come to be called his "back-stairs policy" and "the plot that failed.'

Thanks to the discovery of the Zimmermann plot, Japan and the United States understand each other better, and are growing more and more friendly. Mexico is keeping her troubles to herself and has all she can do in straightening out her own affairs. The boys and girls in America will hope, if baseball and football will teach the Mexicans to play fair, that these games and others like them will become as popular there as they are in the United States.

A man is a father, a brother, a German, a Roman, an American; but beneath all these relations, he is a man. The end of his human destiny is not to be the best German, or the best Roman, or the best father, but the best man he can be.

Though darkness sometimes shadows our national sky, though confusion comes from error, and success breeds corruption, yet will the storm pass in God's good time; and in clearer sky and purer atmosphere, our national life grow stronger and nobler, sanctified more and more, consecrated to God and liberty by the martyrs who fall in the strife for the just and true.

GEORGE WILLIAM CURTIS.

WHY WE FIGHT GERMANY

ECAUSE of Belgium, invaded, outraged, en

BECK

slaved, impoverished Belgium. We cannot forget Liége, Louvain, and Cardinal Mercier. Translated into terms of American history, these names stand for Bunker Hill, Lexington, and Patrick Henry.

Because of France, invaded, desecrated France, a million of whose heroic sons have died to save the land of Lafayette. Glorious, golden France, the preserver of the arts, the land of noble spirit, the first land to follow our lead into republican liberty.

Because of England, from whom came the laws, traditions, standards of life, and inherent love of liberty which we call Anglo-Saxon civilization. We defeated her once upon the land and once upon the sea. But Australia, New Zealand, Africa, and Canada are free because of what we did. And they are with us in the fight for the freedom of the seas.

Because of Russia -new Russia. She must not be overwhelmed now. Not now, surely, when she is just born into freedom. Her peasants must have their chance; they must go to school to Washington, to Jefferson, and to Lincoln, until they know their

way about in this new, strange world of government by the popular will.

Because of other peoples, with their rising hope that the world may be freed from government by the soldier.

We are fighting Germany because she sought to terrorize us and then to fool us. We could not believe that Germany would do what she said she would do upon the seas.

We still hear the piteous cries of children coming up out of the sea where the Lusitania went down. And Germany has never asked the forgiveness of the world.

We saw the Sussex sunk, crowded with the sons and daughters of neutral nations.

We saw ship after ship sent to the bottom - ships of mercy bound out of America for the Belgian starving, ships carrying the Red Cross and laden with the wounded of all nations, ships carrying food and clothing to friendly, harmless, terrorized peoples, ships flying the Stars and Stripes sent to the bottom hundreds of miles from shore, manned by American seamen, murdered against all law, without warning.

We believed Germany's promise that she would respect the neutral flag and the rights of neutrals, and we held our anger and outrage in check. But now we see that she was holding us off with fair promises until she could build her huge fleet of submarines. For

when spring came, she blew her promise into the air, just as at the beginning she had torn up that "scrap of paper." Then we saw clearly that there was but one law for Germany, her will to rule.

We are fighting Germany because in this war feudalism is making its last stand against on-coming democracy. We see it now. This is a war against an old spirit, an ancient, outworn spirit. It is a war against feudalism - the right of the castle on the hill to rule the village below. It is a war for democracy the right of all to be their own masters. Let Germany be feudal if she will. But she must not spread her system over a world that has outgrown it.

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We fight with the world for an honest world in which nations keep their word, for a world in which nations do not live by swagger or by threat, for a world in which men think of the ways in which they can conquer the common cruelties of nature instead of inventing more horrible cruelties to inflict upon the spirit and body of man, for a world in which the ambition of the philosophy of a few shall not make miserable all mankind, for a world in which the man is held more precious than the machine, the system, or the State.

SECRETARY FRANKLIN K. LANE, June 4, 1917.

IN

GENERAL PERSHING

N April, 1917, a small group of men in civilian dress climbed up the side of the ocean liner, the Baltic, just outside of New York harbor. Each one carried a suitcase or a hand-bag, which was his only baggage. They had come down the harbor through the fog and mist on a tugboat. These men were officers in the United States army, and among them were General Pershing and his staff- "Black Jack Pershing," as his men affectionately called him.

They were given no farewell at the dock, in fact their going was kept a profound secret; for should the Germans learn upon what liner the chief officers of the American army that was soon to gather in France, took passage, all their submarines would neglect everything else in attempting to sink this one vessel.

The officers reached England in safety, and made preparations for the great American armies that were soon to follow them. General Pershing was appointed commander of these armies. He had just come from service in Mexico, where he had led American troops in search of the outlaw, Villa.