I was mending; "you have done your 
 best to make him a weakling; and you have failed! 
 He has too much good, old-fashioned stuff in him 
 to be ruined by any modern fad or fancy whatever, 
 even in education." 
 
 But when I really saw Mrs. Sands, my congratu- 
 latory mood because of this fulfilment of the prin- 
 ciple of excellence was, for the moment, wholly lost 
 in human sympathy. She came to my shop this 
 very afternoon; her nose was red; a strand of hair 
 had escaped from the net and was dangling over 
 her cheek, wet with tears. Her sailor hat was 
 tipped rakishly over one ear, but never had she 
 looked so well in my eyes. It was her one natural 
 moment, though she did come tottering in on those 
 ridiculous high-heeled shoes. 
 
 "My boy!" she said, half sobbing. "He has for- 
 gotten all the principles I ever taught him." 
 
 "Thank God for that, Madam," I said, paring 
 off the sole I was adjusting. "You ought to be the 
 proudest woman on God's earth ; you have brought 
 forth something finer than yourself." 
 
 Alas, these people with whom you keep up a 
 constant sub-dialogue in thought of the things you 
 cannot say! Of course I made none of these re-
 
 212 A WORLD TO MEND 
 
 marks to Mrs. Sands, but only did my poor human 
 best to console her and make her understand. 
 
 April 19. 
 
 The air is chill, yet there is spring in the willows, 
 and spring on the headlands in the first delicate 
 ripple of the grass; spring in the notes of the early 
 birds, two or three robbins, a grosbeak, a few 
 song sparrows by the shore ; spring in the deepening 
 green of the long marsh grasses, in the swish and 
 murmur of the tidal river. 
 
 Already I feel a difference in this our America, 
 rising to the call of the war; she presents a strange 
 face and unfamiliar, beginning to beat her plough- 
 shares into swords for righteousness' sake. There 
 is a new life and stir in Mataquoit and in the neigh- 
 boring towns along the shore ; it would almost seem 
 as if there were a new tide in the sea, or as if it 
 were constantly incoming tide, as, man by man, 
 woman by woman, the nation rouses itself out of 
 comfort, out of content, out of strife for wealth 
 and power, to effort that may match this supreme 
 moment. 
 
 With all the rustle and movement of unaccus- 
 tomed activities, an awe, a silence lie over the 
 land. In the eyes of people unanswered question; 
 men talk busily about trivial things but look away. 
 We are breathless all, as if standing on the edge of 
 life and time. 
 
 April 25. 
 
 Jack was with me half an hour yesterday, an 
 hour to-day; he goes to camp to-morrow. As he
 
 A WORLD TO MEND 213 
 
 sat in one of my arm-chairs, talking nonchalantly 
 about his preparations for he is ransacking Sands' 
 Emporium to see what it can do in the way of 
 supplying his outfit I smiled, remembering my 
 old fear that he, so easy-going, so much a hail- 
 fellow-well-met with all men, might fritter away 
 his energies, and be, at forty, still a boy, unless 
 something came to sting him to action. Now the 
 need of a great hour has roused him and is creating 
 him anew, drawing out the resources of a richly 
 human nature and bending them to one purpose, 
 unifying the physical, mental, spiritual powers 
 within him. 
 
 As I looked at him, thinking of the race to which 
 he belongs, he seemed to me fairly representative 
 of the Anglo-Saxon temperament at its best, with 
 its conservatism, its steadiness, its instinctive need 
 of securing fair play. For him, and for unnumbered 
 others of his kind, war has revealed unsuspected 
 depths of nature. As he goes whistling about his 
 preparations, I can see that it is focussing all the 
 strength, all the aspiration within him, making of 
 petted son, half-successful student, mere athlete, 
 a knight of a new and holy order of American 
 democracy, arming himself to fight treachery, 
 cruelty, lust. 
 
 There have been stormy moments in the last few 
 days when contests have taken place between him 
 and his parents as to his action in enlisting ; I have 
 seen in his eyes, perplexed at times, the old laissez- 
 faire look struggling with his own resolution. I 
 stand by him, of course, now that his decision is 
 made, meeting his mother's objections, his father's 
 objections, and, harder still, my own objections.
 
 214 A WORLD TO MEND 
 
 Of the last, nobody, not even Jack himself, is 
 aware; nobody save Tim and me. 
 
 May 1. 
 
 If the way of the evil-doer is hard, how much 
 harder is the way of the would-be well-doer! Now 
 that the war has come to us, the suspicion of some 
 of my neighbors that I am a German spy seems 
 to have become a certainty. What have they to 
 spy upon, I wonder? I came home to-day to find 
 Michael Dunn, the local sleuth, searching my shop ; 
 he had my battered copy of the Republic in his 
 hands, and, judging by his expression as he gazed 
 at the Greek letters, he found the evidence against 
 me wholly incriminating. Doubtless he thought it 
 a code book; perhaps it is. 
 
 He grinned rather foolishly when he saw me and 
 decided that honesty was best; some folks, he said, 
 thought I had come to see what I could find out. 
 
 "So I did, so I did," I assured him, "but with 
 wholly friendly purposes. And if we are going to 
 have any country at all, Michael Dunn, the more 
 we can find out about one another, and the more 
 deeply we can understand one another, the better." 
 
 To Michael Dunn this was more Greek than Plato, 
 but we sat on my bench for an hour or more and had 
 a friendly talk. Try as I would, however, I could not 
 make my idea of disinterested citizenship wholly 
 clear to my Irish guest. 
 
 This megalomania of the small town shows itself 
 in constantly fresh aspects; I might have known 
 that, if we entered the conflict, Mataquoit would 
 conceive itself as the strategic center of the world 
 war! I daresay that the owners of eyes that look
 
 A WORLD TO MEND 215 
 
 out at me from behind curtains or through shop 
 windows as I start for a walk with Tim think I spend 
 my spare hours putting in concrete platforms on 
 adjacent hills for the shelling of Mataquoit by the 
 Germans. 
 
 May 8. 
 
 There is little tune to write, with the war work 
 that I have undertaken added to my old tasks; 
 moreover it would take a greater than I to make 
 apparent the greatness of these days: the surging 
 emotion of the time and the quick, hurt thinking 
 that accompanies the emotion as people set them- 
 selves to know the facts, now that the war has come 
 home to us. They who have not known or cared to 
 know are at last rousing themselves to learn, and 
 everywhere, as here in Mataquoit, there are awaken- 
 ing eyes. There is horror in them, yet through the 
 horror shines a longing to find something to do to 
 help save mankind. 
 
 I was unprepared, after my slow, often discour- 
 aged study of the citizen as existed in Mataquoit, 
 for the splendor and the energy of the country's 
 response to the challenge. The changed feeling here, 
 and, I doubt not, throughout the country, is a curi- 
 ous thing. Already the war has become a something 
 of personal concern; my neighbors, even those who 
 have been deaf and blind to European tragedy, now 
 realize that this is our war. The word America 
 must have magic in it if our entry into the struggle 
 makes such a difference in understanding the situ- 
 ation. I had no idea that national sentiment was 
 so strong among us; while I rejoice in its strength, 
 I mourn its narrowness, for it is in reality no more
 
 216 A WORLD TO MEND 
 
 our war than it was before April 6. We were lag- 
 gard in facing our duty ; I would that we had sprung 
 sooner to our task. 
 
 But we are roused, and the spirit of national unity 
 is kindling to an extent no one would have dreamed 
 possible. As the silent patrol boats begin to go up 
 and down our coasts, and men in khaki appear here 
 and there among civilians, war activities multiply; 
 there is swift enlisting in the ranks of all who can 
 help; nurses, Red Cross workers, and tillers of the 
 soil are toiling to one purpose; the faces of the 
 "knitters and spinsters in the sun" at the south 
 windows in Mataquoit take on a new expression. 
 As I think more deeply into the matter, I cannot 
 count the emotion at the basis of all this a mistaken 
 one, nor can I look upon this pride in our especial 
 flag as a narrow limitation. We are all beginning to 
 realize that our flag stands for something greater 
 than the United States. Everywhere, if what I read 
 be true, is a slow climbing upward to self-forgetful- 
 ness, as incredulity leads to tardy understanding, 
 then to passionate espousal of a cause. Here is 
 genuine crusading spirit; here is a feeling that, 
 greater than any military glory, is the chance to 
 serve, not only America, but the world. 
 
 All the visions of past days of peace go into this 
 desire to vindicate the honor of the human race, to 
 make peace possible for all men. A greater America, 
 a more disinterested America arises, no longer stand- 
 ing apart from the hard destiny of the world.
 
 XXV 
 
 May 10. 
 
 It has been a proud day in my life. In the liberty 
 parade of Mataquoit, I, Wentworth Masters, idle 
 son and grandson of the idle rich, was allowed to 
 march as one of the company representing Ameri- 
 can industry. Two boot lasts were slung over my 
 shoulders, and I had a necklace of awls, needles, and 
 other small instruments. Beside me marched a 
 young farmer, carrying a pitchfork; ahead, a mason, 
 with trowel and hawk. Women, with garden tools 
 and kitchen utensils marched with us; old men and 
 children kept pace, carrying the colors; young men, 
 with a look on their faces that I had never before 
 seen there, walked abreast. It was a most successful 
 parade, having but one drawback, that, as all 
 who could walk, marched, there were few to watch 
 and cheer, save the aged rheumatic and infants under 
 three. 
 
 These were rough-shod, not sandalled feet, and 
 the garb in many cases was uncouth, yet something 
 in the movement brought to my mind the joyousness 
 and the restraint of a Greek procession. Here was a 
 like simplicity, though the lines of beauty were not 
 always there; here was that oneness of action, of 
 many feet tramping onward to a common music; 
 and I felt that they were moving onward, not with- 
 out a goal.
 
 218 A WORLD TO MEND 
 
 May 13. 
 
 If I try to compare our national state of mind 
 since April 6 with our earlier stages of thought and 
 of feeling, shall I succeed? 
 
 Since August, 1914, and our excited interest, min- 
 gled with horror of war, our impatience that our 
 smug and prosperous peacefulness should be thus 
 interrupted, our indignation at being made to think 
 of these things, since August, 1914, we have been at 
 school, learning the essentials of human brother- 
 hood. It is evident, and has long been evident, that 
 we have for many months been outgrowing our 
 early sense of immunity. From the height that we 
 have gained we can perhaps look back and see the 
 path by which we have come. What are the steps 
 by which America has risen from her first shocked 
 surprise and indignation to the point where she is 
 willing to send the very choicest of her possessions, 
 her youth, into this hell, for finer service? The 
 country from end to end agrees, and the whole world 
 agrees with us, that we have no thought of outer 
 gain. "Methinks I see in my mind a noble and 
 puissant nation rousing herself like a strong man 
 after sleep and shaking her invincible locks," aware 
 beyond her own dreaming of spiritual issues, sacri- 
 ficing her dearest that the faith wherein she was 
 founded shall not die upon the earth. 
 
 The puzzles and perplexities were many, the diffi- 
 culties innumerable, in working out a clear sense of 
 the great issue. He who could write the whole story 
 of the way in which the American people has been 
 educated, and has educated itself into understand- 
 ing, would write one of the greatest studies of the 
 inner life ever made. He would picture the country
 
 A WORLD TO MEND 219 
 
 indifferent, apart, standing outside the tragedy, un- 
 aware of its obvious duty; then the slow awakening. 
 The incredulity, the unbelief of the earliest days 
 have made place for the slowcoming belief that this 
 inconceivable horror, brought about by a people 
 farther from us in ethical ideals than the separating 
 seas, must come to us, or we must go forever shamed. 
 The horror is no longer wholly horror ; we are choos- 
 ing to fight in the name of the spirit ; the answer to 
 the call for help has raised the struggle out of the 
 plane of the physical; it is now not a question of 
 blood and wounds and crushed bones; it is a ques- 
 tion of "Greater love hath no man than this." 
 
 Wilson's successive messages have done much to 
 educate the people to a break with this country 
 toward whom our relation had grown to be one al- 
 most of mental subservience. So greatly had we 
 been influenced by her in systems of education that 
 it could have been truly said that no other nation 
 save Germany bore so deep an impress of the Ger- 
 man intellectual stamp as did America. The 
 measure of that past influence upon our minds is the 
 measure of the shock to our moral natures in be- 
 holding the deeds of Germany. 
 
 There were, of course, at the outset many who 
 said that there were two sides to the question, Ger- 
 man and Ally; most of these have grown to know 
 that there are two sides to the war, wrong and right. 
 From the moment Belgium was invaded the issue 
 was clear to clear- thinking people: those who could 
 condone, excuse, explain this have ways of thinking 
 that are hard to follow. That we made no official 
 protest about violated Belgium has been, for the 
 best among us, through the intervening months and
 
 220 A WORLD TO MEND 
 
 years, a source of deep regret, and of a sense of 
 shame. The stigma must forever rest upon us that 
 America said no word. From the first our dispute 
 has been a moral one, I am happy to state that 
 the attacks upon our shipping brought no such sense 
 of outrage for national wrong as was brought to our 
 souls by successive atrocities. The President's com- 
 mand of neutrality, while it represented to many 
 at the outset a wise political attitude, never for a 
 moment imposed inner neutrality upon our best. 
 No neutrality of thought or of feeling is possible or 
 desirable in great issues of right and wrong. 
 
 As regards the political aspect, there was, for the 
 greater number of American citizens who thought 
 at all, keen suspense and fear lest Paris fall, keen 
 sympathy with France, less keen for England. 
 Some, while sympathizing with France, condemned 
 England for going in, a short-sighted view, for, if 
 England had let France be beaten, what of the 
 future of Europe? There were many of us who 
 knew from the first that we ought to be at the side 
 of England, never nobler than now, marching 
 wearily but resolutely to the fighting line, all un- 
 prepared as she was, for the defense of heroic France 
 and Belgium and for the liberties of mankind. 
 More, vastly more, have been convinced of this since 
 the deportations began, and since the sinking of the 
 Lusitania; this was, among many false strokes, the 
 falsest stroke the Germans made, converting many 
 waverers to the Allied cause. East, west, north, and 
 south was a great company of those ready to sym- 
 pathize and to act when they understood. 
 
 There must have been, in every State and town 
 and village, as here in Mataquoit, the unthinking
 
 A WORLD TO MEND 221 
 
 people, smug, comfortable, narrow folk who had not 
 happened to notice the war. Doubtless most of these 
 would call themselves, in favored phrase, one hun- 
 dred per cent Americans, but what Americans! 
 "The Stars and Stripes afford us protection; let us 
 eat and drink, for to-morrow we go to the movies. 
 Who is his brother's keeper?" 
 
 There were hosts of German-Americans, hot at 
 first hi defense of the Vaterland, sympathizing with 
 German aims and rejoicing in the sickening tri- 
 umphs, who slowly moved, as the facts of the be- 
 ginning of the war became known, and the manner 
 of its conduct, toward disillusionment with Prussia. 
 Their passive renunciation of the principles of au- 
 tocracy developed into a fine and positive Ameri- 
 canism when we declared war, April 6, 1917. It is 
 said that in the middle west the sons of German- 
 Americans are swiftest in enlistment of all America's 
 sons. 
 
 There are, of a certainty, many German-Ameri- 
 cans, and some others, who are disloyal. The spy 
 record is written elsewhere. 
 
 There were, and are, many pacifists, exhorting, 
 crying out, reproving those in whom the conviction 
 is awake and stirring that America must rise and 
 help or go forever shamed. These the pacifists 
 treat as if they stood upon a lower plane and did not 
 care for peace as the most precious of all earth's 
 possessions, as if they were militarists and blood- 
 thirsty from birth. I know of none impassioned 
 believers in the creed of helping at this crisis, 
 sternly resolved that we shall not shirk I know 
 of none who fail to value peace as earth's supreme 
 boon. But they know, and I know, that we had no 
 
 \
 
 222 A WORLD TO MEND 
 
 choice. One resents the facile superiority of these 
 pacifists, their failure to grasp the nature of the 
 crisis, their misty thinking. As for peace 
 
 I could not love thee, dear, so much, 
 Loved I not honour more. 
 
 In this spring of 1917 the true citizens of America 
 can breathe more freely. We are no longer standing 
 back. 
 
 May 17. 
 
 To-day, with many of my fellow citizens, I went 
 to the railway station to see off a little company of 
 volunteers who are starting for a training camp. 
 There were seven in all, among them Al Jenkins, a 
 lawless youth who has been driving the grocery 
 wagon and mercilessly overspeeding his tired horse ; 
 Jake Dennis, the prosperous young plumber, who 
 has lately been assuming, in an unpleasant swagger, 
 some of the characteristics of the nouveau riche, 
 and with reason; and Frank Ames, a rakish young 
 cashier in the bank. They wore their ordinary 
 clothing and looked as they always look, except for 
 their eyes, yet I could not help thinking that some- 
 thing of the village slouch had gone from their 
 walk; and in spite of the foolish jests that passed 
 between them and the bystanders about celebrating 
 the Fourth of July in Berlin and bringing home the 
 Kaiser's head, a mantle of dignity seemed to fall 
 from them over the shoulders of all the rough youths 
 in the crowd. 
 
 We said good-by with many cheers and Godspeeds 
 done in slang. I joined in the laughter with which 
 we sent them off, but there was a blur before my
 
 A WORLD TO MEND 223 
 
 eyes. To me they were all Jack; each, in spite of 
 the absolute difference in mental and physical qual- 
 ity, seemed to wear Jack's face. 
 
 I was surprised when it was all over to find that 
 Tim had any tail left; he nearly wagged it off. As 
 is often the case, I felt grateful for his self-expres- 
 sion of me, for I am not one who can readily show 
 emotion, especially when it cuts deep. Wallace, 
 who was there, of course, made every lad who went 
 feel as if he were his son ; Wallace never had a son 
 of his own. Perhaps if he had he could not have held 
 such a finely protective, paternal relationship to 
 all the lads of Mataquoit. I sometimes think that 
 no man has known the depths of the experience of 
 fatherhood except the man who has not had it. 
 
 May 20. 
 
 Still I fall asleep to the sound of footsteps of 
 passing people, blending oftentimes with the sound 
 of the sea. They are of all kinds, old, slow, and 
 staggering; youthful and brisk; firm, as of middle 
 age. The feet of the old and of children keep their 
 wonted pace, but I detect a change in the footsteps 
 of the young, which grow more light, alert, and swift, 
 straggling no longer, conscious of an aim. 
 
 As I listen, I lose my sense of the actual, for, with 
 those that sound in the streets of Mataquoit, I hear 
 the footsteps of all who go across the seas to fight 
 for liberty; keeping step; going to help; the foot- 
 steps of a great army, moving toward great ends. 
 
 Among them I hear most clearly Jack's, though 
 Jack is seldom here; it is odd, but there has always 
 been something distinctive about his footstep. Since 
 his second visit, I have known it as far as I could
 
 224 A WORLD TO MEND 
 
 hear it, for a certain energy and decision with which 
 his foot touches the ground. 
 
 Then, though of course this may be but a reflec- 
 tion of my own mood, a difference comes in the tread 
 of all and sundry, old and young. Though they 
 are going about commonplace errands, giving orders 
 at the grocery, looking after the kindling, there is a 
 majesty in the sound ; it becomes the tread of a vast 
 people, an innumerable host, who have made a 
 great, disinterested choice, taking on a new meas- 
 ure, beginning to step in unison, marching toward 
 a goal.
 
 XXVI 
 
 May 22. 
 
 The beauty of earth's most tragic May encircles 
 the world, running here in swift grasses and in rip- 
 ples of blossom over marsh and hill. Song sparrows 
 and bluebirds are glad without reproof; to-day I 
 heard a bob-o-link in a green meadow. God grant 
 he learn nothing of the war! 
 
 That old sense of Mataquoit as an individual 
 entity is wholly gone. If now it seems to itself the 
 center of a universe, it is a universe bound together 
 by close filaments, so close that if one be broken, 
 this universe will fall to pieces. Nearly every man 
 is busy, weaving threads into this web; the daugh- 
 ters of Mataquoit are helping, learning to weave as 
 never before, and what is true of Mataquoit is true 
 of the whole country. However terrible the cause, 
 I feel a nation about me growing into unity, coming 
 nearer a common understanding in aim and in 
 endeavor than it has ever been before, its varying 
 nationalities, its interests heretofore straining this 
 way and that, uniting in one service. Here is gain 
 inestimable that must never be lost. 
 
 He who should write the story of America's re- 
 sponse to the challenge must get into it something 
 of the sweep and breadth of the country; the ques- 
 tion, the response, everywhere, from the spicy air 
 of Maine woods, to bland California, in shop,
 
 226 A WORLD TO MEND 
 
 ploughed field, and Chinese laundry, in summer 
 homes of the wealthy, in cabins of the poor. A 
 great, powerful nation, organized for peace, turns its 
 energy, its industries, its whole practical and the- 
 oretical purpose, into military activities, for an ideal. 
 A sense of the immensity of the country, the great 
 rolling prairie lands, the Oregon forests, the splendid, 
 uplifted mountain ranges of east and west, must 
 enter into an interpretation of the greatness and 
 of the dignity of the task, as a step onward, a step 
 upward. This moment marks a definite stage of 
 progress, a complete forgetting, for the time at least, 
 of our old sense of endless rights, of privilege, and 
 an entering upon a finer and sadder conception of 
 great responsibility. Civilization itself is at stake; 
 democracy is at stake. With clean hands we go 
 into the great war of the ages, perhaps the last great 
 war anywhere; we have nothing personal to gain; 
 we have much to lose. 
 
 It makes a great step on and up in international 
 statesmanship. When the country which is, in a 
 sense, the strongest, has the most in the way of 
 material power and wealth, deliberately makes this 
 finer choice, it seems written high, in letters of gold, 
 for all the nations to read, that man is his brother's 
 keeper, nation is nation's keeper. 
 
 May 28. 
 
 Billions Brown is back in Mataquoit, earlier than 
 he has ever come before. The little army of men 
 who take care of his estate is being mobilized, but 
 there are wide gaps in it; he is in a state of indig- 
 nation over the lack of consideration shown by the 
 march of history for the convenience of financiers.
 
