thing from the sane part of
the world to enable us to keep our balance. One of the commonest
things you hear about now is the insanity of a good number of the
poor fellows who come back from the trenches as well as of a good
many Belgians. The sights and sounds they've experienced unhinge
their reason. If this war keep up long enough--and it isn't going
to end soon--people who have had no sight of it will go crazy,
too--the continuous thought of it, the inability to get away from
it by any device whatever--all this tells on us all. Letters, then,
plenty of them--let 'em come.

You are in a peaceful land. The war is a long, long way off. You
suffer nothing worse than a little idleness and a little poverty.
They are nothing. I hope (and believe) that you get enough to eat.
Be content, then. Read the poets, improve a piece of land, play
with the baby, learn golf. That's the happy and philosophic and
fortunate life in these times of world-madness.

As for the continent of Europe--forget it. We have paid far too
much attention to it. It has ceased to be worth it. And now it's of
far less value to us--and will be for the rest of your life--than
it has ever been before. An ancient home of man, the home, too, of
beautiful things--buildings, pictures, old places, old traditions,
dead civilizations--the place where man rose from barbarism to
civilization--it is now bankrupt, its best young men dead, its
system of politics and of government a failure, its social
structure enslaving and tyrannical--it has little help for us. The
American spirit, which is the spirit that concerns itself with
making life better for the whole mass of men--that's at home at its
best with us. The whole future of the race is in the new
countries--our country chiefly. This grows on one more and more and
more. The things that are best worth while are on our side of the
ocean. And we've got all the bigger job to do because of this
violent demonstration of the failure of continental Europe. It's
gone on living on a false basis till its elements got so mixed that
it has simply blown itself to pieces. It is a great convulsion of
nature, as an earthquake or a volcano is. Human life there isn't
worth what a yellow dog's life is worth in Moore County. Don't
bother yourself with the con