work
of a workaday world. Among the free peoples who govern themselves
there is but a small field of usefulness open for the men of
cloistered life who shrink from contact with their fellows. Still less
room is there for those who deride or slight what is done by those who
actually bear the brunt of the day; nor yet for those others who
always profess that they would like to take action, if only the
conditions of life were not what they actually are. The man who does
nothing cuts the same sordid figure in the pages of history, whether
he be cynic, or fop, or voluptuary. There is little use for the being
whose tepid soul knows nothing of the great and generous emotion, of
the high pride, the stern belief, the lofty enthusiasm, of the men who
quell the storm and ride the thunder. Well for these men if they
succeed; well also, though not so well, if they fail, given only that
they have nobly ventured, and have put forth all their heart and
strength. It is war-worn Hotspur, spent with hard fighting, he of the
many errors and the valiant end, over whose memory we love to linger,
not over the memory of the young lord who "but for the vile guns would
have been a soldier."

France has taught many lessons to other nations; surely one of the
most important is the lesson her whole history teaches, that a high
artistic and literary development is compatible with notable
leadership in arms and statecraft. The brilliant gallantry of the
French soldier has for many centuries been proverbial; and during
these same centuries at every court in Europe the "freemasons of
fashion" have treated the French tongue as their common speech; while
every artist and man of letters, and every man of science able to
appreciate that marvellous instrument of precision, French prose, has
turned towards France for aid and inspiration. How long the leadership
in arms and letters has lasted is curiously illustrated by the fact
that the earliest masterpiece in a modern tongue is the splendid
French epic which tells of Roland's doom and the vengeance of
Charlemagne when the lords of the Frankish host were stricken at
Roncesvalles.

Let those who have, keep, let those who have not, strive to attain, a
high standard of cultivation and scholarship. Yet let us remember that
these stand second to certain other things. There is need of a sound
body, and even more need of a sound mind. But above mind and above
body stands character--the sum of those qualities wh