 A WORLD TO MEND 227 
 
 He sought me out on the day of his arrival, a 
 week ago ; evidently he thought that our going into 
 the war was the result of my evil influence. War 
 was out of date, he stormed; America had no busi- 
 ness with wars. In what he said, with unnecessary 
 vehemence, I detected that narrow-minded selfish- 
 ness, that failure to understand, that am-I-my- 
 brother's-keeper attitude that many, even in aroused 
 America, still hold. I wrestled with him in regard to 
 his convictions, but in vain. I was unkind enough 
 to wonder, as he talked, what his attitude would be 
 if there were immediate profit in it for him, if he 
 dealt with wares of war. 
 
 Since that first meeting I have seen him nearly 
 every day ; he insists on taking me motoring, though 
 I, who need exercise to keep myself sound in mind 
 and limb, have no time to waste on automobiles. 
 He is in great unrest of mind and of body, as usual, 
 working harder at being idle than any one I have 
 ever seen, and he is disturbed because no one shares 
 his mood of wanting to play. Each day his resent- 
 ment toward the war grows keener; he cannot in- 
 terpret it save as something brought about by the 
 politicians for gain; other motive than that of 
 barter is inconceivable to him. His sense of 
 America's isolation is profound and triumphant ; the 
 sundering seas are enough to keep us prosperous, 
 apart. To hear him talk one would think that he 
 conceived the width of the Atlantic as a virtue in 
 himself. 
 
 Katharine will be home next week, he informed 
 me gruffly, but only for a visit. He said nothing of 
 Jack, and for this I was thankful.
 
 228 A WORLD TO MEND 
 
 June 1. 
 
 The sight of uniforms, the sailors' blue and the 
 soldiers' khaki, on peaceful country roads or wood- 
 land paths, and in village squares, is something to 
 which it is hard to become accustomed. The shy 
 look of the American youth in uniform;, their half- 
 shamefaced pride, the squared shoulders, stiffly 
 held; in some, a touch of sheepishness, show how 
 new and strange is this unexpected call to duty. 
 Even the brief training already given has changed 
 the oftentimes shambling gait to a quick, steady, 
 marching step; they are beginning to walk, the 
 service boys of Mataquoit and the surrounding 
 country, as if conscious of a goal. 
 
 Yesterday a great motor truck filled with soldiers 
 and their belongings, kettles, brooms, a combination 
 of military and camp accoutrements, speeding 
 through the main street of Mataquoit, brought 
 the war home to me as few things have done. To- 
 day a group in khaki marched singing through the 
 streets. Armed youths are guarding the railway 
 bridges beyond the town. 
 
 Marching beside these rough-hewn young coun- 
 trymen, in whose faces light is just beginning to 
 glimmer, or pacing beside supply farm wagon or 
 motor truck on armed steeds, I see the young cru- 
 saders of medieval days, the souls of those long 
 gone keeping step with the souls of those who are 
 wakening to-day, moving, as of old, with their faces 
 toward the east. 
 
 June 3. 
 
 Nothing in my life has surprised me more than 
 the way in which this generation, which we had
 
 A WORLD TO MEND 229 
 
 thought pampered, spoiled by a life made too easy, 
 is rising to meet its challenge; and the challenge is 
 the greatest that has ever come to any generation. 
 Its response will be one of the great wonders of all 
 time. Many of us had feared that the fiber of the 
 race was being weakened by modern systems of 
 education ; if so, the race is evidently incomparably 
 better than its education. 
 
 Young men everywhere are making good; if the 
 young girls have as yet hardly caught their stride, 
 it is partly because they have lacked opportunity. 
 These young men were more prepared than we had 
 thought; out of athletics and summer sports they 
 have made their own hardships, through games and 
 physical feats, of walking, climbing, running. They 
 have learned how to struggle, how to win fairly, how 
 to lose generously and so, all unwitting, have made 
 themselves ready in body for unexampled trial. 
 
 And in spirit? 
 
 Before us is a splendid spectacle of youth marching 
 silently with steady eyes to the sacrifice, animated 
 by some faith deeper than any theories, more fun- 
 damental than any array of words. We have been 
 surprised, after the initial shock of 1914, to find 
 that the spectacle, for all the awfulness, has more 
 of beauty than of terror, because of the wonder of 
 self-abnegation which it has revealed. In this lies 
 the promise of the future peace of the world. 
 
 This will be for all time a shining generation, 
 facing the hardest, making the supreme sacrifice, 
 gladly, voluntarily, many of them, at least. It 
 is, I say it with all reverence, with keen realization 
 of the unexampled hardships that are being faced, 
 a chosen generation, in that its duty has been made
 
 230 A WORLD TO MEND 
 
 plain as by a pillar of fire by night. Remembering 
 the uncertain voices about me in my youth, when 
 none knew the way, nor whether there was a way, 
 I could find it in my heart to envy those who now 
 hear the one clear call. 
 
 June 4. 
 
 Fresh on the heels of a dispute between Adams 
 Johnson and Joe Darnley over the ownership of 
 three feet of land at the edge of a house lot comes 
 Jack, back from the training camp, straight as a 
 liberty pole, a bit leaner, perhaps, but with eyes 
 even brighter than before, and more of color in his 
 face. His uniform becomes wonderfully well both 
 his body and his soul. 
 
 He comes home full of enthusiasm for the life 
 that he is leading, Spartan though it be, after his 
 over-coddled existence at home, and full of en- 
 thusiasm for his kind. The men, he tells me, are 
 generous, unselfish, courageous. He is going into 
 the life whole-heartedly, making friends with all 
 and sundry, low and high, ignorant and otherwise. 
 His conclusions up to this point are buoyantly op- 
 timistic; it is a pleasure to live and to work with 
 men who are so good. He is glad that he has left 
 college, because the present situation gives him far 
 wider opportunity for acquaintance with his kind. 
 
 I say no word to disturb his mood, but I ponder 
 over my stitches. Yes, men are good, in time of 
 stress, of tension, when something calls to the 
 deepest that is in them. But men in general, in 
 time of peace, of prosperity, show no such degree 
 of generosity, unselfishness, but are prone to be 
 captious, self-centered, asking, not giving.
 
 A WORLD TO MEND 231 
 
 June 7. 
 
 One who sits, as I do, by the highway with half- 
 open door, gleans many a remark, hears many a 
 bit of anecdote that record the happenings of this 
 moment far better than the historians of the future 
 can do. Ripples of the least waves betray the sweep 
 of the great tide; innumerable are the significant 
 incidents that tell the story of how we go to war. 
 
 Yesterday I heard two passers-by talking about 
 a Chinese laundryman in Bangor who would not 
 claim exemption on the ground that he is not really 
 a citizen, but insisted on going to war for Uncle 
 Sam. 
 
 Silas Marks, the hotel keeper, who came corpu- 
 lently in for repairs yesterday afternoon, told me 
 of a young Idaho farmer who sold his farm, gave 
 half the proceeds to the government, invested the 
 rest in Liberty bonds and then enlisted. It was a 
 tale that benefited both Silas and me, quickening 
 my hopes for man in the future. "If peradven- 
 ture 
 
 Another neighbor of mine, John Rankin of the 
 drug store, who recently motored to Boston on busi- 
 ness, told me that he volunteered to carry a large 
 supply of books out to a soldiers' training camp. 
 His motor broke down; a farmer, learning his er- 
 rand, came to the rescue with a team of horses. 
 Somewhat hesitatingly Mr. Rankin offered to pay 
 him ; the farmer looked at him and swore . . . 
 swore his patriotism, his feeling that had found no 
 expression, his wrath at being offered compensation 
 for such a task. 
 
 Old Mrs. Abel, a seaman's widow, begins to knit 
 sweaters for the soldiers, now that "our boys" are
 
 232 A WORLD TO MEND 
 
 going; yet, probably, the men who will wear these 
 sweaters will be far less related to her than the 
 British who have been fighting and suffering so 
 long. 
 
 Big John, the half-Indian fisherman on Hawk's 
 Island, has pledged one day's catch each week to 
 the Red Cross; old Joshua Ridgway, whose purse 
 strings are hard to loosen, and who is indeed dis- 
 satisfied that this is not the American Revolution, 
 has sent a substantial subscription to the same 
 cause. Even Peter Breed, the village miser, has 
 come tottering up with his mite. 
 
 This patriotism, this love of country, so quick, 
 sensitive, ready to rise to emergency, so quiescent 
 on ordinary days, how can we stabilize it? How 
 make it permanent? I find my Americanism brave, 
 confident, assured, in this growing unity and aspira- 
 tion as we make ready for great service, yet ques- 
 tioning, oftentimes discouraged in time of quiet, 
 when nothing calls to the greatest. My hope of 
 what man can do for man is deepened by seeing 
 what is offered in this time of great trial, for the 
 response to the need of the hour seems, at times, 
 an answer to many of the questions I have been 
 asking as to how democracy can be made both suc- 
 cessful and righteous. There is abroad in the land 
 a sense of the larger issue, an impersonality, a sub- 
 ordination of the old demand for one's rights, a 
 searching desire only to find one's duty and do it. 
 Everybody is taking on some of the traits of the 
 chosen few on whom I have based my faith, those 
 people whose individual characteristics have be- 
 come articles in the constitution of my ideal re- 
 public.
 
 A WORLD TO MEND 
 
 233 
 
 Watching these developments and sharing some 
 of them, my thought, my hope, leap forward. If 
 national feeling is so strong as it shows itself to be 
 in this centralizing of our thought and purpose, the 
 days to come can put it to great uses; here is a 
 patriotism on which we can build in time of peace, 
 if such time ever comes. What future can be too 
 glorious for a country that can do this great, dis- 
 interested thing, do it not only by act of govern- 
 ment, but by glad acquiescence and ready will of 
 millions of its citizens, who offer their strength of 
 mind and body to aid? 
 
 June 5. 
 
 All over the country to-day, hundreds of thou- 
 sands, millions of young men go to enroll themselves 
 in the army, which, under the Stars and Stripes, 
 is to enter the great struggle for the freedom of 
 mankind. I have a feeling of reverent surprise that 
 in this vast America, pledged to the ways of peace, 
 the conscription law could have gone through with 
 hardly an audible objection. From sea to sea in 
 this land whose immensity is hard to realize, even 
 when one sees the swift miles flowing past in rolling 
 hills and sweeping plains and climbing ranges, the 
 people have risen with one voice of mighty assent 
 to the great purpose.
 
 XXVII 
 
 June 12. 
 
 As this cause in which I am enlisted becomes one 
 for which our hosts are to fight in open field, I must 
 examine again my new-found faith. My thought, 
 my endeavor, which had seemed isolated, apart, are, 
 in reality, a ripple of the great tide which is rising 
 slowly along all shores and through all inlets the 
 wide world over; the President's phrase, "safe for 
 democracy," states with succinct brevity the 
 thought toward which our minds have been groping, 
 as the central issue of the war has more and more 
 revealed itself. With the overthrow of despotism 
 in Russia, and the struggle of the Russian people 
 for self-controlled freedom, the war reveals itself 
 more clearly in its true aspect as a battle for democ- 
 racy. Dimly, from the very beginning, we have 
 felt the clash between two antagonistic principles; 
 now, history is defining in large terms the cause for 
 which we serve. As, in 1848, republican fervor 
 spread through Europe, now, partly by reason of 
 this awful conflict, a sense of responsibility of man 
 for man, a something from which finer government 
 must grow, is spreading the world over. There is 
 an universal enkindling; the great period of the 
 French Revolution pales before the greatness of 
 these days, in their manifold suggestions of the way 
 in which human institutions must expand to make 
 room for the expanding human spirit. National life
 
 A WORLD TO MEND 235 
 
 must grow greater; that old doctrine of liberty, 
 equality, fraternity, applied to international rela- 
 tions, will bring unimagined opportunities, un- 
 imagined obligations. This may be like those 
 geologic moments of quick development, when, 
 scientists tell us, some vast, swift impetus carried 
 growth farther forward in brief periods of time than 
 unnumbered ages had done. 
 
 Thus democracy, in common use as a word, if 
 not as a fact, since my boyhood and long before, 
 takes on a wider significance, a deeper meaning; it 
 is on all men's lips. With sudden sharpness the 
 question comes: What is democracy? With all the 
 world I must arise and define more clearly that for 
 which we are fighting. 
 
 Though I have made great efforts during these 
 last months to understand, I find myself only at 
 the beginning of my lesson of democracy, as yet in 
 the kindergarten. I find it hard, even as Christi- 
 anity is hard, and not distinct from it; I find it 
 more absorbing, more full of challenge day by day. 
 The very conception is- an essentially spiritual one, 
 claiming one's entire devotion, and full surrender 
 to its high claim. The cause is so great and so diffi- 
 cult of achievement that, as our armies move to 
 battle, I tremble, not for success in the fields of 
 France, but for the fields of the future. The pa- 
 tience that is necessary for any true living of the 
 creed, the love of human kind, the disinterested- 
 ness, stagger me. 
 
 This true democracy, implying in each adherent 
 an interest in his neighbor's destiny not unlike that 
 in his own, demands a subordination of the unim- 
 portant to essentials, a willingness to waive one's
 
 236 A WORLD TO MEND 
 
 minor prejudices, to drop one's folly of preferences 
 and exclusions, of restricted visiting lists and select 
 clubs, of boarding schools where privileged young 
 are shut away from their kind. Surely whatever 
 high standards we have should be so high that they 
 could be carried to mart and market place, among 
 plain people, gaining strength wherever battle has 
 to be done for them, benefiting all mankind. As 
 genuine democracy calls for the surrender of all 
 claim for special class or organization, it calls also 
 for the checking of undue expenditure, of the dis- 
 play of wealth in rich food and clothing; it calls 
 for self-abnegation, utmost service, work with one's 
 fellows, full allegiance to that inner state, not outer, 
 made of the alliance of human souls in high unity 
 of aim. Embracing democracy is a supreme act 
 of faith in humanity. 
 
 So runs my thought when I walk by the sea and 
 only the horizon line bounds my vision; but what 
 of democracy in its actual working, in the attitude 
 of ordinary citizens toward their ordinary duties? 
 What of democracy as practised in Mataquoit? 
 There are moments when I want to go out like 
 some ancient prophet, preaching in wilderness, 
 street, and market, calling for repentance from 
 transgression, crying out that men shall not fight 
 and die for such a state of things as exists here. 
 Then the wiser and more disciplined man within 
 me reminds me that my ledger has an asset side, 
 and advises search to see what finenesses, what gen- 
 erosities, what instances of good intent, what gal- 
 lant carrying of responsibilities, I can set down here 
 under the actual working of this order; advises, 
 too, closer scrutiny of the other column, to discover
 
 A WORLD TO MEND 237 
 
 if any of these items can be turned into assets. 
 Am I equal to this task of spiritual mathematics? 
 From column II what can I carry over to column I? 
 
 I II 
 
 Assets Liabilities 
 
 Good nature, friendli- Lack of intellectual 
 ness, hail-fellow-well- ideal, of desire or 
 met tendency. power to think. 
 
 T. . ,. 11, Bucolic certainty, ignor- 
 
 Desire to live and let ., 1r 
 
 v ance, conceiving itself 
 
 live. . .. 
 
 as inspiration. 
 
 Quickly roused sym- Selfishness; desire for 
 pathy with suffering, gain at all costs. 
 
 when once this is T r , r , j 
 
 , Laziness, often of body, 
 
 known. f . f . , 
 
 more often of mind 
 
 In general, business and souL 
 
 squareness and fair- Passivity. Resignation 
 ness. plays too large a part 
 
 in our democracy. 
 Sense of binding nature 
 
 of an agreement. Men stand patient un- 
 
 der wrong conditions, 
 Hatred of force. instead of creating 
 
 better. 
 
 Love of country. Pa- . 
 
 trintiqm Feeling that all fault is 
 
 U1UUO1U. - - 
 
 the other man s. Ten- 
 
 A deep consciousness of dency to be critics, to 
 being free men. tel1 wn &t is wrong, 
 
 rather than to do 
 Belief in fair play. what is right.
 
 238 A WORLD TO MEND 
 
 As I look I see little that could be transferred 
 from II to I; and, seeing that I have left at the 
 bottom of the page no room for balancing, I am glad 
 to carry over the account; there are many items yet 
 to be entered. All fastidiousness and minor dis- 
 tastes apart, I find much whereon to build enduring 
 government. Chief among the factors is this sense 
 of fair play, widespread, though not universal, and 
 stopping usually short of generosity. It shows itself 
 largely in a business sense of fairness in human deal- 
 ings ; and our hope for the future will depend largely 
 on the extent to which we can make widespread a 
 deeper knowledge of that which is unfair in man's 
 relation to man. 
 
 If the attitude of citizens toward their ordinary 
 responsibilities could be the same as their attitude 
 toward the huge unprecedented war-task which has 
 been thrust upon them in the name of the political 
 faith they hold, there would be cause for great en- 
 couragement. War's obvious needs bespeak the 
 subtler needs of peace. 
 
 June 15. 
 
 The name of Billions Brown was halfway down 
 the list of those to whom I was directed to go, to 
 ask money for war charities; I went to him to-day. 
 
 "I'll not give you a cent," he stormed. "I don't 
 approve of war." 
 
 "Billions," said I, "old Mrs. Mooney, who takes 
 in washing (which she cannot see to do) came to 
 me the other day and brought me ten cents. She 
 had been told that I was collecting for the war 
 sufferers, and this was the price of her Sunday 
 night's supper. You are a successful financier, but
 
 A WORLD TO MEND 239 
 
 Mrs. Mooney will be a far better financier in King- 
 dom Come than you are." 
 
 He scowled and gave me a check for a thousand 
 dollars, which shows that he is in a disturbed state 
 of mind. No wonder that he is bewildered, for he 
 and all that he stands for of physical and material 
 growth in the country have been brought to a stand- 
 still by the turn affairs have taken, have been 
 brought to naught unless this eyes open to a sense 
 of other values. I have hopes that he will yet 
 squeeze his somewhat bulky figure through the eye 
 of the needle. 
 
 Roses are blossoming everywhere, syringas are in 
 bloom; unnumbered fragrances of grass and flower 
 steal through the sea-scented air of Mataquoit. It 
 is full summer, but a summer that seems indefi- 
 nitely removed from the lonely center of conscious- 
 ness where each one of us waits, trying to think out 
 the world problem. 
 
 June 16. 
 
 Again we went to the station to say good-by to 
 our recruits, this time a company of drafted men, 
 thirty-four in all. Some of them I know; some 
 were country boys whom I had never seen; a few 
 of them were shabby to raggedness and a few ele- 
 gant with all that was latest and most "exclusive" 
 in Sands' Emporium. Their youth and callowness, 
 their evident lack of realization of the magnitude of 
 the task before them, were pathetic. The crude air 
 of carrying it off, making nothing of it, slapping 
 one another humorously on the shoulder, tilting 
 hats to a rakish angle indicative of extreme self- 
 assurance, was distinctively American, perhaps
 
 240 A WORLD TO MEND 
 
 lesser American. How much they have to learn, 
 what need they have to grow, before they will be 
 ready ! 
 
 Yet there is a touching simplicity in their willing- 
 ness; they go uncomplainingly, but some, at least, 
 have fear in their eyes. . . . Something made one 
 catch one's breath at the sight of them, even though 
 both Jack and Tim were there, inspiring courage, 
 bringing now and then a shout of merry laughter 
 from the crowd. Jack has taught Tim to stand and 
 salute the man in khaki; Tim would gladly enlist 
 if he could, but Tim is a professional militarist and 
 would not really count among crusaders. 
 
 It is superb and it is marvellous that, over all 
 this vast country, there has been no riot; hardly 
 have there been protests against conscription, only 
 a quiet taking up of obvious duty. What is this 
 power making itself manifest? Is it patriotism, 
 deeper and more widespread than we have known? 
 Is it Christianity, profounder than words or con- 
 scious thought? Doubtless for many, perhaps for 
 the majority, it is yielding to authority; but that 
 authority is deeper than mere power of govern- 
 ment; there is in it the weight of public opinion 
 throughout the country. So is freedom justified of 
 her children. This one fact of the readiness with 
 which men flock to the colors is more compelling 
 evidence of our unity than we have ever had before ; 
 it brings the balance overwhelmingly on the asset 
 side of my account in democracy. 
 
 Whatever the reasons for quick response to the 
 mandate, these men can hardly fail to come out of 
 this great service, if come they do, without a deep- 
 ened sense of life and the aims of life. What sol-
 
 A WORLD TO MEND 241 
 
 diers they will make in the service of peace, they 
 who so obediently answer call to war! They go to 
 face a discipline that will make them men ; to learn, 
 tragically, a deeper lesson than all the untroubled 
 years have brought. What promise is here for the 
 future, if, in the days that follow the great war, 
 we can but make the clarion call for service as clear 
 as this which sounds to-day! 
 
 Coming home after the last boyish hand had 
 waved out of the last car window, my thoughts ran 
 back to the past as well as forward to the future. 
 Of those who builded America it can be said that 
 their accomplishment is greater than they dreamed. 
 They did not know, those grave fathers of the young 
 republic, how boundlessly far their deeds would go; 
 how far the words that they were saying would be 
 carried. They did not dream of their young de- 
 scendants, going out, giving their youth, their fair- 
 ness, their passion, their desire, to hand on the torch 
 of liberty, to carry it round the world. 
 
 June 20. 
 
 One may tell the national story in terms of con- 
 scription, unprotested, sweeping the nation; one 
 may tell it in terms of old Mrs. Markham, my 
 widowed neighbor, unable to buy yarn to finish the 
 tenth pair of stockings she has knit for the soldiers. 
 It was my hostess, the Widow Frayne, who told me, 
 and who carried out my commission to supply her 
 present and future need. 
 
 Even Mrs. Frayne's sharp and inquisitive eye has 
 become an asset for the government; she is merci- 
 lessly aware of what every one in Mataquoit has 
 done or left undone. No sergeant in khaki could
 
 242 A WORLD TO MEND 
 
 be more indefatigable in searching out slackers and 
 haling them before that bar of justice, her tongue. 
 
 Yet I marvel increasingly at the mysteries of 
 human nature, as the war, like a searchlight, throws 
 them into glaring relief, high light, and deep 
 shadow. Widow Frayne herself sits ceaselessly 
 knitting, wearing out her forefinger, and, at times, 
 her temper, in making stockings for the soldiers. 
 Something in her, hitherto untouched, is quivering 
 into life, a submerged tenderness, a sympathy with 
 her kind. She who has always spoken with utmost 
 bitterness of her young neighbors in Mataquoit, 
 deriding Phil Thompson for his fondness for flirting, 
 and Alec Feeney for his recklessness in spending his 
 father's money, will have no word spoken against 
 Philip Thompson and Alexander Feeney, American 
 soldiers. I quoted last night some old remarks of 
 hers as if they were my own, and she flew at me, 
 chastising me with the valor of her tongue for being 
 uncharitable. Even Tom Hanks, the ragman, whom 
 I have put down in my studies in democracy as 
 incapable of being appealed to by any but personal 
 motives, has brought tarnished pennies and nickels, 
 tied up in a red bandana handkerchief, to contrib- 
 ute to the local Red Cross work. So, many of my 
 neighbors, up and down the street, are wakening to 
 a conception of something greater than their own 
 firesides. 
 
 What is it? Undoubtedly the thought of youth 
 facing death. 
 
 Why can not the tenderness be enlisted for the 
 days of peace? Why may it not always be at the 
 service of the young, who face a something more 
 perplexing, more awful than death, life? Many
 
 A WORLD TO MEND 243 
 
 and many a manifestation of folly Widow Frayne 
 undoubtedly sees, as she sits, sharp-eyed and un- 
 relenting, by the window: flirting, giggling, stolen 
 kiss as the unchaperoned of the village walk up and 
 down, or the unsteady steps of lads who have found 
 something to fuddle their brains even in prohibi- 
 tionist Maine. What she fails to see is that these 
 young are shaken, driven this way and that by the 
 mysterious, dimly understood forces of existence. 
 
 The beneficent power of human nature when it 
 is stirred to its depths, how can we keep it for- 
 ever wakened, astir in the interests of life?
 
 XXVIII 
 
 June 23. 
 
 Katharine is at home for a visit; she came to see 
 me, bringing Clare with her. My thoughts about 
 democracy and my duty to my fellow man flew 
 swiftly out of the window, and it was with diffi- 
 culty that I prevented the Congregational minister's 
 boot, on which I was working from following, and 
 landing in my violet bed. It is not easy to think 
 about either abstract questions or boots when 
 Katharine and Clare are in the room. 
 
 Katharine was simply dressed, but with no sug- 
 gestion of a nurse's uniform; she is unchanged, 
 except that her inner self shines out a bit more 
 clearly. Her steady eyes met mine with less of 
 question in them, and her mouth wore something 
 of the firm, sweet, disciplined look of old Grand- 
 mother Brown's. They sat in my two armchairs 
 which, throughout the winter, have held, in the 
 forms of my neighbors, many of the hopes of the 
 new democracy. Clare hung on her sister's lips as 
 she told of her winter, treasuring every word. 
 
 Katharine has of course not received full nurse's 
 training and is technically not ready to go, but the 
 distinguished physician under whom she is working 
 is equipping a unit for immedate service in France, 
 and he has all but promised that Katharine shall go 
 with him. What this means in recognition of her 
 unusual ability and her character Katharine did
 
 A WORLD TO MEND 245 
 
 not, of course, say, but I know. If there is still any 
 element of uncertainty in this eminent medical 
 mind as to permitting so great an irregularity, I 
 feel no doubt as to the result ; I know my Katharine. 
 
 Billions humbly inquired, when I met him later 
 in the afternoon, whether Katharine had confided 
 to me anything about her future plans; he would 
 not deign to ask her. When I told him he turned 
 red, then white. 
 
 "I suppose," he said wrathfully, "that she has 
 some romantic notion in her head. She thinks that 
 young fool Sands will be wounded over there and 
 she will be called upon to nurse him." 
 
 "She thinks nothing of the kind, Billions," I told 
 him, "and you ought to be ashamed of yourself." 
 
 June 28. 
 
 Even now sometimes, as I drive my nails, I 
 reproach myself for the folly of this thing that I am 
 doing in separating myself from old associations 
 and old relationships. My experiment is a bit crude, 
 perhaps, but it represents my plunge into reality. 
 A man, before he goes out, should arrive at some 
 understanding of the world in which he lives ; had I 
 not jolted myself out of my earlier surroundings I 
 should never have taken sufficiently into account 
 actual phenomena, events, happenings, the world 
 and the people in it. Surely I have made some 
 progress, outgrowing my complete absorption in 
 books and mere ideas, that inward look, which 
 failed to get true perspectives. 
 
 I am glad that I am going through this great na- 
 tional experience of war in my present surroundings. 
 The homely, trivial detail, the homespun happen-
 
 246 A WORLD TO MEND 
 
 ings of common American life here in Mataquoit 
 bring me nearer than my old world would have done 
 to the great glory of understanding and of sharing 
 the willing sacrifice of America to-day, as at last 
 we find our place among the nations. 
 
 Driving my pegs, I am haunted by imaginary 
 pictures of our war vessels crossing the seas, bris- 
 tling with guns, moving in swift, even flight across 
 the waves. One of them will some day take Jack, 
 another, Katharine; I pound my finger in impa- 
 tience of longing to take that path with them. Like 
 unnumbered others, I want to serve where the need 
 is greatest and most obvious. Yet I remind myself, 
 and with another little whack of my hammer, that 
 there is a front trench here as well as in France 
 and in Flanders. We must all be somewhere in this 
 battle line for democracy, but perhaps the hardest 
 part of the fighting will not come in the battle- 
 fields; there is endless opportunity for those who 
 stay at home. Now, when we are shocked, startled 
 out of our petty absorptions, wakened to a deeper 
 personality, lifted above ourselves, I, with others, 
 must be learning how to carry the great faith, the 
 great discipline, the great and disinterested service 
 on into the coming democracy of the years of peace. 
 
 July 3. 
 
 Jack will be going soon ; home on leave for a few 
 days, he tells me that he is waiting orders that may 
 come any moment now. I should be an unhappy 
 man if he did not go and go voluntarily; I should 
 have the feeling of having again failed in life. 
 
 I brace myself in my cobbler's chair and work 
 more assiduously at my stitching than I have ever
 
 A WORLD TO MEND 247 
 
 done. Few days are left, and the moments that can 
 be counted mine are fewer still. Their exceeding 
 preciousness weighs upon me with such a sense of 
 what must be said that I find myself inarticulate 
 when Jack is here. After all, what do words count? 
 
 Whether Jack had managed to secure as his time 
 of leave these days of Katharine's visit home I do 
 not know, but I am sure they had not planned to 
 meet in my shop. Yet here they met this morning, 
 as on the first day of their acquaintance ; Katharine 
 had stopped to bring me a message from Grand- 
 mother Brown in regard to the right treatment of 
 rheumatism. Knowing my place as a member of 
 the older generation I kept silence and applied my- 
 self to my needle while they talked or tried to talk. 
 They had singularly little to say to each other or 
 to me, they who had chattered so freely, asked so 
 many questions, demanded so many opinions a 
 year ago. The significance of this I realize; they are 
 going to act and have small need for words. 
 
 I have known little of outer event in their story, 
 though I have gathered much from reading Jack's 
 mind and moods, which are almost shamelessly 
 transparent. From the first, his days of suspense 
 have told upon me, his moments of joy I have 
 shared, though he has said nothing of them. The 
 glimpses they have had of each other have been few 
 and far between, and now Billions has decreed that 
 Jack shall not be received at Round Towers; he told 
 me so himself. That the two love each other deeply 
 I am aware; I would not stop it if I could, in spite 
 of Billions' feeling; it could no more be checked 
 than could sap mounting in a tree. But I can not 
 put this down in words; I never wrote a love story
 
 248 A WORLD TO MEND 
 
 and would not write this even if I had the power ; it 
 would be sacrilege. 
 
 When they did find their tongues they talked 
 gaily, comparing details of accouterment, one stoutly 
 upholding the virtue of khaki, one of white linen. 
 Through it all ran the glory and the poignancy of 
 the thought that it was probably their last meeting 
 before going their different ways in sailing to the 
 other side. The young, if I may borrow one of Jack's 
 expressions, are game ; I doubt if anything so merry 
 as their laughter had ever rung out in my little shop ; 
 yet Tim crept up and licked my hand. 
 
 They went away together, and my last glimpse 
 of Jack showed white young lips trembling on the 
 verge of speech. I thought that they were wholly 
 gone as I turned my needle and my whole attention 
 to confirming some stitches on a bit of Jack's sol- 
 dier outfit, thinking proudly that never in my early 
 life had I done anything so useful, when I heard 
 a murmur of voices, after a long silence, from the 
 bench under the pine tree near my window. 
 
 "No," said Katharine's voice, ringing a bit more 
 clearly, I fancy, than she had intended. "It might 
 hinder, if I should want to work under the Red 
 Cross over there; they won't let you, if you have 
 father, or brother over there, or any other en- 
 tangling alliance." 
 
 "But Katharine," Jack was saying, in a voice that 
 cracked a bit, "will you, if I come back?" I could 
 not close my window and perforce heard Katharine's 
 
 "Perhaps, if 7 come back." 
 
 They kept step as they went away down the street, 
 as befitted two who have enlisted in the great battle 
 for democracy. There was a splendor of life and of
 
 A WORLD TO MEND 249 
 
 strength about them as they walked together, 
 stored-up energy, potential power, sheer force of 
 nerve and of muscle, as if all the prosperous years 
 had been accumulating in these and their like rich 
 resources for the hour of need. Those two were 
 symbols of my America, going to the help of the 
 world. 
 
 They had much to give, their youth, their joy, 
 their strength, their beauty, much to sacrifice; I 
 envied them. I hope it was not because I am safe, 
 am fifty-odd and lame, am kept by outer force from 
 doing what they are doing so royally that I envy 
 them; I think that my envy is real. Ah, these 
 young, with their baptism of fire and flame and suf- 
 fering! Was ever love so tragic or so great as love 
 in this generation? 
 
 July 8. 
 
 As one recalls the changes wrought by the war, 
 and the signs of change, nothing seems more signifi- 
 cant than the look in the eyes of people, the 
 greatest change of all. The young men already in 
 khaki, and the young men behind counters who 
 know that they must go wear a wholly different ex- 
 pression from that to which we have been accus- 
 tomed in young men. There is a depth in the eye, 
 a something dim but very real back of the surface 
 glance. Called suddenly from our bustling, external 
 life to face the eternal verities, they wear a look of 
 hushed awe and surprise. 
 
 Young Andy Johns in the real-estate office, silent ; 
 the Owen boy, drafted but not yet assigned, going 
 about the streets with a waiting look in his face; the 
 country lad I watched on a street corner on a day
 
 250 A WORLD TO MEND 
 
 of parade, with his head in relief as if carved by 
 an idealist artist, such as St. Gaudens, eyes far- 
 seeing, young lips quivering into firm control, all 
 wear a look of surrender to some fine inward guid- 
 ance, and a look of non-surrender forever to that 
 external force which is trying to establish itself all 
 over the world. 
 
 The eyes of the older men have altered too ; there 
 is in them something wistful, noncommittal, as if 
 all life were at some deep pause. I asked Thomas 
 Shaw, a local builder, how the war had affected his 
 business; he said simply: "Killed it," but with a 
 look as if it mattered little. Contractor Elting was 
 talking with him, urging against some enterprise 
 which the two were contemplating together; it was 
 too great a risk; no one could foresee the end of 
 this; what he said was commonplace he is a com- 
 monplace man but the common words seemed to 
 echo far off, almost at the end of things. The faces 
 of both were as the faces of men who have watched 
 kingdoms fade and die; the inexorable greatness 
 of life is thrusting itself upon them in years when 
 one is slow to learn. 
 
 The women's eyes have changed less; they are 
 nearer always the great issues of life and death. I 
 see apprehension in many a mother's face, and great 
 pride. The sorrowful exultation of my neighbor, 
 Mrs. Lent, in the son who is now at the front in 
 France, the son who was wild and a bit bad, is 
 significant; she had never before been able to be 
 proud of him. The eyes of mothers the world 
 over must look much the same now, the one differ- 
 ence being the question as to whether their sons are 
 going or have gone.
 
 A WORLD TO MEND 251 
 
 The eyes of the young girls are different; they 
 have a kindled look of waiting that is not quite 
 waiting. It is in many cases eagerness to help; 
 in some, sympathetic understanding of the world 
 tragedy and of individual tragedies that have come 
 within their ken; in some, already, it is sorrow of 
 those who have come within the shadow. 
 
 The eyes of older folk and young have become 
 vistas, wherein one sees far-reaching paths, leading 
 on and up, for the treading of human kind. 
 
 July 30. 
 
 Our war nurse has sailed away upon a liner which 
 is to have a military escort. I went to see her off; 
 her father would not go. 
 
 "I won't go near it," said Billions, speaking of the 
 ship whose name he had just learned through his 
 daughter, yet he looked sorry; the trouble with 
 Billions is that he looked sorry for himself. 
 
 "Who's paying the girl's expenses?" he asked 
 suddenly; I told him that she was earning her way 
 to the front; an organization had been formed to 
 defray the costs of the unit, headed by the physi- 
 cian who had once been Grandmother Brown's tow- 
 headed protege. I did not tell him that Katharine's 
 personal outfit, or most of it, had been purchased 
 with the old lady's money; this acceptance was a 
 gracious thing on the part of the girl ; Grandmother 
 Brown had tried to enlist in all ways that are open 
 to a woman of seventy-five. 
 
 She was at the dock when I reached it. waiting to 
 see her granddaughter sail; she had driven down 
 in a taxicab, showing a high degree of courage in
 
 252 A WORLD TO MEND 
 
 trusting herself to a machine which was known only 
 to be abhorred. With her was Clare. 
 
 "Isn't she great?" said Clare. Clare uses freely 
 the one adjective of her generation. 
 
 "Yes, she's a good girl," said Grandmother Brown. 
 
 The picture is clear in my mind of the vessel slip- 
 ping out of its berth, with the green water churning 
 at its sides; of the half -laughing, slightly defiant 
 face, the head thrown a little back as she sailed 
 away ; her clear and sunny eyes wore no look of fear 
 or of question. 
 
 A memory of a Greek grave relief came back to 
 me, a sculptured relief of a maiden whose lifted 
 finger seems about to raise a latch. In Katharine's 
 eyes as in hers was a look of one for whom great 
 doors are about to open ; God grant these doors open 
 upon further life, not death. There was that in my 
 throat unbecoming a man and a cobbler. 
 
 Remembering the look upon her face I can say: 
 "So much of her is mine," for she told me, in a note 
 which I am keeping in my ledger, that but for me 
 she would never have gone, never have known or 
 cared. 
 
 Here is my decoration, my croix-de-guerre. 
 
 Jack has gone, too. When and how the transport 
 with my boy slipped out of New York harbor I 
 do not know; America has learned the hard lesson 
 of silence, and in secrecy and silence her sons depart. 
 
 So they go, my two. They are not mine in any 
 worldly sense, and yet I give them. Truly I have 
 grown rich in this year in which I turned my back 
 upon my worldly possessions; my seeming loss has 
 meant great gain; for the whole world I would not 
 barter what these months have brought.
 
 A WORLD TO MEND 253 
 
 Those two are symbols, of youth, of joy, and love, 
 in willing sacrifice, symbols of what America is will- 
 ing to do, of this greater America, rising out of 
 her wheat fields, her gold mines, her riches innumer- 
 able, to offer that which is more precious than all 
 her boundless possessions, her young.
 
 XXIX 
 
 August 4. 
 
 My young crusaders sail away to help in this 
 cruel conflict. 
 
 This is a beginning. 
 
 I sit at home and drive pegs into John Morey's 
 shoe. 
 
 This is also a beginning. 
 
 I talk with John Morey and discover his inmost 
 mind, what he thinks regarding many matters, re- 
 ligious and political. Here is my crusade, well 
 mapped out; sympathetic and intelligent under- 
 standing is the one thing needful. I tell him what 
 I think, but absent-mindedly; I find it harder now 
 to be interested in what John Morey thinks and to 
 help shape his thought to fine issues. 
 
 In these vast empty spaces, for this small sea 
 town seems to me now an immeasurable, dreary 
 waste, I keep myself hard at work. Tim is unre- 
 mitting in his devotion ; he understands, as does no 
 one else in Mataquoit, and he is trying to make of 
 himself not only a four-footed friend, but a young 
 girl with a sensitive, determined face, and a youth 
 in khaki, with merry, affectionate eyes and a jolly 
 laugh. He is not entirely successful, but he comes 
 nearer success than any one else could. 
 
 My mind persistently strays from the problems 
 of the days to come to the glory of these present 
 days. It is in the faces of the young, and not of
 
 A WORLD TO MEND 255 
 
 Jack and Katharine alone, that I find an answer to 
 the haunting question as to whether this is the end- 
 ing of a great period; whether the world is falling 
 to decay. 
 
 There can be no serious thought of resemblance 
 between the character of our time and that of 
 Rome's downward days, a parallel that, I confess, 
 has often occurred to me. The conscript legions 
 had no strength for life's renewing such as that 
 offered by the youth of to-day. The world over the 
 young have flocked to give all; their vigor, hope, 
 passion go into the collective life of the world. It is 
 not only the young men ; the young women also find 
 constantly new ways to serve. What power in their 
 continued life, if this be granted, for life's renewing; 
 what power in their death ! 
 
 With their millions, the world over, living so 
 greatly, dying so greatly, grasping already in youth 
 the truth that comes hardly ever in later years, the 
 essential truth that deepest living is deepest sacri- 
 fice, who can think that to-day can mean downfall, 
 decadence, loss? Rather, there is immense impul- 
 sion, an immense gain, this world -experience in self- 
 abnegation, carrying life to higher levels than it has 
 ever known before. It may be that under the great 
 challenge so grandly taken by youth, the race, 
 through its very struggle and anguish, will develop 
 with swiftness never known before, brief months 
 doing the work of many hundred years. 
 
 Not in the days of Rome's decadence, but in the 
 day of her power when the great attempt at world 
 dominion was made, I find a certain parallel. The 
 grasp at world power failed ; but down all the broad 
 highways of the Caesars, through all their vast
 
 256 A WORLD TO MEND 
 
 cities, triumphed a faith whose way they had un- 
 wittingly made straight, prepared. 
 
 As to-day, millions of the young flock, eager for 
 the sacrifice, we can but say: What fruit has come 
 from that spectacle of the pale Christ upon the 
 Cross! 
 
 September 12. 
 
 Day by day I feel more deeply the difference in 
 this, our America; this rising to the call of the war 
 means, for the great majority of the nation, a re- 
 newal of the old pledges of democracy. There is in- 
 creasingly, an awakening of the rich out of their old 
 mood of feeling the world a grand place in which to 
 disport one's self in special privilege, freedom to 
 do as one likes and utmost ability to do it ; there is 
 a partial rousing of the laboring class from a self- 
 centered demand for their rights, yet many of the 
 unions are still far from patriotism; there is a 
 splendid response of the great middle class east, 
 west, north, south offering brain, and muscle, and 
 possessions. Professional and artist classes find 
 common hope and aim with plain folk. There is 
 continual growth of all through this stern struggle 
 into a sense of unity of this vast nation, a feeling of 
 oneness in a great hope. It is not a narrow race 
 feeling, but union of a conglomerate people in a 
 common ideal, fine, high, beyond anything this 
 world has ever known. 
 
 It comes, the deeper concord for which we have 
 longed. 
 
 We grow toward unselfishness, toward larger 
 views, toward a greater conception than the state- 
 craft of any large nation has ever yet recognized,
 
 A WORLD TO MEND 257 
 
 that man is his brother's keeper. The promise for 
 the world lies in the fact that the young are learn- 
 ing it. 
 
 The voluntary service offered in this war is a step, 
 and a great step, in a mighty progress. That which 
 one has found in vision as the hope of the days of 
 peace becomes actual in this new disinterestedness of 
 war time; each day brings record of fresh activities 
 that seem a prophecy of fulfilment of my aspirations 
 for the civic relations' of manhood. All classes are 
 suddenly called out of themselves and above them- 
 selves, and so the world moves upward to fuller 
 understanding, fuller sympathy, which holds within 
 it the promise of future peace. Those who have 
 served greatly will not forget. 
 
 September 20. 
 
 I am a proud man now as I walk the streets of 
 Mataquoit, for Tim is wagging friendliness nearly 
 all the time, and, as Tim's tail registers the state 
 of my feeling more accurately than I can register 
 it myself, I recognize within me a definite growth in 
 the matter of entering into the lives of my kind. 
 It is Tim who keeps me constantly aware that my 
 interest, my concern ramify in all directions, reveal- 
 ing to me my subconscious self, which often is bet- 
 ter than I, the merely thinking I. 
 
 Yet my understanding of men, while it grows 
 greater, does not display that constant and orderly 
 progress which I had hoped. I have one day a feel- 
 ing that I have gained new insight; then I find 
 myself baffled, with an overwhelming sense of igno- 
 rance of how to go about my task; and at times I 
 search even for my longing to understand. Possibly
 
 258 A WORLD TO MEND 
 
 I went about it with too much of scientific over- 
 certainty of results if study were applied. It takes 
 more than observation, more than mere intellectual 
 questioning to understand your neighbor; your 
 whole heart and mind and soul, as well as your 
 attention, must be set on it. Personality retreats 
 before you into fathomless recesses ; all you have of 
 individual concern and of affectionate interest must 
 be used to lure it from its hiding place. Old Mrs. 
 Mooney, whose deepest nature I divine, whose in- 
 nermost motive I know on Tuesday, on Wednesday 
 has become an impenetrable mystery. 
 
 A battered post card from Jack, a brief letter from 
 Katharine, remind me that my endeavor to enter 
 into the lives of my kind has worked out hi ways 
 sweet and unexpected. In coming, I went into vol- 
 untary isolation ; I broke with my traditions, cutting 
 myself off, I thought, from personal ties. And now 
 has come the deepest relationship that I have ever 
 known. It is ironic; I who set out to embrace all 
 human kind, find human kind in general often elud- 
 ing me, but find my affection going out unstintedly 
 to these two, and bringing great reward. 
 
 Perhaps I can learn to love my neighbor as my- 
 self: no great task, but I can not love him as I 
 love Jack and Katharine Brown. Especially Jack. 
 
 September 30. 
 
 It is difficult to face the thought of the rain of 
 fire on the western front, not only because of fear 
 of danger to our own lads, but because of our sorrow 
 that they must take weapons of destruction in their 
 hands. God grant that the great purpose of this 
 fight be held in the heart of each American boy who
 
 A WORLD TO MEND 259 
 
 goes into it, through all the bitter struggle. He who 
 takes up the sword shall perish by the sword except 
 it be to him less a weapon than a symbol of the 
 right. This warfare must not be mere fighting; 
 unless we keep faith with our higher hope that this 
 war will end all wars and usher in a better order yet 
 to be, we are but murderers. 
 
 Our dilemma is a strange and tragic one: war in 
 itself must be condemned as savagery, to be put be- 
 hind us as soon as may be in the striding onward 
 of humanity. But the momentous crisis proved 
 that, until all the world outgrow it, we must bear 
 our sad part therein; the fact that we of America 
 had long outgrown war is no reason for shirking our 
 responsibility of helping save for mankind that lib- 
 erty which we have won for ourselves. Growth is 
 an uneven thing; progress is an uneven thing, yet 
 the marching host must go together ; wo cannot leave 
 behind those who have struggled and fallen from the 
 line. They who retard, as Germany does now, re- 
 tard the whole ; they who drag down, drag down the 
 whole, for a tune only, for certain months and 
 days. 
 
 Thus with the leaders of this sorry enterprise we 
 descend into hell. Every moment of this warfare 
 drives home the profound truth that man is, of 
 necessity, one with his fellow ; go with him he must, 
 be it to hell or to heaven; there is no falling, no 
 rising alone. May every moment drive home to 
 every man the truth that it is also his most sacred 
 duty to block forever the gates of this particular 
 hell; and to spend his utmost energy in finding 
 paths whereby he and his fellow man may mount 
 in harmony heavenwards.
 
 260 A WORLD TO MEND 
 
 November 15. 
 
 Winter comes on apace with windy days of driven 
 leaves and quiet sunshiny mornings of hoar frost. 
 Still our great national work goes on, in training and 
 equipping soldiers ; in making munitions ; in gather- 
 ing and distributing supplies. So great an effort, 
 so swift and determined a girding-up of loins, we 
 have never made in all our history, yet, if recent 
 reports be true, unabashed luxury still shames us. 
 Men surfeit here, while thousands starve over there. 
 The life of unthinking plutocrats in our large cities, 
 for there are still many, with their sybaritic quar- 
 ters, their rich foods, their priceless jewelry and 
 costly clothing; the waste of resources, such as the 
 constant glare of electricity in city streets in foolish 
 advertising, while London and Paris sit in darkness 
 in order to economize light, betray us, or many of us, 
 as something less than citizens of this our America 
 in her new, finely heroic mood. A devoted worker 
 in war relief, home for a rest, wrote recently that 
 the difference was so great between those stricken 
 capitals and ours, the heartless expenditure here 
 made her so deeply ashamed of her country, that 
 she longed to go back immediately to those lands 
 where people live and suffer, away from this spot 
 where people feed and flaunt. 
 
 There is another side here which she will see in 
 time ; meanwhile, we need to suffer. God grant that, 
 through the suffering, wisdom may come. 
 
 This thought, intensified by the crisis of the mo- 
 ment, of needless expenditure, has been with me 
 much during the past months, for I have been long 
 on the track of a vanishing simplicity in our life, an 
 earlier reality of democratic conditions, disappearing
 
 A WORLD TO MEND 261 
 
 now under the impact of wealth, with display on 
 the part of those who have, and envy on the part of 
 those who lack. There was in days gone by, in many 
 a community, a something finer in actuality in the 
 relations of man to man than the theoretic schemes, 
 the machine socialisms of to-day, a something that 
 we need to rediscover and redevelop, until it become 
 manifest throughout the land, a friendly relation- 
 ship in difference of condition, without patronage on 
 the one hand or covetousness on the other. Men 
 knew better in old days how little material things 
 really mattered ; it is great pity to have the thought 
 of mere possessions exalted to be the central article 
 of any social and political creed. 
 
 As I walk by frozen meadow or the shore of the 
 loud-sounding sea, with Tim at iy heels, I find 
 myself repeating a kind of litany: 
 
 "From increasing luxury, from respect for mere 
 things, from selfish detachment, from neglect of 
 civic duty, from failure to realize individual respon- 
 sibility, from selfish claim, Good Lord, deliver us." 
 
 Democracy's prayer; it is high time that de- 
 mocracy was on her knees.
 
 XXX 
 
 April 29, 1918. 
 
 Found my ledger, with a thick coating of dust, in 
 a drawer where it had long lain forgotten. This is 
 no pen-and-ink world, either in Mataquoit or on the 
 Western Front. I grow increasingly practical ; night 
 after night, I go with all my toil so weary to bed 
 that sleep is too sound for dreams, even dreams of 
 progress. 
 
 The papers recently announced that our consump- 
 tion of wheat here in America had been diminished 
 by fifty per cent, owing to the effort made by the 
 United States to send wheat to relieve the Allies, 
 using substitutes at home, rye, barley, corn meal. 
 I like to think of the concrete way in which this 
 has brought into practically every American home 
 the country over some sense of responsibility toward 
 one's brother man. The effort to feed the hungry 
 world and the slight self-denial imposed by it must 
 be enormously educative for us in this country, all 
 too used to the sight of the grasping hand of the 
 master of industry, of labor crying for more and 
 more, of venial politician working in the interests 
 of his small group. The secret of the real brother- 
 hood of man is perhaps contained in the flour barrel, 
 broken wide open for all. 
 
 One munches rye bread with a feeling of thankful- 
 ness that such homely ways of serving one's coun- 
 try are open to us who may not fight. One elimi-
 
 A WORLD TO MEND 263 
 
 nates sugar, but what is sugar, when one's spirit 
 chafes night and day unceasingly as the waves fret 
 the shore, with baffled longing to serve in action? 
 My brief and slangy letters from Jack show me, 
 though I have to read between the lines, that he is 
 doing a man's work "over there." I read them over 
 many times, with deep content and with a subtle 
 sense of assurance difficult to put into words. Dur- 
 ing all the crash and turmoil of the time, the thought 
 of Jack brings me a sudden sense of peace, as if 
 through my love for him some inner law of harmony 
 had been revealed; these are moments when the 
 stirring of this which is nearest the divine within 
 me, reveals something of hidden purpose in things, 
 when he and I, and all men seem safe, through all 
 the tragedy of circumstance, held in a region of great 
 music, love. 
 
 May 10. 
 
 More and more boots come to be mended, and 
 this is patriotism, in part at least; people who, in 
 earlier days, would never have thought of wearing 
 mended boots now bring footgear of all kinds for 
 repair. It is a wise economy, personal, national, 
 nay, for all the world needs leather, international; 
 my stitches help bind the broken bits of the world 
 together; my waxed thread twines itself into that 
 web that life is weaving throughout the world of 
 the sorrows and the suffering of mankind and the 
 desire to help, knitting mankind into one. Every 
 mended boot helps in a world suffering from a 
 leather shortage. 
 
 But what can one say of women in these days, 
 with their fur coats and leather coats and their high
 
 264 A WORLD TO MEND 
 
 boots, demanding, and for mere fashion, more 
 leather than they ever asked before? Was that 
 literary blasphemer right who said that woman 
 would be the last thing to be civilized? 
 
 May 12. 
 
 We linger long over our newspapers, which record 
 activities at home, and news from the battlefields 
 where the destiny of mankind is being decided. 
 Reports of disaster over there we meet with rising 
 courage ; reports of success with the hope that, when 
 our day of triumph comes, we may celebrate not 
 victory, but peace. 
 
 The list of casualties, which grows longer as our 
 share in the war becomes a more active one, I read 
 with sorrow and with reverence, hoping that those 
 who fell, fell willingly, knowing for what they 
 fought. For those who understood, and cared, I 
 can not count this loss of life loss; there is such a 
 thing as living your whole life in a few minutes, if 
 thereby you help save the finer hope of the world. 
 With my reverence for these boys who have won 
 life's supreme gift in their days of youth is min- 
 gled envy, envy of their opportunity and of their 
 strength to use it. 
 
 I am anything but a militarist ; I hate war and its 
 unspeakable cruelty, but I cannot help realizing, as 
 I see the splendor of the response to the great chal- 
 lenge, how little in recent decades that which is 
 deepest in human nature has been made manifest; 
 how the profounder resources of our being have 
 remained hidden and unknown. Something has 
 come to the surface that we did not realize was 
 there; I am aware of something greater and bet-
 
 A WORLD TO MEND 265 
 
 ter in our country and in the life of the majority 
 of its citizens than was apparent in the fat and 
 prosperous ante-bellum days: deeper concern for 
 inner values; lessening content with comfort and 
 mere physical well-being; aspiration toward higher 
 things and willingness to suffer for them ; a new dis- 
 interestedness, a desire to lose name and face in 
 the sum total of human welfare. The eyes of men 
 are being lit from some farther star. 
 
 How far we were from measuring up to the chal- 
 lenge when the first shock came ; how we have grown 
 in strength and in impersonality since that first 
 sense of quivering horror; what possibilities of de- 
 votion in human spirit have been revealed, I would 
 my ledger might record truthfully. 
 
 It brings us close to that enduring mystery, the 
 ministry of pain in our lives. There is no use of 
 putting down words; it is too deep to fathom, yet 
 one's thought reaches out to days when, in peace 
 also, the soul of our country will be awakened and 
 alert, no longer "Fit but to be led by pain." 
 
 May 25. 
 
 Billions Brown is here again ; we approached each 
 other to-day each with a white flag; the last time 
 we talked we were at such odds about Katharine 
 that we parted not wholly friends. 
 
 His white flag was very white indeed; I admired 
 him as he unfurled it and held it resolutely aloft. 
 He gave me news of Katharine; she was working 
 very hard, possibly to the detriment of her health; 
 though Billions poohed and pshawed over the folly 
 of it I could see that he was glowing with such pride 
 as never possessed him before. Katharine writes to
 
 266 A WORLD TO MEND 
 
 him faithfully every week, though the letters were 
 often long delayed. 
 
 He told me, a bit sheepishly, but with a twinkle 
 in his gloomy eyes, that I need not plan further to 
 share my two dollars and forty-seven cents a week 
 with Katharine; he had decided some time ago to 
 give her back her allownace, with additions. 
 
 "What could I do, with you and Katharine and 
 Mother all against me?" he asked. 
 
 "Don't forget Clare," I suggested. It was Clare 
 who told me later this afternoon the amount of this 
 allowance; Billions, who has scoffed at all war 
 charities, is sending his daughter monthly an enor- 
 mous sum to use for herself or for anybody who 
 needs it. It is enough to make an appreciable dif- 
 ference in the wretchedness of some sections of 
 northern France. 
 
 In talking with Billions I spoke casually of the 
 fact that our consumption of wheat had now de- 
 creased sixty-five per cent; he broke into angry 
 speech. The government had no right to interfere 
 with individual liberty in this way ; he had asserted 
 his independence as a citizen of the United States 
 by storing a great hoard of flour; the government 
 had confiscated it. His wrath at the memory of this 
 shook the frail walls of my little shop. Then he 
 told me, with a loud laugh, of his chef, who, one day 
 in April, came raging into Billions' library with a 
 bag of corn meal in one hand, of rye flour in the 
 other, and asked, 
 
 "What do you want me to do with this peeg 
 food?" 
 
 "Let it rot," said Billions. And the chef obeyed. 
 
 Here Billions and I took to the trenches again
 
 A WORLD TO MEND 267 
 
 and carried on a war of words, going valiantly over 
 the top more than once. Who is victor is often hard 
 to say in this trench warfare, but I naturally thought 
 it was I. Have I not right on my side? 
 
 June 9. 
 
 The solemn summer days move on, from their 
 dawning over the gray sea to their ending in the 
 green west, where the sun goes down behind the 
 pines. All through the anguish of this struggle, man 
 against man, all through this new and deeper 
 brotherhood, shoulder to shoulder, in profound suf- 
 fering, I hear the voice of the coming era, singing 
 great promises for the future. 
 
 There is an awful simplicity in this moment ; the 
 things that matter are few and very great. Right 
 seems more right than it used to, and wrong more 
 wrong, for the relationship of man to man is re- 
 vealed as unfathomably deep, deeper than we knew. 
 How far away and unthinkable are those old mo- 
 ments of amusement at the peculiarities of human 
 beings, that interest in life as a spectacle! How 
 far that cool analysis of idiosyncrasies, failings, that 
 detached character study in which we used to de- 
 light, that world of which Henry James was the 
 admired interpreter. 
 
 My neighbor's failing is now, in some deep sense, 
 my own ; we have joined hands with humanity ; we 
 are part and parcel with those whose lives we share. 
 We can no longer stand aside and merely study our 
 fellow men; if they have failings they must needs 
 make good, and we must share the making; we are 
 one with our fellows in this awful hour, and, please 
 God, hereafter. Clever or not, gifted or not, stupid,
 
 268 A WORLD TO MEND 
 
 brave, or full of fear, they are our brothers. Noth- 
 ing seems to matter save that we stand shoulder to 
 shoulder, trying to keep the line; save that we all 
 remember that we fight for humanity. What great 
 foreshadowing we now discern, through deepened 
 sense of kinship, of a greater nation yet to be ! 
 
 June 25. 
 
 Billions drives about Mataquoit, or strolls over 
 his vast estate with a more and more puzzled look 
 upon his face. Such an expression have I seen on the 
 face of a boy whose kite has vanished in a high wind, 
 and who stands gazing at the string. Billions' world 
 has blown clear away, and he still clutches vainly 
 the broken string. 
 
 He joins now and then the symposiums in my 
 shop, where, even in June, we have an open fire if 
 the evening is chilly, symposiums where we try to 
 rebuild the world. He often looks puzzled. This 
 framing of a perfect world is indeed a task ; even the 
 Creator has not yet succeeded in that, when you 
 come to think of it. 
 
 All over the country, from Florida to Oregon, 
 the patriotic movement toward greater production 
 is on; from sea to sea, the embattled farmers, with 
 their embattled daughters, dig, hoe, and rake, try- 
 ing to meet with peas, beans, potatoes and a hundred 
 other growing things the threatened famine of the 
 world. 
 
 Billions' younger daughter, Clare, is out in one 
 of the fields on his estate, hoeing, in khaki trousers. 
 She, whose mother never touched anything rougher 
 than finest lawn or softest velvet, never lifted a 
 finger to perform the slightest useful task, is working
 
 A WOULD TO MEND 269 
 
 like a farmer's son from early morning until late 
 afternoon. The young truly have seen a vision. 
 
 Billions, who disapproves, who forbade her, un- 
 availingly, to do this, stands often by the fence, in 
 his uncomfortable elegance of attire, looking on 
 and scowling. But I know that, even if he has not 
 wakened to the need of the hour, the old free days 
 of his boyhood are astir in him; I know that he 
 envies Clare that khaki suit. 
 
 As I passed this afternoon, Clare looked up and 
 grinned at me, but she did not stop her work: I 
 ought to add that I think she winked. The world 
 is hungry ; the young heiress hoes corn ; throughout 
 the country maidens and young boys are raising a 
 fairer crop than they know. 
 
 July 4. 
 
 On this day which is being celebrated the world 
 over as commemorating a definite step outward and 
 upward in the history of the human race, a radical 
 journal, whose title claims prophecy for the future, 
 whose motto claims Christianity, has been put into 
 my hands. Its weak violence dismays me ; it attacks 
 our government, our institutions, at every point ; it 
 builds up nowhere. It is but one of many publica- 
 tions of the kind throughout the country, produced 
 and supported not only by aliens, but by descend- 
 ants of American citizens, who thus dishonor their 
 forbears. 
 
 The consciences of free men should forbid such 
 snarling utterances ; the weak cry out and denounce 
 because they are weak; the strong lend a hand. 
 Any man who sets his face toward the smallest task 
 of construction I honor, minute though it may be,
 
 270 A WORLD TO MEND 
 
 but my heart is too sore with the world's great agony 
 to bear with patience this petty carping, coming 
 like stings upon an open wound. 
 
 I have no defense to make of many aspects of 
 the present state of things here in America; there 
 has been great abuse of individual opportunity ; our 
 government has not at all points shown either omnis- 
 cience or omnipotence, such as is claimed for the 
 paper schemes outlined by the ultra radicals of to- 
 day. But to declare a government wholly bad be- 
 cause of grave sins and shortcomings is to deny the 
 possibility of government among men, for as long 
 as men fall short of perfection, governments will 
 fall short of perfection. I have not, if I dare sug- 
 gest it, noted among the anarchists and extreme 
 radicals that passion for perfection of character 
 which alone could ensure permanent success for their 
 plans of rule, and I find difficulty in sharing their 
 belief in the adequacy of that rule, as an ultimate 
 solution of the human problem. 
 
 The gist of my thought about the matter is that 
 it is for the real sons and daughters of America to 
 admit the existence of present abuses and to find 
 a way of righting them. Our past experience in 
 freedom ought to have brought us to a point where 
 we can get on without red revolution; we shall do 
 better in evolution than in revolution ; and after all, 
 evolution seems to be nature's way. 
 
 July 10. 
 
 It would make the asset side of my ledger far 
 too long to record there all that has been done in 
 Mataquoit in behalf of a suffering world. The 
 bean vines of Joe Hincks bear testimony to a new
 
 A WORLD TO MEND 271 
 
 sense of international relations, as do the cabbages 
 of Enoch Ames, the truckman, and the patriotic 
 potatoes of the Widow Frayne, for even she has 
 felt the breath of a new era astir in her garden 
 patch. Old Madame Strong on the hill has risen 
 to heights of patriotism; her wakened spirit took 
 the form of summer squashes. She could not work 
 herself, but she dispensed with the services of her 
 maid that the latter might make a garden. Clare, un- 
 abashed, is peddling from town to town, in a rickety 
 Ford belonging to a girl of her acquaintance, the 
 peas and lettuce and other vegetables that she has 
 raised. To Billions' insistent offers of unlimited 
 funds for contribution she replies by a firm smile, 
 her grandmother's smile; she wants to earn some- 
 thing. Her short khaki skirt and high tan boots, 
 both somewhat dusty, her brown, resolute, winsome 
 face under a flapping straw hat bring great pleasure 
 to Tim and me, but anguish to Billions. I am sorry 
 for him but cannot help; these birth throes of a 
 greater world must be endured. 
 
 The Red Cross rooms are piled high with gar- 
 ments and with bandages; sweaters and socks in- 
 numerable are being knit by the women of the 
 town; even old Nicholas Means, a retired sea cap- 
 tain, has knit two pairs of socks for the soldiers. 
 Why could he do nothing in times of peace except 
 fuddle himself with something that intoxicates? 
 What it was I can not say ; this is the State of Maine. 
 
 Old lady Simms has actually made and contrib- 
 uted half a dozen shirts, all stitched by hand: how 
 she saved money to purchase the material for them 
 nobody knows. Even old Joshua Ridgeway, though 
 he has not raised vegetables for his fellows or knit
 
 272 A WORLD TO MEND 
 
 socks, has placed two considerable sums of money 
 in my hands for Red Cross use. Where have his 
 patriotism, his humanity, been summering all these 
 years? And Wallace, but no ledger could sum 
 up all that Wallace has done and is doing. 
 
 People rush at this crisis to give of their sub- 
 stance, their time, their strength. So many are the 
 national generosities that I am beginning to realize 
 that our engrossment with material things was not 
 so real as it seemed. The great majority were doubt- 
 less absorbed in these things because they saw 
 nothing better ; it was but a thin surface crust, this 
 absorption, concealing depths which no man knew.
 
 XXXI 
 
 July 15. 
 
 Letters from Jack and Katharine come at rare 
 intervals, lending a glory to my baked beans, suf- 
 fusing fish cakes with a radiance not their own, 
 lingering with a kind of light round every bit of 
 leather in my shop. Not that they say anything 
 extraordinary; they are severely brief, business-like, 
 and practical. Jack tells me about his dugout; 
 about going over the top and coming back un- 
 scathed; and adds that the tutoring I gave him in 
 cobbling has stood him in good stead, as he has 
 mended his own boots more than once. Katharine 
 writes about the hospital beds, with mattresses not 
 as comfortable as she could wish suffering men to 
 have; about the endless stream of wounded; about 
 endless operations, with constant anaesthetizing. 
 This giving of anaesthetics is her chief work. 
 Though both economize words, they give me some 
 glimpses of life over there, of our boys marching 
 through French villages and along French highways, 
 under overhanging trees ; of children running out to 
 see and cheering the long lines of American sol- 
 diers; of gray-haired men and women at cottage 
 doors watching through dim eyes the hosts of their 
 deliverers. 
 
 There is not a word in the letters of either about 
 their feelings, scarcely a word about themselves,
 
 274 A WORLD TO MEND 
 
 except as a pair of eyes seeing things, a pair of hands 
 doing things. I have been wont to deplore the 
 lack of vocabulary of the young of the present day ; 
 they seem to have at their command a single ad- 
 jective, a phrase or two at best; perhaps, after all, 
 it is a good thing; their inarticulateness may be 
 the measure of their practical preoccupation with 
 the matter in hand. 
 
 Jack is threatening to send home a little French 
 orphan, a lad he found in an abandoned, ruined 
 village, for his parents to look after. I do not feel 
 sure that this would do; better send him to Tim 
 and me, for we are beginning to understand the 
 right way to make a citizen of him and other lads. 
 
 Not only in reading letters from those whose 
 friendship I hold, but in reading newspaper ac- 
 counts of the deeds of youth of my own and other 
 countries my heart swells in pride. Such glory of 
 human courage and devotion must make our earth 
 shine out as more than a star among stars. 
 
 In the actual sense of human brotherhood, not 
 as a theory, a phrase, but a loyal companionship 
 in life and in death; in the generous impersonality 
 shown in this war; in its vast sacrifice, there is 
 foundation and firm foundation for such a civiliza- 
 tion as the world has never seen, a something for 
 which a better word than mere inadequate "civiliza- 
 tion" must be discovered. Men do not seek glory 
 in this war, do not ask rewards, do not try to attain 
 individual distinction. In this very subordination 
 of the personal demand, its annihilation, is a basis 
 for an uplifted world-wide democracy where every 
 man's concern shall be res publica. 
 
 No defeat on western front or Italian front, no
 
 A WORLD TO MEND 275 
 
 defection in Russia can hinder its coming to pass. 
 For the eyes of men have seen it in vision, and the 
 future is secure; it is builded on the souls of men, 
 and the souls of men who hope like this can not 
 be overthrown; it is builded on the one lasting 
 foundation, sacrifice. So Christianity, the individ- 
 ual faith, slips into democracy, a creed becoming 
 manifest in the rule of nations; it is a wonderful 
 thing, at my age, to feel this great thing begin to 
 come to pass. 
 
 July 23. 
 
 Spent the latter part of the afternoon hoeing my 
 bean patch, for I also am a patriot. Candor com- 
 pels me to confess that my beans are not particu- 
 larly good beans; the vines are not half as high as 
 those of Joe Hincks, my policeman friend. But, 
 excelsior ! 
 
 The best thing about my garden patch is that it 
 now and then raises an idea, not necessarily my 
 own. With cunning forethought I chose a spot not 
 far from the highway, where my neighbors pass up 
 and down. On that bit of fence, picket though it 
 be, have leaned the brains and brawn of Mataquoit, 
 as neighbor after neighbor has there stopped to dis- 
 cuss the world war, and the world future, and the 
 weather. Topics of international importance have 
 been turned over there with my hoe; topics of 
 local importance have here come up not only for 
 discussion but for settlement. Was I not recently 
 made a selectman of Mataquoit? 
 
 Wallace stopped for a few minutes to discuss 
 ways and means of increasing our Red Cross fund; 
 he looks thinner, older than when I first saw him;
 
 276 A WORLD TO MEND 
 
 the war is telling on this man who suffers in other 
 people's suffering as he does not in his own. 
 
 After he went, old Mrs. Martin came hurrying 
 along, with terror quivering in the ancient feathers 
 of her rusty bonnet. A report had reached her of 
 German submarines off the coast of Cape Cod and 
 of vessels sunk there; what could we do in case of 
 attack? Perhaps it is but natural that this obscure 
 town on the Maine coast should seem to its inhabi- 
 tants the goal of the Kaiser's ambition ; I suggested 
 all that I could in the way of comfort: that Mata- 
 quoit could not be sunk by torpedo; that a small 
 party of German soldiers would hardly land in the 
 midst of a large hostile population. She refused to 
 be reassured, but hurried on, reminding me that I 
 should be peculiarly exposed in my hut so near the 
 sea. I admitted it. 
 
 In this garden, given over not only to vegetables 
 but to ideas, the ideas are, on the whole, better 
 than the vegetables. If my patriotic crop is a bit 
 different from those of my neighbors, I trust that it 
 brings as great a promise of sustenance and of seed 
 for the future. Here, with the help of two of my 
 young fellow townsmen, who are disaffected in the 
 matter of wage, I have raised a commendable profit- 
 sharing scheme, to be applied in all industries for 
 the contentment of the laboring man; to be en- 
 forced by the Federal Government through an inter- 
 state commission if necessary. Our only point of 
 difference is that it shall be everywhere a profit- 
 and-loss sharing scheme; this idea that a rule can 
 and should work two ways perplexes my young 
 friends, who scowl and shake their heads over it. 
 being obsessed by the single vision of their kind of
 
 A WORLD TO MEND 277 
 
 a rosy future with high mounting wages, and no 
 risks, no uncertainties for them. We have talked 
 much, too, of the possibility of breaking up our 
 present political parties, whose differentiation has 
 now become more a matter of prejudice than of 
 principle, so that one finds oneself in an embarrass- 
 ing predicament when asked by a foreigner to ex- 
 plain the essential differences between a Democrat 
 and a Republican. Our presidential campaigns are 
 marked by more and more hasty improvisation of 
 points at issue, and become more and more a fight 
 between men than a struggle between contrasting 
 articles of political faith. If we could but have a 
 Conservative party, whose chief concern should- be 
 to see that that which is best in our present insti- 
 tutions should be preserved, and a Liberal party 
 whose chief concern should be to advocate changes 
 in our theory and practice of government, that 
 might make for betterment; we might perhaps find 
 out the path of wisdom wherein the nation could 
 walk in safety and in honor. Fighting under the 
 radical wing of the Liberal party, labor, and all 
 modern theorists could, in endless speech-making, 
 blow off steam which now, in confinement, tends 
 toward explosion. 
 
 In my leisurely hoeing and raking, many a paral- 
 lel suggests itself between gardens and government. 
 When old Joshua Ridgway speaks of our Constitu- 
 tion as a something fixed once and forever, and 
 never to be altered; when the radical young clerk 
 in Rankin's drug store alludes to it as a set of dead 
 formulae, ready to be thrown away, it is my privilege 
 to respond that our Constitution is alive and capable 
 of endless growth, through amendment, so that it
 
 278 A WORLD TO MEND 
 
 may shape itself to the widening destiny of a grow- 
 ing people. It is difficult to convince old Joshua 
 that the deepest sacredness of this charter of our 
 liberties lies in the fact that it can be changed to 
 meet new need, as it is to convince my young friend, 
 the clerk, that our government is still in the making. 
 Digging about the roots of my corn, I confess to 
 myself and to the rustling leaves that if I and my 
 fellows had shown ourselves aware of the vital 
 greatness of our Constitution, if we had been con- 
 scious of our government as a living something, to 
 which we, as citizens, organic factors, contributed, 
 there would be among us fewer disaffected young 
 radical men without a country. Billions Brown, 
 Asa Trimmer, our successful lawyer, Fred Stone, 
 our real estate magnate, and I, with many others, 
 through what sense of higher values, through what 
 efforts of will have we tried to make good the pos- 
 sibilities of development inherent in our present 
 scheme of rule? Have we not rather, forgetting 
 that nature never pauses, conceived our govern- 
 ment as a something settled once and forever, put 
 about us as a protecting wall to safeguard us and 
 our interests, a something to complain about, to 
 criticize with amused smiles? That it is an organic 
 body, with roots deep down in our natures, for 
 whose well being and growth we are individually 
 responsible, has never occurred to most of us. 
 
 August 5. 
 
 The fourth year of the war draws to its close, and 
 the horror moves on, through the tragic steps of 
 the great spring drive and a fresh Armenian 
 massacre, ten thousand added to the two millions
 
 A WORLD TO MEND 279 
 
 already slain and starved; through continued 
 struggle on the western front, and recent success 
 that may or may not mean permanent gain. Was 
 Jack in this last advance, I wonder? I wait anxiously 
 to know. The long war tension deepens, to a point 
 where it is well-nigh unendurable. How can one 
 think in a world like this; how write; how speak? 
 All forms of writing break under the strain; all 
 words become as if silent, non-existent, before this 
 awful coming into human life of that which makes 
 every hill a Calvary, and every field a Holy Sep- 
 ulchre where those have been laid who have died 
 that the world might go free. 
 
 How shall words that sufficed before August, 
 1914, meet our need now? 
 
 The soldiers, they tell us, are silent, after the 
 noise and crash and hell of sound. Those who write 
 of the look of men who have fought in this war 
 speak in terms that recall Browning's Lazarus. 
 They seem to be describing men who have been 
 through some vast and terrible experience that lan- 
 guage cannot reach ; men who no longer live in this 
 world, but judge by other standards than ours, have 
 other measures of life and action., We who do not 
 share, who live in safety on the far edge, watching 
 from a distance Golgotha, what right have we to 
 speak? Or, for that matter, live, when others die 
 that we may? 
 
 What this means to the sons of America we know 
 in part from their suffering and their glory, shown 
 in their flight into the air, their courage under 
 water, and their brave graves in France. The letters 
 from young soldiers printed from time to time in 
 the papers make one hold one's breath because of
 
 280 A WORLD TO MEND 
 
 the simplicity of the courage expressed, the sure- 
 ness of its aim: "If I go out, know that I was 
 game," is the burden of many a mesage. These 
 letters seem utterly different from anything of 
 which the young would have 1 been capable five years 
 ago, in this thought of death, not as a something 
 terrible, far-off, to be dreaded through a cautious 
 lifetime, but as something near, perhaps the next 
 step of achievement. 
 
 There is in the letters no demand except for a 
 bit of chocolate or tobacco, some trivial thing whose 
 sending will bring pleasure to the giver. Is this 
 the world which, of late years, has had its mind and 
 soul concentrated on the thought of comfort and of 
 health at any cost? From the guarded, self- 
 centered, germ-searching rays of a few years ago 
 they go out into this hell, unflinching in the face 
 of physical annihilation such as the world has never 
 seen. And their bodies, which they have been 
 taught to regard as all, are as nothing; the faith 
 for which they die, or, worse, suffer mutilation, is 
 all. 
 
 The soul, evidently, has survived even this 
 modern era, with its obsession regarding the world 
 of matter, its disintegrating analysis, its lack of 
 vision. 
 
 Reports from American hospitals in France, as 
 from other hospitals, record no murmurings or com- 
 plaints, no protest against mutilation, suffering, on- 
 coming death, only, some immense unexpressed 
 desire to help, to offer all in the great cause. Sol- 
 diers and civilians alike in France, England, Italy 
 suffer utmost hardship, know hunger, deprivation, 
 sorrow, saying only: "I am content."
 
 A WORLD TO MEND 281 
 
 Thinking of the way of ancient faiths, with their 
 sacrifice of chosen victims, one holds one's breath to 
 see whole nations move up the Via Sacra, the Via 
 Dolorosa, to sacrifice themselves. Fighting Aus- 
 tralian, Englishman, Canadian, American go out, 
 in supreme surrender, million by million, risking all, 
 for what? That all men may have a chance, may go 
 free, as they are free. Swearing, sinning doubtless, 
 forgetting often the highest part of the high aim, 
 they still are moved by some immense inner force, 
 they give in willingness all for something which 
 means for them no outer gain, only utter loss, of 
 things external. 
 
 Can it be that the very soul of Christian faith 
 has made undreamed advance, creeping into the 
 hearts of believers and unbelievers the world over, 
 conquering the world without our knowing it, as 
 we have in the past delicately weighed and balanced 
 doctrine, assertion, intellectual question? He who 
 dies, dies now on Calvary, Christian to the great 
 heart of him, whatever may be on his lips. Scoffer 
 and believer march in step to willing sacrificial 
 death. Have doubter, denier, the unthinking found, 
 while the Christian world was troubling itself over 
 theologies, the one simple and sufficient truth that 
 Christianity is a life, not a theory, a life, perhaps 
 death, for others? Christ knew always. 
 
 Through the shock and the horror of resurgent 
 paganism, through all the mist, this great fact of 
 all but universal, glad sacrifice shines out. Perhaps 
 the great challenge has come to make the world 
 aware how greatly it had become Christian, not 
 knowing; Christian, with denial on its lips, but love 
 in its heart, and willing surrender of life for it. The
 
 282 A WORLD TO MEND 
 
 world insisted upon interpreting Christianity as an 
 absolute philosophy or creed; itself its own witness, 
 it has made itself manifest as inner vitality, men 
 not knowing. We are digging deep these days, be- 
 low our doubts, below our new-found superficial 
 knowledge, into the deep, rich, hidden vein of very 
 life. 
 
 August 10. 
 
 List upon list of those dead and wounded; loss 
 upon loss; it often seems too much to bear. It is 
 as if life were just bringing us forth ; as if we were 
 being born, through pain and suffering and awful 
 horror, in the travail of some mighty mother; and 
 all our past, with its loves and its aspiration and its 
 achievements, is lost in wonder as to whether we 
 shall be worth her anguish. Our eyes are strained in 
 trying to read the mighty purpose on her forehead ; 
 her eyes we cannot see, for they are closed and 
 blind with pain. 
 
 Will they unclose and reveal some undreamed 
 beauty, of high faith and piercing insight, aim, 
 great as the suffering endured; hope equal to the 
 agony; joy, deep as only the joy can be that has 
 known anguish, that deepest joy of all, of bring- 
 ing life to birth? 
 
 The past seems unimportant ; shall we who share 
 life's most awful hour remember aught of what we 
 did or what we were? Only, strain every nerve and 
 fiber; try to let every feeling quicken, and to face 
 every slightest flame of mental energy, that we may 
 perhaps somewhat understand, it may be even act, 
 do something of the high behest of earth's most 
 crucial moment.
 
 A WORLD TO MEND 283 
 
 Our failures matter as little as our small achieve- 
 ments; all hopes and aims held heretofore, whether 
 gained or lost, are small and trivial as compared 
 with the great needs of this moment. If we have 
 failed and it is ebb tide of aspiration and endeavor 
 with us, this moment may be the turning point ; we 
 may come on again with swelling intensity of pur- 
 pose to a new and farther mark on the shore. Per- 
 haps all life, all achievement, all civilization is even 
 now thus falling, falling, to rise higher than ever 
 before. It is the stress of great storm with us now ; 
 will high tide, and clear weather, and free winds 
 come?
 
 XXXII 
 
 August 14. 
 
 I see Jack's father and mother now and then; 
 last week they showed me a German helmet which 
 their son had sent. For those who disapprove of 
 fighting they take great pride in one boy's valor 
 in fight; they go over again and again all the de- 
 tails he has given in his letters; the trench raid; 
 the slight wound, and the three days in "blighty." 
 Their reasoning seems to be that fighting is right 
 now that Jack is doing it. To-day I met Mrs. Sands 
 in a state of great excitement; Jack has received 
 some decoration, what she could not tell me. He 
 had not written about it, of course; another boy 
 of Mataquoit had announced the fact on a picture 
 post card, somewhat blotted. 
 
 I confess to my ledger, but not to Mrs. Sands, a 
 growing, personal anxiety in the face of the extended 
 operations among our troops and our apparently suc- 
 cessful offensive. We do not know whether Jack is 
 back at his post; was that wound really as slight 
 as was reported? 
 
 August 18. 
 
 Headlines proclaim the complete success of Foch's 
 counter-offensive; the Germans are swept back all 
 along the line. The Americans have covered them- 
 selves with real glory, for their initiative, their 
 courage, their inability to discover what surrender
 
 A WORLD TO MEND 285 
 
 means, or what caution means; to-day's paper says 
 that two million, six hundred thousand American 
 soldiers are in France. 
 
 As one reads, on these days of tragic anniversary, 
 the account how full of dramatic irony! of 
 the Germans' continued retreat in the Marne sector, 
 where they advanced so triumphantly four years 
 ago, as one holds one's breath in presence of a hope, 
 too great for any words, that the tide has turned, 
 one realizes that, unless this mean far more than the 
 retreat of the Germans, it is nothing; it must mean 
 the ultimate retreat of the imperialistic idea, of 
 man's belief in force, the retreat of war itself. 
 
 September 3. 
 
 A brief letter from Jack, who writes that he is all 
 right, quite well, and physically fit, gladdened my 
 heart to-day. He tells of a great service of thanks- 
 giving held in Amiens Cathedral on August fifteenth, 
 to celebrate the deliverance from the Germans. 
 There was a choir of French soldiers; the altar was 
 surrounded by the red, white, and blue flags of Great 
 Britain, France, and the United States. Jack could 
 characterize it only by the one meager adjective of 
 his generation; I do not indeed doubt that this 
 spectacle was "great"; and I would I might have 
 seen and heard so much of hope for the future in 
 this spot where carven stone and deep stained glass 
 perpetuate through beauty the sacred tradition of 
 the past. 
 
 That music of which he wrote, pealing out for 
 victory through the wonderful Gothic arches of that 
 cathedral, laid strong hold upon my imagination 
 and mingled in my thought with the bell which I
 
 286 A WORLD TO MEND 
 
 heard tolling through the fog for days in early 
 August, 1914, and which has never been wholly out 
 of my ears in all the months between. That was a 
 sound as of a passing bell, knelling the death of an 
 era; what did it toll out, as it tolled out a period? 
 Dare I think of this in terms of my hope? 
 
 The selfishness, self-centeredness, unconcern of us 
 all, whether intellectual and spiritual, or material; 
 the unabashed wealth, the luxury of the few, which 
 belies our America, and misleads the working man 
 into forgetting that the vast majority of people of 
 the country are, like himself, workers. 
 
 Much, I hope, of the sensational labor and 
 pseudo-labor agitation, much of the theoretical 
 side of the "wrongs-of-the-poor-working-man" prop- 
 aganda. The last few months must have proved to 
 many people that toil is good ; must have suggested 
 many deeper things than a sense of wrongs, notably, 
 the joy of helping. Would that the professional 
 agitator could be rung out, and that the working 
 man might be permitted to use that most precious 
 of his possessions, his common sense. 
 
 Would that, with the walking delegate, might be 
 rung out the half charlatan economist, who teaches 
 the mischievous doctrine that character is wholly the 
 result of economic conditions. This mechanistic 
 conception of man as formed in personality and de- 
 termined in destiny by forces external to himself 
 has wrought untold havoc in the world, has started 
 a subtle inner disintegration of millions of men. 
 Carried to its logical results, it means intellectual, 
 spiritual, moral death; man is to a far greater ex- 
 tent than he dreams to-day the result of his own 
 endeavor.
 
 A WORLD TO MEND 287 
 
 So may vanish also the materialism of high and 
 low, of the masses and the classes, the naive trust 
 in wealth, in prosperity as the goal of endeavor; our 
 smug confidence in mechanical and material treas- 
 ures, that growing faith in externals which marked 
 the whole preceding period ; all that ignoring of the 
 inner life, and over-emphasis on the body, that 
 growing tendency toward belief in the laws of physi- 
 cal progress as the only valid laws, which has ruled 
 modern life and thought. 
 
 That passing bell in my memory rings all too 
 slowly to ring out all that I would like to see go: 
 that fine-wordiness of the mere talking idealist, the 
 lofty pretension, unbacked by deed, the phrase- 
 mongering of the higher life. Those who go out to 
 death uncomplainingly, and with no appeal to us 
 for pity or for admiration, have rebuked us into 
 silence. Men and women must act, must be, not 
 merely talk, in the era that is coming. Would that 
 the knell could sound of our "isms" and mists of 
 thought, our current novelties of faith and aspira- 
 tion, our passion for the newest, the latest, the most 
 astonishing thing in beliefs, preferably occult; also, 
 of all our bizarre art that springs from the eccentric, 
 the desire to startle, all speaking irrationalism in 
 the world of creative activity, resting upon a some- 
 thing unbalanced, not wholy sane in human nature. 
 With it may go also art of the merely analytical 
 type, signifying a clever dissecting of human nature, 
 with no profound imaginative insight, no deep sym- 
 pathetic concern. 
 
 Through all my eager thought of what must go 
 sounds the music of that vast cathedral, pealing out 
 victory; may it prove the melody of life to be,
 
 288 A WORLD TO MEND 
 
 the "still sad music of humanity." May it bring 
 swiftly the righting of every real industrial wrong, 
 in a world where all men shall work to the utmost 
 at their different posts; where shall reign such a 
 sense of responsibility of man for man as never be- 
 fore has been known. May the music of a great and 
 simple faith run through our lives, with the two 
 great and sufficing notes sounding therein : belief in 
 the universe as a spiritual universe ; in Christ's way 
 of sacrifice as the one way of holiness. And may the 
 art of that new world be simple, fundamental as its 
 civic and its religious beliefs, touching the common 
 chords of love and faith and hope. 
 
 September 10. 
 
 All summer Billions has remained incorrigible, 
 while every one else, from the old fisherman on 
 Hawk's Island to Sam Hicks, the odd-job man, has 
 been doing his bit. Billions has steadily and ob- 
 stinately refused to do anything for the war and 
 the war sufferers, at least openly. As much of his 
 wealth as could flow through Katharine's hands has 
 evidently gone to the relief of suffering over there; 
 she wrote me not long since that she was perplexed 
 to know how to dispose of the vast sums that were 
 coming to her. Sending her huge drafts perhaps 
 brings to Billions a pale shadow of the satisfaction 
 to which he looked forward all his life; in a sense 
 he is lavishing his wealth on Katharine. 
 
 But he walks about in a loneliness as great as if 
 he were the sole inhabitant of the world, with one 
 of his daughters in khaki trousers, one in Red Cross 
 uniform, and all the effort of his life gone for 
 naught. His whole striving has been to give them
 
 A WORLD TO MEND 289 
 
 a vast heritage; it is piled high, but they are curi- 
 ously unaware of it, living in a world he does not 
 know. 
 
 He remains ostentatiously idle, though there is 
 no one to play with him; ostentatiously over- 
 dressed, though none have time to look at his 
 clothes; and, though he is personally moderate, 
 there is a surfeit of food upon his table. 
 
 To hear him on the subject of the income tax 
 is sulphurous; he told me in a rage the amount he 
 is to pay this year. I openly rejoiced; he must help 
 clothe our soldiers whether he will or no. 
 
 But within the past week a change has come 
 over him : the hospital in which Katharine has been 
 working was bombed by a German aeroplane; a 
 wounded soldier, to whom she was attending, was 
 killed before her eyes; a splinter lodged in Katha- 
 rine's shoulder, causing a wound painful but not 
 dangerous. 
 
 Billions is furious, with a cold, white fury that 
 bodes ill for the Germans. Whether it was the 
 cowardice of a deliberate attack on wounded men, 
 or whether it was because his own flesh and blood 
 had been injured, I do not know, but he has made 
 a vast contribution to our local war fund, in his 
 own name, has sent another to New York, and has. 
 ordered that a huge shipment of gasoline shall be 
 sent to France from one of his refineries, for motor- 
 truck purposes, the moving of arms and men. 
 
 Naturally I too am stung to the quick by the 
 thought of Katharine's suffering, but I wish that I 
 could fathom or understand this selfishness that 
 protects from all sense of hurt until one's own are 
 hurt.
 
 290 A WORLD TO MEND 
 
 September 17. 
 
 Sitting on the bridge over the tidal river this 
 afternoon, as the tide came in, I decided that I am 
 one hundred and one per cent American. 
 
 My pride is not mere pride in the successful mili- 
 tary victory of July and August; it is joy in the 
 great task undertaken, one never before undertaken 
 by people or nation. For in all the recorded history 
 of the human race, through all time, there is no 
 single event more important than this, the crossing 
 of two million and more men of a free, peace-loving 
 country, to fight, in a battle that means for them 
 and for America, no gain, only loss, and sorrow, 
 and bitter wounds, and death, that other men may 
 go free. And in all recorded history there is nothing 
 more significant than the self-denial in the matter 
 of food from end to end of America, much of it 
 voluntary, that Europe might be fed. 
 
 A new era is ushered in, one nation voluntarily 
 taking upon itself the burden of others; is it the 
 beginning of a time when national ethics will rise 
 to the height of individual ethics and perhaps be- 
 yond? 
 
 My culture-doubts vanish; so also my fear lest 
 the great race-amalgamation stamp out our in- 
 herited national characteristics. All have responded 
 equally to the. challenge ; all clamor for a share of 
 the great and sacred work. I am proud, proud to 
 the point of pain of being an American citizen: 
 with bowed head I consecrate myself and the rest 
 of my days to the task. 
 
 No past failure or present menace must deprive 
 us of a sense of the greatness of our heritage. We 
 haVe risen to a great moment; have taken upon
 
 A WORLD TO MEND 291 
 
 ourselves great international duties; the high sig- 
 nificance of this hour we must not lose, nor ever 
 fail in the obligation it has laid upon us. 
 
 November 11. 
 
 The great news, the greatest news on earth, un- 
 contradicted as yet, of peace. 
 
 November 14. 
 
 I wander by the brown salt marshes where, in 
 and out, the water sparkles with brighter gleam 
 than of old. . . . Tim barks more joyously than 
 I have ever heard him. . . . Peace, incredible 
 peace. . . . One breathes differently since No- 
 vember eleventh. Not being where I can share 
 the service of thanksgiving in a great cathedral, I 
 seek my altar out of doors, and listen to the thunder 
 of the sea. 
 
 I am beginning to be able to think again; during 
 the days since the great news came I have done 
 little but walk, or cobble with as great intensity 
 as if it were for me to put the broken world to- 
 gether and mend it, with strong waxed thread. At 
 first I think I was bewildered by the silence of the 
 guns, though it was with the soul's ear only that 
 I have heard them. 
 
 The country from end to end is celebrating vic- 
 tory; victory of what? of military might, or of 
 that hope of the world which we have chosen to 
 call democracy. The country has been deeply 
 stirred and has awakened, but to what of lasting 
 import has it awakened? Will the passion of our 
 great effort animate our future, or will it waste 
 itself in futile shouts, from a hundred and ten
 
 292 A WORLD TO MEND 
 
 million throats of, "We won the war." As the lads 
 come home, are they coming to the old America, 
 of triumphant outer progress, of individual enter- 
 prise, and laissez-faire as regards the general wel- 
 fare, or to an America making good in all that our 
 forefathers hoped and planned and prayed for, all 
 that we, building on their foundation, have added 
 to their hope? 
 
 The new questioning as to the relation of man 
 to man must be worked out better than it has ever 
 been, worked out, not merely thought out. No old 
 answer will suffice. If our America is to go on, it 
 must be America on a higher spiral.
 
 XXXIII 
 
 November 17. 
 
 The tension of the war situation has been re- 
 lieved, and now follow long empty days wherein 
 creeping anxieties, suppressed during the time 
 when our attention was focused on the western 
 front, become manifest. The exultation of No- 
 vember H gives way to subtler misgivings of de- 
 feat, and a menace which has long been at the back 
 of my mind threatens openly. Through all the 
 months while Russia has been boiling up like a 
 seething cauldron I have been waiting, with sus- 
 pended judgment, for information that would en- 
 able me to form a decisive opinion regarding this 
 new power of Bolshevism. 
 
 Last autumn ended that miracle of a peaceful 
 revolution, almost without bloodshed, which, in 
 the spring of 1917, had astonished the world with 
 its swift and happy overthrow of the tyranny of 
 centuries, its swift inauguration of a new era. The 
 reports that have come since then, both of destruc- 
 tion and of construction on the part of this new 
 and constantly growing power, open corridors of 
 thought down which one almost fears to tread. 
 They tell the story of contemporary Russia as of 
 one long welter of blood ; the populace, the so-called 
 "people," are massacring the bourgeois; a century 
 ago in France it was the bourgeois who massacred
 
 294 A WORLD TO MEND 
 
 the nobility; from what dregs of humanity will 
 arise, in another hundred years, the Caliban people 
 who will massacre the proletariat? Has progress 
 then, as at times it seems to have, the clumsy, crush- 
 ing gait of a tank, leaving death in its wake? 
 
 That grand phrase, "the rule of the people," a 
 sacred article in our creed, now takes on an un- 
 expected and sinister meaning, falling upon our 
 ears like a threat, as we face the encroaching power 
 of the lower; will this in time become the power of 
 the lowest? Now that the under dog has risen in 
 the Russian Bolshevik, and that the under dog is 
 mad, mad to wipe out all who have shown mas- 
 tery, the question as to whether he will succeed be- 
 comes the most crucial question before mankind the 
 round world over. The most terrible menace here 
 is not the war against political institutions, but the 
 war against the sacredest human instincts; if re- 
 ports be true, family life and love, religion, the only 
 enduring foundations of government, are threatened. 
 
 It is borne in upon us with appalling clearness 
 that other autocracies may follow that of ruling 
 houses; that democracy, or alleged democracy, holds 
 within itself potential utter tyranny, more devas- 
 tating than any other tyranny known ; demos, liter- 
 ally, may imply mob rule, the surging up from the 
 depths. How often here in America, whose estab- 
 lished freedom we have taken so lightly and irre- 
 sponsibly for granted, have I heard the loud voice 
 overmaster the right voice, and seen the will of the 
 people vanish before the will of the demagogue! 
 Whether Russia's present plight is due primarily to 
 the stirring up of the lowest instincts and passions, 
 or to the fact that a little coterie of self-appointed
 
 A WORLD TO MEND 295 
 
 Tsars are imposing upon the people a cruel and 
 shallow rationalistic scheme, wherein formulae of 
 progress are substituted for knowledge of those 
 characteristics of human nature that make for 
 growth, it is impossible to say. In either case, the 
 country is groaning under a narrow class rule, and 
 the imperialism of the many is substituted for the 
 imperialism of the one. It would be idle to deny 
 this menace of Bolshevism, all the world round; 
 idle to deny that we of America, who have been 
 living in the full security of the principles of 1776, 
 are threatened in that freedom of which, to tell 
 truth, we have never been wholly worthy. We have 
 serenely taken it for granted that freedom was a 
 matter settled once for all; now we face a situation 
 in which the question may be asked as to whether 
 we are to keep or lose this vast privilege to which 
 we have not lived up. In this slaughter of the 
 bourgeois the moving finger points to us, as it 
 points to our kind in other lands. Are we, how 
 are we to escape red revolution? 
 
 I disclaim prejudice; I trust that my mind is 
 open to real aspects of progress, yet I do not think 
 that the bell boy should take the place of the rector 
 of the university, or the apprentice that of the man- 
 ager of the factory, as I am told is the case in parts 
 of contemporary Russia. One reverences essential 
 man, the human being as such, yet one discerns 
 grades and shades of intellect that make men ca- 
 pable of serving their fellows by leading them. It 
 is for those who hold a liberal faith, and who have 
 a measure of intellectual and spiritual training to 
 say whether democracy shall continue to be a great 
 and increasing force making for freedom, or whether
 
 296 A WORLD TO MEND 
 
 it shall become a degraded and degrading tyranny 
 whose end is chaos. The issue is clear, as we face 
 the appalling possibility of a world without leader- 
 ship; if art, culture, fineness of life, yes, even jus- 
 tice and a sense of fair play are to be served, all who 
 have shared these gifts must go down more than 
 halfway to meet the populace in friendliness; must 
 show them their need, their lack, must help them 
 up, sternly holding before them higher ideals than 
 they can work out for themselves. The best things 
 in life never yet came from mass movement. 
 
 November 20. 
 
 Katharine writes of touching scenes in France, 
 glad village celebrations as soldiers go to their homes 
 to share with their wives and children their joy in 
 the deliverance of France; of a little ripple of 
 gayety in Paris, where uniformed figures of many 
 countries meet and greet each other with smiles. 
 War vanishes, and the feeling of relief is like that 
 when tooth and claw of wild beast are drawn from 
 shivering flesh and quivering nerves. As I read, I 
 can almost hear little shouts of laughter as the 
 French children begin again to play, and can see the 
 smiling wrinkles about the faces of the old, as 
 Jeanne and Jeannot find themselves safe again, 
 though without a roof over their heads, for the 
 end of the adventure of eighty years. 
 
 This last letter was more outspoken than any I 
 have ever had from Katharine, and it gave me 
 clearer glimpses than I have ever had of the recesses 
 of her fine nature. Under all the hurt sympathy 
 with the suffering about her is a little exultation in 
 having broken the chains that bound her, and having
 
 A WORLD TO MEND 297 
 
 won her freedom to act, to serve. She stoutly re- 
 fuses her father's cabled suggestion that she come 
 home at once; there is more than enough to do, 
 with her many patients and other individuals whom 
 she is trying to help. She is building a house for 
 an old woman who fled from her village in the Cha- 
 teau-Thierry region, with the one survivor of her 
 household, a large gray goose. Katharine discovered 
 her, spent with hunger, wandering in a field in 
 search of food, talking to the goose as if it were 
 human. The goose was performing that best of ser- 
 vices, listening what mortal could do more? 
 as her mistress poured out the story of the shelling 
 of her home: son, daughter and their three children 
 perished with the house when the bomb fell. Granny 
 was untouched because she was out feeding the 
 goose. 
 
 "Her new home is to be on the site of the old one, 
 as nearly as we can find it in the heap of rubble 
 and ashes that was the village. I am going to put 
 her in charge of four little orphans who were brought 
 to the hospital the other day. Granny sits on a 
 splintered beam and watches the foundation stones 
 of her house as they are laid by German prisoners; 
 and the goose affectionately pecks at the buttons on 
 her gown, which is rather a pity, as there are but 
 two left. You see I cannot possibly come home 
 now; there are my three tubercular soldiers who 
 must be placed where they can have care and proper 
 food; and there is a whole small hospital of blind 
 soldiers whose fate rests with me. Oh, I can't begin 
 to tell you all there is to do ! I will come back some 
 day, when I am needed there more than I am here." 
 
 I refolded Katharine's letter and sent it to Grand-
 
 298 A WORLD TO MEND 
 
 mother Brown; wisdom is justified of her grand- 
 children. 
 
 It is the moment of the young; they rise grandly 
 to its challenge; and we older folk? It is our great 
 hour, too. With as much of devotion; with less, 
 perhaps, of hope ; with fewer years in which to help 
 make good the better state for which the world is 
 striving, we face the future. 
 
 We envy the young, yet we have at this tragic 
 crisis a service that the young cannot render. Our 
 years are assets, if we count them and what they 
 have taught us aright. It is for us whose memories 
 reach back over decades of human life, who have 
 also some ripened knowledge of the history of the 
 world and its finer culture, to help bring what was 
 best in the wisdom of the past to the making of the 
 future ; to offer in like service all that has been deep- 
 est in our individual experience. It is for us to keep 
 youth from breaking faith with the past, from re- 
 linquishing the spiritual and ethical standards won 
 by our forbears in long struggle; to guard it lest it 
 fall victim to raw theory, a special menace in a 
 scientific era. To think, observe, remember ; to keep 
 a quiet mind through the turmoil ; to try quietly to 
 aid in working things out, there is our task. 
 
 It is for us to help keep alive faith in the inner 
 realities, denial of the mechanistic conception of 
 life, for us, who know from experience the falsity of 
 this conception. Of all the wisdom that we can 
 bring the young this is the supreme truth : that the 
 living will is the only enduring force in life; that 
 they are wrong who teach that all abides but in cir- 
 cumstance ; that the age-long struggle of the human 
 soul is all that counts.
 
 A WORLD TO MEND 299 
 
 November 25. 
 
 Mataquoit keeps on with many of her war activi- 
 ties, notably with one great war activity, talking. 
 Here, as elsewhere throughout the country, the story 
 is told and retold of how America won the war. 
 Local pride rises high; to listen to discussions at 
 street corner or in post office is to become almost 
 convinced that Mataquoit, single-handed, defeated 
 the hosts of the Central Powers. Old Silas Marks, 
 the hotel keeper reminds us that he prophesied the 
 very day and place in which the Germans would 
 flee before our American boys; Phil Landers, the 
 expressman, and Abraham Jencks of the rural de- 
 livery regard the outcome as in some mysterious 
 way the result of strategy and tactics recommended 
 by themselves; and Enoch Ames, the truckman, 
 nodding sagely, asks if he had not always said we 
 would "show them." 
 
 No one can be more proud than I of the glory of 
 American courage as it has been shown in these 
 hard months; stories of heroism, individual and of 
 whole companies, have poured in fast upon us. Yet 
 it is fatuous to say that we won the war. We brought 
 decisive help after four years of death struggle to 
 those who, having given all, were well-nigh spent. 
 Our eleventh-hour service is bringing us all too gen- 
 erous praise from statesmen and from populace 
 abroad, and a self-praise at home which is as foolish 
 as it is alarming. This tendency toward boastful- 
 ness is the greatest menace our country faces; our 
 conviction that we are the best and most remarkable 
 of all people, what can it lead to except defeat? 
 
 Perhaps we can keep in our democracy something 
 of the courage, the dash, the sense of team work
 
 300 A WORLD TO MEND 
 
 of our fighting battalions over there, and eliminate 
 something of our over-swift self -congratulation. 
 Even now one detects a higher note, an exultation 
 in sharing, through choice, the hard destiny of the 
 nations. Mataquoit has become more than Mata- 
 quoit in reaching out for its part of the world bur- 
 den; and if Mataquoit can rise above itself in self- 
 forgetful devotion, any place can. Two of our 
 wounded have come home, one, young Melton of 
 our hardware store, who must wear a wooden leg 
 for life, and Joe Leavitt, the postmaster's son, who 
 has lost an eye. Sorrow has come to many a home, 
 with cruel swiftness; a bride of six weeks, daughter 
 of Rankin of the drug store here, learned first from a 
 list of casualties in the local paper of the death of her 
 young husband in France. Lover, brother, son, 
 the sad tidings drifts in, and one by one my neigh- 
 bors are stricken; but, here as throughout the 
 country, two by two, and three by three, and many 
 by many, they rise to the challenge. Patient fingers 
 still fold bandages innumerable; schemes for gar- 
 dens for the coming year take form in long lists of 
 seeds to be purchased and plans of beds to be made ; 
 on the street, in the sitting-room windows, at lec- 
 tures, in trains, all women are knitting: to me they 
 are symbols; they are knitting together the hearts 
 of men, knitting together the lives of the citizens 
 of the world. 
 
 A line from Jack brings the news for which I have 
 been waiting with anxiety greater than I confessed 
 to myself; I dreaded to know what the last hours 
 before the armistice had meant for him. He is 
 well, he writes, but a bit "seedy"; presently he is 
 to have a week on the Riviera and will write me
 
 A WORLD TO MEND 301 
 
 a long letter from there, for he has much to tell 
 me. Patience is the cobbler's special virtue. 
 
 As the way of peace opens out before us and 
 thoughts of the future overmaster all other 
 thoughts of men in shop and church and market 
 place, while all the air seems waiting for the wiser 
 statesmanship of the future, I am saddened by in- 
 creasing attacks upon my old friend and erstwhile 
 mother, England, mother not only of my race, of 
 my inherited instincts and standards, but mother 
 also of those free institutions which face the future 
 with promise and with endless possibilities of ex- 
 pansion. Nay, England is perhaps rather my 
 grandmother, whom I cherish in my heart, who 
 taught my mother America the underlying ruling 
 principles of her life. Shall a man, shall a great 
 nation, not reverence its grandmother, especially 
 one who stands for firm, slow-growing, stable free- 
 dom, who builds on strong foundations, steadily 
 achieves more and more of liberty, never gives up, 
 knows not defeat? 
 
 Yet the sons of England who come in friendliness 
 to talk to American audiences are dismayed by the 
 amount of anti-British feeling here. What is the 
 chief source of this would be difficult to say ; doubt- 
 less the Irish have more than any one else to do 
 with keeping the flame of grievance alive; yet it 
 seems folly to cherish a grievance for the sake of 
 the grievance. Foolish text books, too, perpetuate 
 that old, brief feud between mother and child; but 
 surely it is bad taste to flaunt family quarrels in 
 public. None but a barbarian people would teach 
 the doctrine of hate to its young, and it is quite 
 time that our Revolutionary War was presented in
 
 302 A WORLD TO MEND 
 
 all our histories as a domestic dispute that resulted 
 in great benefit to both members of the family. 
 Surely through this, as through nothing else, 
 Britain learned that fashion of treating her colonies 
 that has resulted in her great daughter nations the 
 world over counting it their chief glory to belong to 
 her. In that war, as in many another, the defeated 
 nation won the most. England, realizing a mistake, 
 set about to correct it; the story of all succeeding 
 decades until the present day is the story of per- 
 sistent and successful efforts to secure more freedom 
 for the individual man, to make government more 
 and more sensitive to the popular will. Thus they 
 have achieved, politically, at least, a more real 
 democracy than our own, a more flexible system: 
 the voter, be he never so humble, has a larger share 
 in affairs; the government that does not satisfy the 
 majority falls. They try more experiments, admit 
 more changes than we, as is shown in their attitude 
 toward labor; with a certain anxiety they pursue 
 liberty, trying to keep a finger on the hem of her 
 garment; we, flushed with success in that far-off 
 Revolution of 76, drag her in chains at the wheels 
 of our triumphant chariot, oversure that she is our 
 handmaiden forever. Yet part of that pride where- 
 in we hug ourselves from generation to generation 
 is baseless. How much have we grown since that 
 moment of triumph, which, unless we change our 
 ways, may ultimately prove our moment of defeat? 
 Have we not petrified somewhat, in old way and 
 habit, conceiving that we have nothing more to 
 learn and little more to do? Possibly the English 
 are wiser than we in keeping an unwritten consti- 
 tution; perhaps ours, written or printed, gives the
 
 A WORLD TO MEND 303 
 
 effect of a something settled once and forever. 
 Whatever the causes, our English cousins have out- 
 stripped us, recognizing liberty as a process, not a 
 completed achievement. 
 
 It is time that we realized here, as men do realize 
 in England, that our destiny and that of England 
 are inextricably bound together. It is time that 
 our text books were radically changed, in a way not 
 only to eliminate all suggestion of lasting bad feel- 
 ing, but to emphasize the likeness in spirit between 
 us and our English next of kin. In the new light on 
 things it should be clear to all American citizens 
 that the Fourth of July should be celebrated 
 by English and Americans together as marking a 
 victory of the creed for which both stand, faith in 
 freedom, belief in individual right, individual 
 chance to work out individual duty, a victory 
 against the German George, who was using English 
 armies to fight against English purposes and Eng- 
 lish principles in 1775-1776. 
 
 Now that we have partly learned to understand 
 each other in fighting side by side, neither victor 
 over the other, we must march together, conscious 
 of a common aim, each nation helping the other 
 in clarifying ideas, in correcting mistakes, in keep- 
 ing ideals high. There is much that we could teach 
 each other; there are many ways in which we could 
 help each other in taking up an enlarging share of 
 the world's burden. That race which, in all its 
 branches, has done more than any other race on 
 earth to found and make permanent free institu- 
 tions has a right to the leadership which it has won. 
 It is not for a man of my calling to use extravagant 
 language; cobblers are, I imagine, a rather silent
 
 304 A WORLD TO MEND 
 
 and reticent folk. It is therefore impossible for me 
 to express the full extent of my rejoicing that Eng- 
 lish and Americans, Australians, Canadians, New 
 Zealanders are learning comradeship in trench and 
 hospital and open field. Will it eventually be 
 written, as Germany's greatest among her many 
 great achievements, that she has welded together, 
 by a bond that naught can break, the scattered 
 members of the Anglo-Saxon race? Perhaps the 
 supreme contribution of that self-efficiency will be 
 that she has done what nothing else could have 
 done, has made them forget distances, old quarrels, 
 grudges, misunderstandings, and has set them as 
 soldiers of liberty, fighting side by side, in unity 
 of a common aim. 
 
 Minor as well as major services could we Ameri- 
 cans and the English render each other; we could 
 learn something from their silences. 
 
 "Tell your men," said a young English officer to 
 an American friend, "not to talk so much." It 
 seemed that some of our soldiers, on setting foot 
 on French soil, had boasted that they had come over 
 to win the war; English soldiers had promptly re- 
 torted 'that the war was already won, and that the 
 English and French had won it. "Not to talk so 
 much." It is in our over-easy self-congratulation 
 that we differ from the English, who hardly admit 
 to themselves victory, sometimes even when they 
 have won. One can but acknowledge, especially 
 in reading American newspapers, full of outcries 
 over what we have done, that the English are, in 
 this respect, better bred than we. They must 
 pardon us if our climate, with its exhilaration and 
 its sparkle, has penetrated to our inner conscious-
 
 A WORLD TO MEND 305 
 
 ness and to our vocabulary; our boasting is, per- 
 haps, not so bad as it sounds, being that of a 
 vigorous child, brimming over with hope and with 
 determination as to what it is going to do. 
 
 On the other hand, these English friends and rela- 
 tives who tell us so often, with an elder brother's 
 intonations, how much better every aspect of life is 
 ordered over there, should be reminded that it ought 
 to be. They have had a thousand years and more 
 in which to arrange the ways of their household, we, 
 little more than a hundred, nor have they thou- 
 sands upon thousands of foster children to whom 
 the very alphabet of civilization must be taught. As 
 we learn from the silences of our British cousins, 
 perhaps they may learn a bit from us of good- 
 natured friendliness to all and sundry, a real and 
 abiding sense of the truth that "a man's a man for 
 a' that." If they have surpassed us in political 
 democracy, they have fallen behind in social, or 
 shall I say, personal democracy?.
 
 XXXIV 
 
 November 28. 
 
 The world crashes; tyrants fall from their thrones, 
 following the example of the German Kaiser, whose 
 abdication on November tenth I wholly forgot to 
 record, as it seemed unimportant by the side of 
 the great coming of peace. Yet surely there is sig- 
 nificance in a moment, unparalleled in history, when 
 a Yankee schoolmaster, spokesman for many great 
 nations in arms, points a finger at the Hohenzollerns, 
 telling them to climb down from their thrones, and 
 they obey, while scores of petty princelings make 
 haste to follow. When morning brings us no news 
 of an empire overthrown or a dynasty falling, I 
 feel a sense of lack, as if Widow Frayne had forgot- 
 ten some part of my breakfast. 
 
 I have often wondered, in reading of great and 
 tragic epochs like that of the French Revolution, 
 how people could go in their old ways through times 
 of such deep convulsion, eating, drinking, sleeping, 
 and busying themselves in every-day affairs. Yet 
 our common life moves steadily through these far 
 greater and more tragic days ; old Mrs. Abies totters 
 down to the grocery, as usual, to buy her pound 
 package of oatmeal and five cents' worth of pepper- 
 mints. Abraham Jencks, of the rural delivery, comes 
 out and rakes leaves to bank his house for winter; 
 and I thread my needles and try to take my stitches 
 as methodically as ever. Yet when, in late after-
 
 A WORLD TO MEND 307 
 
 noon, I walk on the beach, I am aware, in the very 
 ripple of the little waves at my feet, of the passing 
 of an epoch. Chaos is come again, chaos in which 
 the breaking up of old worlds leaves us with eyes 
 straining for the first glimpse of a new world be- 
 ginning to take form. 
 
 I would that a spirit which is now abroad in the 
 land might become one of its permanent character- 
 istics. These are days of almost universal friend- 
 liness, when differences are forgotten, and old feuds 
 are washed away in the incoming tide of good feeling 
 all over the earth. Leavitt, the postmaster, and 
 Melton, the hardware man, who have cherished a 
 quarrel for thirty years, forgot it and shook hands 
 quite simply when they happened to meet in the 
 presence of their wounded boys. It looks as if the 
 peace treaty, when it is made, would incorporate an 
 article containing a settlement of the boundary 
 question long disputed between old Joshua Ridgway 
 and Marks, the hotel keeper. The newspapers and 
 magazines of England, France, America, with their 
 expressions of new international admirations and 
 affections, are not more full of unwonted, generous 
 appreciation than is the air of Mataquoit. Mrs. 
 Sands, meeting me upon the street, places something 
 in my hand, saying simply: "A letter from Jack," 
 and I go on, quite forgetting to notice whether or 
 not she is wearing foolish, high-heeled shoes. The 
 rival ministers have buried, not the hatchet, but the 
 hymn book that has been a bone of contention, and 
 are holding united services. 
 
 If any peace treaty could embody the feeling of 
 peace that now prevails, the world over, it would 
 be a lasting one indeed.
 
 308 A WORLD TO MEND 
 
 November 30. 
 
 I have been reading a peculiarly American article 
 in a Sunday paper, describing in glowing fashion 
 our progress in mechanics, proudly listing our Ameri- 
 can inventions, notably aeroplane and submarine, 
 and calling upon the world to witness that there 
 should be no tendency toward pessimism : we should 
 have faith in the future of the human race because 
 of its power of invention. 
 
 It filled me with distaste. Though I should 
 hardly dare write it save in this old ledger where no 
 eyes but mine will ever see it, I have for years per- 
 mitted myself a certain skepticism regarding many 
 aspects of modern progress. These mechanical con- 
 trivances, aeroplane, submarine, engines and ma- 
 chines innumerable; this endless chasing by hu- 
 manity of the active muscles of its own tail; this 
 external, mechanical development which we call 
 progress, and which is, in great part, a vicious circle 
 of impulses, appetites, passions, ministered to by 
 more and more complex machines, what will it 
 all lead to, except around to the tip of the tail again? 
 
 By centuries of effort, by applying much of our 
 best brain power to problems of physics, we have 
 got back to the point, oh, supreme achievement! 
 where we can fight like winged, prehistoric mon- 
 sters in the air, like crawling, mammoth amphibians 
 under sea, and chaos is indeed come again. Our 
 chief concern should have been learning how not 
 to fight at all. Might it not be well to check a bit 
 this one-sided development and give our minds and 
 souls a chance to catch up with our legs and wings 
 and fins? 
 
 Long before the storm broke and the old period
 
 A WORLD TO MEND 309 
 
 ended, many of us had realized that all was not well 
 with us, that we were living in a material paradise 
 with thought chiefly for pleasure and for comfort. 
 With each successive year in the last decade preced- 
 ing the crash the consciousness grew strong within 
 me that our concern was too much with the body, 
 with search for wealth, with mere things. This 
 conviction grew so insistent that, though I am no 
 poet, I attempted to express myself in verse: 
 "Have pity, Lord, we prosper" 
 
 But my feeling was so strong that it refused to fit 
 itself to words or metre, and merely continued to 
 smoulder within me. 
 
 Those of us who have been deeply concerned with 
 the inner development of the race long ago divined 
 that our tragic prosperity contained within itself a 
 threat of ultimate defeat. I realized this, yet, pre- 
 occupied with books, ideas, theories, I did not stir 
 myself to action, not knowing how to begin. I blame 
 myself and men of my own stamp quite as I blame 
 those apostles of theoretical and applied science who 
 have misled the multitudes; more than I blame the 
 great mass of the misled. We who held a faith in 
 better things and did not find practical ways of 
 making that faith tell have been shirkers; we have 
 avoided enlistment in the battle for our kind. 
 
 My own repentence is worked out, not in sack- 
 cloth and ashes, but in leather and shoemaker's wax, 
 here where I may sit and hear men speak, and may 
 make my voice heard among them. 
 
 December 3. 
 
 In spite of my practical endeavors in going faith- 
 fully to town meeting, to all committee meetings for
 
 310 A WORLD TO MEND 
 
 which I am responsible, and trying constantly to do 
 my share in improving the institutions of the place ; 
 in spite of my unwearied search through printed 
 matter old and new for ideas that make for the bet- 
 terment of human government, I know that no ex- 
 ternals, no improvement in outer condition alone can 
 save this country, or any other. As in Mataquoit, 
 so it is the whole earth over; the crying blunder of 
 our time is the idea that civic salvation can come 
 wholly from without by act of Congress or decree 
 of Parliament, whereas it is not the laws which 
 are so much at fault as it is minds and souls. No 
 laws can produce a righteous commonwealth; it 
 must be righteous men. It is not because our Con- 
 stitution is bad that we of America have fallen 
 short, but because we ourselves have been unroused, 
 self-centered, inadequate. Any political scheme that 
 will permit the right will of the people to make itself 
 felt is good enough for men to work in and to amend, 
 good enough to make better, if they have patience 
 enough to devote themselves to its betterment. Our 
 institutions are imperfect, granted, yet they are 
 capable of endless growth; our task is to work 
 steadily and to contribute all that is within us to 
 that growth. We could make heaven on earth under 
 our present government if each individual were the 
 citizen he should be, forever trying to shape our laws 
 and our ideals toward finer issues. 
 
 It is character that we need, individual character, 
 and with this, perhaps the finest part of it, more 
 realization than in the old days of every man's 
 responsibility for his neighbor. Our forefathers' 
 doctrine was good, but we must complement and 
 complete it, learning how to live more generously,
 
 A WORLD TO MEND 311 
 
 acquiring a deeper sense of the share our brother 
 man holds in our destiny. We must find the right 
 balance between the two tendencies manifest in our 
 past growth; if youth in my day was taught too 
 exclusively to bend all energy to the cultivation of 
 virtue in himself, the salvation of his own soul, 
 youth to-day is taught too little of this. A reaction 
 is due against the spirit that, in a world of such 
 good fellowship, all will be well, that heaven will be 
 heaven because "the gang's all there." It is no less 
 true now than of old that heaven must be earned; 
 we must try to revive belief in individual conscience 
 as the supreme factor in life, keeping something 
 from this period of collectivism, a consciousness of 
 sharing, a knowledge of human lives as inextricably 
 bound together. Our supreme need now is a counsel 
 of perfection regarding inner excellence; poet or 
 prophet must arise to tell us again that government 
 is an affair of men's souls; that no outer laws can 
 bring freedom or civic righteousness. 
 
 "The sensual and the dark rebel in vain 
 Slaves by their own compulsion." 
 
 From the dreams of recent years that the mil- 
 lenium will be here when we have perfected the 
 machinery of rule, let us waken to the fact that 
 omnipotence itself could not produce a government 
 that would function perfectly without the right kind 
 of men. 
 
 December 3. 
 
 I rubbed my eyes this morning, hardly believing 
 that it was young Jim Lent whom I saw. A year
 
 312 A WORLD TO MEND 
 
 of training and of active service have sent this 
 swaggering, ruffianly boy home a self-respecting 
 man. Discharged after recovery from a wound, he 
 is back in Mataquoit; the way in which he holds 
 his shoulders, the way in which he walks down the 
 street, show a transformation which is not only outer 
 but inner. He is actually planning to go to work 
 for his long-suffering mother. 
 
 Frank Ames, our rakish young cashier, is here 
 also; in these, and in a few others who have drifted 
 back, one notes a new dignity, an air of having 
 marched shoulder to shoulder with their fellows. 
 War is a hideous evil, but training for war does 
 something for young men which at present peace 
 doe* not do, because they are not trained for peace. 
 We must change that. Ancient Sparta had her limi- 
 tations, but ancient Sparta had great characteris- 
 tics, chief among which was knowledge of what 
 must be done in the development of the young. I 
 am wholly opposed to any military training that 
 would direct the mind to future wars, but when we 
 banish, as God grant war may, the horror of fight- 
 ing, may we not keep, for the achieving of peace, 
 some discipline both of the body and of the mind 
 of youth that will make both body and mind avail- 
 able for the service of democracy? The Boy Scout 
 movement is a step in the right direction ; the very 
 wearing of a uniform, symbol as it is of fraternal 
 relationship, has educative value, turning the minds 
 of the many toward unity of aim. Not only our 
 boys but our young men also should be gathered 
 into organizations where they may learn obedience, 
 order, and learn that there i? a great music to which 
 -all must step in unison.
 
 A WORLD TO MEND 313 
 
 December 7. 
 
 As I become more intimate with Billions I find 
 many things to like in him, and I deplore the snob- 
 bishness of my boyhood, as I deplore such snobbish- 
 ness everywhere. There should be no line of demar- 
 cation drawn by wealth or family in any American 
 college; such sense of class corrupts American de- 
 mocracy in that which should be its place of nur- 
 ture. Now I feel a kind of affectionate regard for 
 Billions, in spite of my disapproval of his business 
 methods, and we have many pleasant hours to- 
 gether. He forgets to be the trust magnate and be- 
 comes the raw boy again as we go over old days on 
 the campus. 
 
 Great is the irony of life, that, out of all that col- 
 lege class of seven hundred or more, Billions in his 
 exile of magnificence at Round Towers, I in my 
 exile of chosen poverty in my cobbler's shop, should 
 relieve each other's isolation through these hard days 
 of waiting. We chaff each other constantly about 
 our contrasting solutions of the problem of existence ; 
 my conviction that he is wholly wrong deepens, 
 while he never ceases to jibe at me because of this 
 occupation of mine, which puzzles him all the time, 
 and me though I would not confess this to Bil- 
 lions part of the time. I boldly tell him that he 
 and his kind are as extinct as megatherium and 
 ichthyosaurus, and other vanished captains of in- 
 dustry that sought their prey in an earlier world, 
 and have left us only their bones to prove their 
 utter extinction. For I believe that, among the 
 things that have passed with the old era is the great 
 financier who was permitted to make a fortune of 
 unnumbered millions out of the American public;
 
 314 A WORLD TO MEND 
 
 he will have no place in the new and better order 
 that will come when peace is made. I believe that 
 we shall in future find ways to end this appalling 
 contrast between vast riches and utter destitution 
 which mocks our democratic hope. 
 
 Our new drastic income tax is at least a step in 
 the right direction of wise limitation of what any 
 one citizen may own; heavy inheritance taxes will 
 go far in reforming present conditions, as will the 
 introduction of profit sharing in business enterprises. 
 
 Billions was in last night, and we disputed ve- 
 hemently for two hours, after I had told him that 
 his world, in which his boyhood's dreams of extreme 
 wealth had been more than fulfilled, had come to 
 an end, and a new order was beginning. We parted 
 in peace, however. 
 
 "Good night, Dodo," I said, not that I really 
 know just what the Dodo is, but I know that it is 
 extinct, like Billions. 
 
 "Good night, you silly sentimentalist," he an- 
 swered, and he put his hand affectionately on my 
 shoulder. "Lunatic," is, however, his favorite name 
 for me; we have grown fonder of each other, since 
 we began to call each other names. Ever since I 
 made the acquaintance of his old mother, I have 
 been discovering a fine creature in Billions, who 
 never had a chance for full development. Much of 
 the theorizing I have been doing in regard to the 
 government of our country in future amounts in 
 effect to this: I should like to see it such that Bil- 
 lions, the multimillionaire, shall in future be nipped 
 in the bud in order that Billions, the man, shall have 
 a chance. 
 
 Sad thoughts knock at the door of my heart dur-
 
 A WORLD TO MEND 315 
 
 ing these meetings, rousing within me misgivings 
 regarding the very character of our freedom. Bil- 
 lions and I have both made full use of our liberty, 
 but a sad failure of equality and fraternity. He has 
 exploited his neighbor ; I have let mine alone ; which 
 is more guilty? Translated into concrete terms, one 
 of my puzzles, as I cobble, is how in the coming 
 democracy to prevent Billions Brown, how to pre- 
 vent myself. We ought to be made impossible, even if 
 it takes an amendment to the Constitution to do it. 
 
 Not only with reference to us, the guilty twain, 
 but with reference to our countrymen at large I 
 ask again, as I have often asked, with the thought 
 of our future development in mind: What have we 
 done with our one hundred and forty years of lib- 
 erty, equality, fraternity? Who can deny that we 
 have, at least in those aspects of life which are most 
 manifest, greatly failed? Those reproaches of war 
 time against our practice are quite as valid in time 
 of peace ; unabashed luxury, unrelieved poverty con- 
 vict us; the loot of great fortunes, the city palaces 
 and shore palaces, the city slums, tell a long story of 
 failing patriotism. 
 
 With the overwhelming inrush of desire and 
 appetite after months of abstinence, those tokens of 
 our long national shame, the flaunting expendi- 
 ture of the many, the priceless jewels, the rich gar- 
 ments, the evidences of life given over to automo- 
 biling and dancing, to vaudeville, revues, and mere 
 pleasuring; will probably be more than ever in evi- 
 dence, making one wonder if our brief moment of 
 greatness must wholly vanish. If, in earlier years, 
 as in this past year, the privileged in wealth, tradi- 
 tion, birth, had lived up to their individual duties,
 
 316 A WORLD TO MEND 
 
 their opportunities of sharing and of helping, we 
 should not now be facing this moment, wherein the 
 moving finger writes upon the wall: America, this 
 grandeur of opportunity unused; America, this tre- 
 mendous responsibility not realized, will end in ruin, 
 desolation, utter failure, if her citizens go back to 
 the old selfish way. 
 
 Is our failure so great that all should be lost? 
 This citizenship, which we have failed to justify, 
 should it be taken from us? It is pity unspeakable 
 if we must forfeit this one chance in the history of 
 all ages for the full development of the individual 
 in freedom, for that hope toward which nature's 
 utmost aim would seem to point. Yet, unless we 
 can make in future better use of our liberty than we 
 have in the past, should we not forfeit it? No man 
 who neglects duty as we and ours have done, no man 
 who uses his power of individual achievement for 
 purposes of exploiting his fellows, has a right to 
 citizenship. If fraternity, from free choice, is be- 
 yond us, must we not be coerced into fraternity? 
 Perhaps we have deserved this, sinning greatly in 
 selfishness, but if this prove necessary, we are driven 
 centuries back in our development. Shall we sink 
 to some collectivist system, inevitably falling to a 
 lower level, giving our lives, our consciences into the 
 keeping of the state, where the glory of free choice, 
 free action, of the finer will shall be gone ; shall we 
 strike out liberty, placing ourselves where we shall 
 have no choice in the matter of showing generosity to 
 our neighbor ; or shall we claim, with awful sense of 
 responsibility, the freedom of the individual for 
 which our forefathers fought, and live up to it as we 
 have never done? The alternative is plain ; either a
 
 A WORLD TO MEND 317 
 
 collectivism crushing individual endeavor, or a new 
 and disinterested individualism. 
 
 The wheel of destiny is turning; the social revo- 
 lution is upon us; by the law of retribution it is 
 bound to come, unless our life change. It is for us 
 to make sure that the social revolution come not 
 through red uprising, but in the minds and souls of 
 American citizens, especially those who have in- 
 herited privileges of long standing, and that it come 
 before it is too late. We must win the distinction 
 of being citizens in that republic where the disin- 
 terested soul of man lives by choice at peace with his 
 neighbor. The burden of our individuality is upon 
 us; we are responsible for its utmost reach; its 
 utmost reach is the voluntary surrender of selfish 
 aim. 
 
 Have the one hundred and forty years brought us 
 enough of insight to correct our mistakes, enough of 
 conscience to help us repair our sins of omission? 
 I confess to a longing for one more chance for the 
 American citizen, for one hundred and ten millions 
 of American citizens, just one more chance to grow 
 into an unselfish unity of purpose. Our forefathers' 
 hope must not be proved too high a hope for us; 
 we must not let the supreme gift of individual lib- 
 erty be taken from us but turn 
 
 "and thank God, hastening, 
 That the same goal is still on the same track." 
 
 December 10. 
 
 In my post-office box this noon, under much mis- 
 cellaneous printed matter, I found a letter, an un- 
 wontedly plump letter, in a thin, crisscrossed foreign
 
 318 A WORLD TO MEND 
 
 envelope with a French stamp. Divining in it sig- 
 nificances that would make it impossible for me to 
 read it as I sometimes read letters, strolling home 
 through the main street of Mataquoit, I waited until 
 I was again in my shop, with the door securely 
 closed and opened it with a sense of pleasurable 
 anticipation. 
 
 There was a long epistle from Katharine, 
 enclosing a brief note from Jack; the two had 
 then met for the first time since they went to France ; 
 Katharine had willed that they should not see each 
 other. She is thoroughgoing, Katharine, in her de- 
 votions, and had determined that nothing, even for 
 an hour, should take her mind from her work. 
 
 Yes, they had encountered each other quite ac- 
 cidentally on an October Sunday afternoon. Jack, 
 on leave for a week, and en route for Paris, whence 
 he was starting for the Riviera, was spending a day 
 exploring the devastated region back of Chateau- 
 Thierry. Strolling through a ruined village, he had 
 come upon Katharine, sitting on the threshold of 
 what once had been a home, now splintered into 
 minute fragments. Katharine's afternoon was free, 
 and she had walked two kilometers out to this spot 
 where she was building a home for the old woman 
 and her goose. Jack found her looking at the newly 
 laid foundation stones. 
 
 In all the shattered village where houses and 
 church together had crumbled into sand there was 
 no living thing; no blade of grass, no leaf; only 
 splintered trunks of trees, and here and there a 
 broken wall of a house, standing shell-like, with 
 gaping holes; only heaps of crushed stone and tile 
 and plaster, and a rough outline of transept and
 
 A WORLD TO MEND 319 
 
 nave where the church had been. Here was no 
 man, woman, nor child, no chicken, dog, nor pig; 
 
 "And no birds sang." 
 
 iNow the full details of that meeting I shall never 
 know; but the result I was told and asked to act 
 upon. Katharine had decided at last, she told me; 
 and would I please see her father and act as inter- 
 mediary? Relations (by letter) had of late been 
 so satisfactory between them that she hated to 
 disturb them; perhaps, if I break the news to him, 
 the blow would be softened; I could wheedle him 
 in anything. Would I please try to get his consent 
 to her marrying Jack? 
 
 "You don't know how much respect he has for 
 you," said Katharine, the flatterer. 
 
 Jack's note was brief and not wholly legible, for 
 he wrote with a broken pencil on a rough bit of 
 paper from a notebook. He would not teH me 
 what I had always known without telling, but he 
 seconded the request for intervention. 
 
 "Asking you to do this may seem queer action 
 for a man and a soldier, but I am not afraid of 
 him; I am only afraid for Katharine. You have 
 no idea how she cares for her father." 
 
 "I'll tell Billions that first," I said to Tim, who 
 was looking very happy over the news, which he 
 seemed to understand. 
 
 "I don't want to make trouble," said Jack, "but 
 this thing between Katharine and me has got to be. 
 You are the only strategist who can plan out a win- 
 ning campaign." 
 
 So I am to interview Billions! Mine the boiling 
 oil, if boiling there must be; mine the oubliette.
 
 320 A WORLD TO MEND 
 
 So be it ; I'd rather be the victim of other people's 
 lives than not to be in life at all. As Jack would 
 say: "Here goes." 
 
 As I prepare for my task, an undercurrent of 
 glad feeling is strong within me which will perhaps 
 be a potent factor in winning my case. It is the 
 thought of those two, my two, in their service uni- 
 forms, Jack's probably not over-clean, pledging their 
 faith, in the dust and ashes of that ruined village: 
 a symbol of their young country, lending her 
 strength, her youth, to rebuild among the ruins of 
 a world; a symbol of the days to be, of life and 
 love, with their feet on death. The future is safe, 
 beyond shot and shell, safe in the hearts of the 
 young. 
 
 December 11. 
 
 I broke the hews to Billions. His first remark 
 was not unexpected; from the way in which he 
 said it I could see that he had rehearsed it many 
 times, in expectation of the inevitable moment. 
 
 '"I'll disinherit her," said Billions quite like an 
 angry father in a play. 
 
 "That's a rather good idea," I told him. "I do 
 not want to say anything that will hurt you, but 
 I doubt if you could do anything that would please 
 Katharine more ; she worries a great deal about your 
 having so much money, Billions." 
 
 December 12. 
 
 The silence over the battlefields is heard as dis- 
 tinctly here as there; in the merciful breathing 
 space, one may pause to think, and perhaps may
 
 A WORLD TO MEND 321 
 
 think more clearly than at any time during the 
 past four years and more. Looking back, I can 
 see how greatly the war has done that which I, 
 meditating on ideals for days of peace, have longed 
 for, as something great beyond possibility; that 
 sense of need of my early days in Mataquoit has 
 been swept into answer to the need. To an extent 
 I should hardly have dared hope, it has, for a time 
 at least, wakened the rich man out of his luxurious 
 content, the scholar from his minute problem, the 
 artist from his separate dream, the lover from the 
 selfishness of his desire, woman from the contempla- 
 tion of her clothes, even from a selfish maternity ; 
 the father from hope of his son's commercial success 
 as the supreme aim of existence. 
 
 The young have grown up under it, bending the 
 whole of their ambition and effort to meet the great 
 challenge. Youth becomes sublime, as it has never 
 been before, under the effort. The old have grown 
 young under it, with passionate desire yet to make 
 good. They who have never served have here 
 learned to serve ; they who had known no ami have 
 found an aim for effort. Our nation is awake to 
 spiritual issues, as, a few years ago, I should not 
 have believed possible, through this trial by fire, 
 whereby we are made tragically one. 
 
 No man can think out fully the meaning of this 
 great and terrible thing which came to pass; no 
 man can stop trying to think it out. I am no 
 militarist; God knows I would gladly have laid 
 down my life to avert this war, as would thousands 
 of men and women, could the opportunity have 
 been given them in August, 1914. 
 
 But I have faith in experience, in man's supreme
 
 322 A WORLD TO MEND 
 
 duty to face that which comes, and find the meaning 
 in it; the one unpardonable sin in life is wasting 
 experience, failing to see and grasp, while it is quick, 
 the opportunity given by struggle, by suffering, for 
 insight into the inner meaning of life; failing to 
 try to shape the trial of the moment toward the 
 highest ends. Though this attitude may betoken 
 little as regards theology, it shows much of faith. 
 We must not stand passive, questioning what the 
 great tragedy means; we must make it mean the 
 best. We did not seek this anguish ; it found us, con- 
 fronting us with a great moment when we were 
 compelled to rise and help, or go forever shamed; 
 now we have an account to render, in that we have 
 gone down into that ancient hell of slaughter. It 
 is for us to make the mighty struggle tell upon our 
 future, divining what we can of its deeper purposes 
 and helping carry them out in our regenerated wills, 
 purposing better things for the future because of 
 the tragedy of the past. We must make this, spirit- 
 ually, a step onward; as with any agony, we must 
 wrest from it its deepest significance. 
 
 If, from out the remotest past, from mud and 
 slime, a monster has arisen, threatening all that 
 humanity has gained in its struggle upward, swift 
 and splendid have sprung to meet it, love, sacrifice, 
 devotion such as the children of men have never 
 dreamed. Dragon fang and archangel's sword have 
 met in our time; would the angel have risen so 
 quickly had the dragon not stirred in the ooze? 
 What is there for us but to wrestle with the angel 
 and hold him fast, to seize and keep the greatness 
 that our hour of anguish has brought, to try to carry 
 into the future the spirit of sacrifice of these last
 
 A WORLD TO MEND 323 
 
 months? If we let the surging, noble emotion of our 
 days of service ebb back along the sand, if we forget 
 our high endeavor, we shall be greatly guilty. This 
 crisis has pointed the way to unity of disinterested 
 service, has shown us undreamed possibilities in 
 ourselves. Our problem therefore is to find how 
 certain qualities in human nature, manifest in times 
 of great trouble, of utmost stress, can be held, quick 
 and alive, for the country's service in time of quiet. 
 How can we make permanent the mood of sacrifice? 
 How keep aroused, when no danger threatens, this 
 self-forgetfulness, this willingness to help in the 
 life of the country, as if the whole conduct of affairs 
 rested on each man's back? Man must learn to 
 stand by man in days of calm as in days of tumult; 
 this is what we need, the heroic mood for 
 common days. 
 
 If we have found then, in that great crisis, war, 
 just those virtues needed in the greater crisis, peace, 
 we must not let them go. Gone are those terrible 
 but simple fighting days of summer; we face per- 
 plexing days of autumn, of whiter, with a world's 
 work to do. Then it was only: Stand shoulder to 
 shoulder; do not let the weak fall by the hand of 
 the assassin; now the question is: Who is my 
 brother? How shall I treat him? How shall men 
 rebuild this shattered house of life so that it will 
 not again crumble about their ears? 
 
 A nation, one as we were one in the awful hour 
 of making ready to go to the rescue of mankind, as 
 eager to help as we were then, could mark out a 
 path higher than any nation has ever yet taken, 
 could achieve an unexampled destiny. If our vast 
 material resources could be matched by spiritual
 
 324 A WORLD TO MEND 
 
 aspiration as great, what limit could there be to 
 our development at home or to our power abroad 
 in helping work out concord among men? 
 
 December 15. 
 
 Coming home by the shore path this afternoon 
 I saw Billions Brown out on the headland, standing 
 in relief against the sky. Poor Billions, he does not 
 yet know that he has passed away! I see no place 
 for him in the world of the future or for his kind, 
 save perchance those few leaders of enterprise great 
 enough to turn from the race for individual wealth 
 and power and lend their energies to the building 
 up of the country. 
 
 Billions and I are together now several evenings 
 in the week, sitting by the open fire in his library, 
 or in my shop, where sweet-smelling pitch pine 
 lends a fragrance to our discussions. Secretly I 
 think he likes my shop best, though he still looks 
 sadly out of place, in all his tailored glossiness, 
 among my odds and ends of leather. Sometimes 
 he picks a book from one of my shelves, reads it 
 a little and scowls; it would almost seem as if the 
 greater part of my library is such as to offend him. 
 He was silent last night for an hour over a chapter 
 in an economic treatise on profit-sharing, but he 
 said nothing about it, nor did I, though I had assid- 
 uously trained that volume to open in that place 
 for his benefit. He has not told me why he stays 
 on so late in Mataquoit; I divine a need of com- 
 panionship, something of that subtle loneliness 
 which has been stronger in us all since the world 
 crash came. 
 
 Sometimes I think we make a symbolic picture,
 
 A WORLD TO MEND 325 
 
 he and I, Capital and Labor, conversing amiably, 
 propitious, I hope, for the future. 
 
 Billions scoffs at my ideas, yet he will not let 
 them alone; he comes back again and again to the 
 old questions, provoking me to utterance. Never, 
 in spite of drastic admonition, will he admit the 
 error of his financial ways, yet I do not wholly de- 
 spair of right citizenship in Billions even yet. There 
 are momentary flashes of wistful doubt in his face, 
 where there used to be but a Bismarckian aggres- 
 sive certainty. He is giving away huge sums of 
 money in charities at home and in war relief work 
 abroad; those purse strings, once loosened, have 
 never been tied again. He makes vast and gloomy 
 schemes for philanthropic disposal of more and 
 more of his wealth. 
 
 Wallace joins us sometimes, but he has little time 
 for discussion of theories of right action; he is too 
 busy with action itself. They make an interesting 
 and suggestive contrast as they talk together, as 
 they do with eagerness, for they have grown to be 
 great friends: Billions, in his newly-wakened gen- 
 erosity, giving away his millions; Wallace, as has 
 been his lifelong habit, giving his very soul. It 
 takes no diviner to tell which coin is of the precious 
 metal most needed in our national treasury of the 
 future. 
 
 Sometimes, through wreaths of smoke, my 
 thought of the democracy to be takes on the faces 
 of tue people I have known here. Wallace, of 
 course, is in the new period, less changed than any 
 one else, doing what he has always done. 
 
 Jack is the chief figure in it, the world open for 
 his energy, his friendly cooperation. I have ceased
 
 326 A WORLD TO MEND 
 
 trembling for his scholarship; he is graduating in 
 a world of men and of affairs; the ideas that he 
 needs do not come from books. 
 
 Katharine is there, unwearied in serving, every 
 power, gift, talent dedicated to her kind; her hands 
 and Clare's are channels through which Billions' 
 great wealth will flow into the life of the country, 
 relieving distress, starting new enterprises for the 
 development of the young. 
 
 With them I catch glimpses of many of the youth 
 of Mataquoit, their self-consciousness lost, self-in- 
 terest merged in something greater, finding and 
 keeping the pace of the new era, the old slouch 
 gone. Some of the middle-aged catch the pace also : 
 all the world is doing its domestic, its civic, the 
 entire range of its human duties as faithfully as 
 Grandmother Brown has done hers, but no! that 
 would be the millennium, and the millennium is not 
 yet. 
 
 December 18. 
 
 Some of these days of waiting are days of de- 
 pression, when my courage wavers, and I have a 
 fear that we may be going back to the old, ignoble 
 content of the pre-war days. Am I right or wrong 
 in foreboding a certain relaxation of effort every- 
 where, in detecting already a subtle atmosphere of 
 letting go? I miss the great endeavor toward the 
 utmost, the ultimate striving of the last hard 
 months; is the passionate oneness of purpose of 
 the fighting days threatened? Will nothing but 
 danger, anxiety, anguish unite human kind? Where 
 can we find a battle hymn that will thrill the souls 
 of men to generous unity of action in time of pros-
 
 A WORLD TO MEND 327 
 
 perity as in time of adversity? How can the heroic 
 instinct be fostered, trained, and urged to utmost 
 effort in days when there is no war? 
 
 December 20. 
 
 To-day came the longest letter I have ever had 
 from Jack, written from the Riviera, where he is 
 getting a few days of sorely needed rest. 
 
 "It's great down here," he writes, so dismissing the 
 scenery. "Now that I've got a bit of time I thought 
 I'd tell you that I've doped out at last what I'm 
 going to be. Engineer. Civil. Bridges. The no- 
 tion came to me weeks back, oddly enough, one day 
 when we were having a hot time of it. I was lead- 
 ing my men over a bridge across, well, I can't 
 spell it and I can't pronounce it, but it's a branch 
 of the Marne. Things were pretty lively, and some- 
 thing I thought at first it was the day of judg- 
 ment struck the bridge right in the middle, and 
 we had to swim for it. We did, too, and nobody 
 was hurt worth mentioning, and we crawled up on 
 the bank and went for them, good and plenty. 
 
 Well, I got my idea of my career-to-be between 
 the time I left the bridge and the time I struck the 
 water. You know how they say when you are 
 drowning you see your whole past life in an in- 
 stant; the difference was, I saw my whole future 
 life. And then I didn't mean to drown, not 
 muchly. 
 
 I'm going to do construction work, build things 
 that will last and will be a permanent part of the 
 life of the country. I never could get used to the 
 idea of buying things and selling 'em again, I 
 hope Dad won't mind too much. When I strike 
 that burg where they are trying to educate me I'm
 
 328 A WORLD TO MEND 
 
 going to hustle. I'll take the courses that will fit 
 best into my scheme, I dare say I shan't be so 
 book-shy, now that I know what practical thing 
 I'm going to do afterward. I've always been on the 
 defensive, afraid they'd make a highbrow of me. 
 As I'm sure at last that they haven't a ghost of a 
 chance, I'll go to it, hot and heavy. 
 
 And I've got a hunch that along with my own 
 job, I'd better do a bit of another kind of construc- 
 tion work ; lots of fellows have got it. You'd better 
 believe that we know what we are fighting for over 
 here, and the idea has dawned on us that we've 
 got to go on with our job for the rest of our lives 
 at home. It's taken a lot of powder and shot to 
 get it into some of our heads, but we've got a clearer 
 notion than we used to have of what the show is 
 run for over there, America, I mean. We've made 
 a compact among us that we are going to whirl in 
 and get a whack at the immigrants. Teach 'em 
 English. Whip 'em into line. Teach 'em games. 
 Trouble with these Germans is that they don't un- 
 derstand games; no idea of fair play. That's the 
 place to begin, there's nothing, really, so civil- 
 izing as games. There's a lot to be done with all 
 those fellows that keep tumbling in on us to make 
 'em find out what self-government means and 
 learn to keep step." 
 
 Every statement in this letter has my joyous ap- 
 proval; the boy sees at last. But heaven help the 
 immigrants if Jack teaches them the kind of Eng- 
 lish he uses! 
 
 December 22. 
 
 Report has it that our armies will soon be sailing 
 back, and that demobilization will go on rapidly
 
 A WORLD TO MEND 329 
 
 once they are here. Of Katharine's plans I have 
 heard nothing further, but doubtless not many 
 weeks will pass before my two will come home 
 again, come home, I trust, to happiness, and to 
 something greater than mere personal happiness, to 
 citizenship for themselves and for their children in 
 a land of enlarging freedom. There is that in the 
 lives and experience of Jack and of Katharine which 
 sanctifies the threshold of the home yet to be. It 
 is not only for myself and for others who love them 
 that I long to have them here again, safe. All 
 my unlived life, my sense of lost opportunity rises 
 in strong desire within me to aid in the work which 
 service in this war has begun, to help them find 
 their place, know the greater and better America, 
 and aid in shaping her destiny. 
 
 My deepest misgiving as well as my strongest 
 hope lingers about them and their kind. They who 
 went gladly overseas to the conflict, will they 
 come back with lessened light upon their faces? 
 Are they again to know days as great? They have 
 ministered to the ill, to the dying; they have suf- 
 fered anguish with their fellows in the shell-smitten 
 trenches; will they be able to minister to the com- 
 monplace; to those whose souls are dying, choked 
 with too much of earth and its riches; to those 
 resting inert on old privilege, not earned, claiming 
 immunity from struggle and making no return? 
 Will the inspiration of their service in the face of 
 death last in the face of the multitudinous difficulties 
 and discouragements of life? 
 
 That old haunting inquiry will not down, as to 
 whether they will return to a nation permanently 
 wakened to higher aim, more greatly one than ever
 
 330 A WORLD TO MEND 
 
 before, or merely to a nation more prosperous than 
 it has ever been, as the papers predict, and con- 
 stantly growing richer, with its merchant marine 
 and its increasing trade all over the world, where 
 others have let go? 
 
 I sadden at the prospect of an enlarging material 
 life, where we profoundly need an enlarging spirit- 
 ual and intellectual life. We greatly need suffer- 
 ing, misfortune, discipline; have we suffered 
 enough? 
 
 Nations victorious in arms are not always those 
 which have gained a real victory; defeat of subtler 
 kind lurks often, I dare not think inevitably, in 
 success on the battlefield. The German triumph 
 of 1871 was, in reality, a great German defeat; 
 wars should be banished if only for the mischief 
 they do to the victor nation. Sad thoughts arise; 
 there is menace in our loudly celebrated victory of 
 to-day. If outer gain be inner loss, what lies ahead 
 of us, who have won so easily? 
 
 Our best hope rests with those who have suffered, 
 have seen and shared unspeakable things, and have 
 tried to help. They who have made the great sacri- 
 fice, whose sympathy has been proved good in deed, 
 this dedicated generation will carry over the length 
 and breadth of the country an influence profound; 
 here is a leaven that will work. Our nation will be 
 what they try to make it; not without hope I wait 
 those who come, with faces shining, from the east; 
 the splendor of our young half blinds my eyes: 
 
 "I see them walking in an air of glory 
 Whose light doth trample on my days."
 
 A WORLD TO MEND 331 
 
 In these who have learned by serving we shall 
 find the one thing that we need, leadership. The 
 vision of the new democracy, the necessity of 
 brotherhood among men come to them concretely, 
 through descent into that hell of war suffering to 
 which misunderstanding leads. They have seen the 
 greater issue, and they will not forget, nor will they 
 suffer the hard impulsion of slaying their kind to 
 come again upon them. 
 
 What may not be, with their broader outlook and 
 their profounder sympathy, when they come home, 
 aware of America's responsibilities to all her 
 citizens, but also to the world, having learned the 
 deeper needs of mankind, harmony at home and 
 abroad, fraternity the world over, friendly relations 
 in difference, a right internationalism ! Through 
 their high service rendered, through their insight 
 into the pitfalls which beset the footsteps of man- 
 kind, they will lead us forward safely; they will 
 carry on the best of our old traditions but with 
 something new and great added, resolved to make 
 democracy come true, not only for ourselves but 
 for others, not blown about by whiffs of unpractical 
 theory, not Anarchists, not extremists of any kind, 
 not Bolshevists, not snobs, but Americans, citizens 
 of a great republic whose foundations are the souls 
 of men. 
 
 Dimly, shining through the picture of what we 
 are, I begin to have a vision of what we may be; 
 the great events, the questions roused by them, 
 pierce through modern habit and training to a some- 
 thing mystical within me, a tendency which I 
 have kept out of sight, and of which I have been 
 somewhat ashamed. Yet one need not feel apolo-
 
 332 A WORLD TO MEND 
 
 getic for holding in one's greater moments faith for 
 which one can not present full reasoned proof ; could 
 one present such proof, it were not faith. My vision 
 of the future America is built on Faith, Hope 
 and Charity ; a vast deal of Charity. 
 
 I see a great nation, redeemed by suffering, 
 brought through sorrow and through hard endeavor 
 from paths wherein it had gone astray, face to face 
 with the profoundest duty of humanity. Sacrifice has 
 ever been the way of faith ; crude, primitive, cruel in 
 early days, it still contains essential truth, the need 
 of human nature to suffer, to give up. We, who 
 have offered on the altar of the nations our dearest 
 and best, know that the flame of our faith rises 
 higher than ever before, shining on the path of the 
 future. Through our great choice has come a higher 
 ideal; a deeper sense of responsibility, a more pro- 
 found disinterestedness. Purposes never fully real- 
 ized even in America, or but dimly remembered, 
 write themselves plainly across the stars. 
 
 So, in solemn vision, America moves on to un- 
 dreamed greatness, with all her incoming races be- 
 coming one in aim and in endeavor. All classes, all 
 honorable occupations are fairly represented, all 
 voices of her many citizens are heard. She finds a 
 way to use even the wrath of her disgruntled chil- 
 dren, her manifold sons and daughters, gathered 
 from many lands, letting it spur her to finer justice, 
 so that their anger against her becomes part of her 
 power, as she sifts out and uses what they bring her 
 of real suggestion, and throws away the threats and 
 the curses. The principle upon which our govern- 
 ment rests, the principle for which the Anglo-Saxon 
 race has fought throughout history, belief in lib-
 
 A WORLD TO MEND 333 
 
 erty, secured by institutions growing more and more 
 free, is driven home, in part by this great con- 
 flict, to the minds and hearts of half-developed 
 peoples, who would, perhaps, in an age of calm, 
 have gained no clear knowledge of it, driven home in 
 all our preparations, in our actual struggle. Its 
 watchword is fair play ; in peace, as in war, we fight 
 for fair play and for the safeguarding of those old 
 and precious things of life, our faith, and the in- 
 tegrity of home and family. 
 
 Thus this country of outer greatness becomes the 
 country of inner greatness, taking up into her high 
 purpose all the hope and the achievement of those 
 who have served her at this crisis to add to earlier 
 hope and achievement. All among our many mil- 
 lions, who have forgotten, in differences of opinion, 
 class, occupation, our deep political creed of many 
 in one, again remember. All who have conceived 
 our unity as a oneness of power, of wealth, of outer 
 greatness, learn that the only enduring unity for 
 any people is unity of high spiritual aim. 
 
 The vision, will it come true? It is for us to 
 make it come true; visions do not fulfil themselves; 
 men fulfil them. 
 
 December 24. 
 
 A few days of warm sunshine, fit to usher in the 
 age of gold. Yesterday Tim and I took a holiday 
 and raked leaves in order to bank hollyhocks and 
 daffodil and crocus bulbs. There is a dim blue haze 
 on far-ofT things; and near, things seem reddening 
 as in spring, but this is perhaps only an effect of the 
 unwonted sunshine. As far as brown fields stretch 
 away earth seems all golden promise, and everywhere
 
 334 A WORLD TO MEND 
 
 is a sense as of great frosts about to melt and let 
 go, in this charmed pause between the cessation of 
 the war agony and the insistent stirring of the great 
 problems of the future. All questions vanish as we 
 wait in an Indian summer calm, that is as a vision 
 of fulfilment, for earth's greatest Christmas day, 
 inaugurating a lasting Peace on Earth. 
 
 As I work in my shop, a breeze comes in through 
 the open window, bringing a breath of the sea. 
 To-day I am mending a pair of my own shoes, for a 
 long path lies ahead of me, and I have far to tread. 
 For the present, my steps shall be in the fields I 
 know, and I shall go on cobbling here, where I have 
 earned a sense of home, and friends. I have hope 
 that the garden gate of Jack and Katharine will not 
 be too far away, and that I may often lift the latch, 
 finding sometimes within not only their two selves, 
 but Grandmother Brown. 
 
 Not without hope I shall live on in Mataquoit, 
 bending my strength to whatever reforms and 
 changes, local or national, seem to promise help for 
 the future. Some day, if I gain much wisdom, I 
 may try to express it in more permanent form than 
 these rough entries in my ledger. Before this I have 
 much to learn and shall go on with my task of enter- 
 ing into the life of my fellows; no government can 
 relieve me of that. If the future depends on intel- 
 ligent accord between man and man, between nation 
 and nation, our great need is sympathetic insight. 
 We must learn to understand, not criticize, to reach 
 the inner motive ; we must dig deeper into the soil 
 of human life than we have ever dug. 
 
 I have recorded here, in black and white, but a 
 tithe of that which I have found out; the better
 
 A WORLD TO MEND 335 
 
 part of human wisdom that comes from experience 
 can not be set down in words, far less in figures. To 
 tell truth, I am rejoicing that this last page of my 
 ledger leaves me no room for balancing accounts; it 
 is too early yet for that. 
 
 Looking back, I can not count my months here as 
 wholly failure, for in them I have grown into closer 
 relationship with my kind ; to have learned to sym- 
 pathize and to care as one did not at thirty is not 
 ito have failed utterly. When I stood apart and 
 analyzed my fellow man, I did not wholly like him ; 
 certainly he has many qualities that are far from 
 perfection or the desire for perfection. But when 
 I cast my lot with his and struggle with him, I am 
 aware in him of a deep stirring, a striving toward 
 an excellence dimly apprehended, perhaps too great 
 for formula, too deep for mind alone to grasp. 
 
 I have, in truth, solved few, if any, of the prob- 
 lems of democracy, and am now, at the end of my 
 ledger, but at the beginning of my task. But I know 
 that I have gone the right way about it, and I know 
 the end in view: to learn to understand my neigh- 
 bor, and to know that the whole world is my 
 neighbor. 
 
 THE END
 
 THE WORN DOORSTEP 
 
 By MARGARET SHERWOOD 
 12mo. Cloth 
 
 An American woman whose English lover has been killed 
 in the war rents a house in a tiny English village and finds 
 some comfort in the people who seek shelter over her worn 
 doorstep, helping her to forget personal loss in the greater 
 tragedy around her. 
 
 "Occasionally, very, very occasionally, it happens that a 
 book appears whose merits one would like to shout from 
 the housetops, and such a book is this." The New York 
 Times. 
 
 "A story moulded not only for the present but to be an 
 enduring testimony of war and the triumph of woman's 
 spirit over the tragedy of war." The Boston Transcript. 
 
 By the game author 
 
 FAMILIAR WAYS 
 
 12mo. Cloth 
 
 A volume of engagingly brief and readable essays on 
 subjects close to everyday life, yet constantly suggestive of 
 wide horizons of thought and feeling. The style has the 
 same distinction which has won so much praise for Miss 
 Sherwood's other works. 
 
 "Charmingly written, intimate essays whose character 
 may be shown by some of their titles." A. L. A. BookKtt. 
 
 LITTLE, BROWN & COMPANY, PUBLMHEM 
 34 BEACON STREET, BOSTON
 
 A 000 040 786 6