ly. The influx into Petrograd and
Moscow should be stopped. Relief organization should go out from these
cities toward the front, stop the refugees where they meet them, and
there make provision for them to spend the winter. To this purpose
hundreds and thousands of sleeping barracks and soup kitchens like those
in Petrograd must be built along the provincial highways. Thousands of
these people will never again see the familiar environment where they
have lived all their lives, even if Russia regains her lost provinces.
But more of them will be able to return eventually, and there will be
less suffering among them this winter, if they are stopped where they
are and are not allowed to flow into the two Russian capitals, so
terribly overcrowded already, and into the colder country north and east
of Petrograd and Moscow.

[Sidenote: Russia unable to handle situation.]

I understand that this policy has been adopted by the Tatiana Committee.
But Russia alone cannot handle the situation; she must have generous aid
from outside.

[Sidenote: America a synonym for service.]

A young American, Mr. Thomas Whittemore, who was in Sofia when Bulgaria
went to war, left there declining an invitation of the Queen of Bulgaria
to head a branch of the Red Cross, because his sympathies were with the
Allies, and is now in Russia working out a programme for the relief of
Russia's refugees under the auspices of the Tatiana Committee. He is out
on the roads in an automobile constantly, meeting the incoming human
flotsam and jetsam of war, and his recommendations will have the weight
of authority. America has become a synonym for service in France,
Belgium, and Servia, but thus far America has done next to nothing for
Russia. Shall America, who responded so splendidly to the appeal of
Belgium and Servia, ignore the needs of the stricken people of Poland
and the Baltic provinces, whose sufferings are greater than the
sufferings of the Belgians, certainly as great as the sufferings of the
Servians?

[Sidenote: War's most moving sight.]

There are many pathetic things in war--soldiers wasted with disease,
blasted in arm and leg with explosive shell, withered in eye and lung by
the terrible gas; but none of these things is so moving as the sight of
little children, homeless, parentless, and with clothing worn and torn
by travel, sleeping in empty freight cars, cold railway stations, or on
the very blizzard-swept sidewalks of Russian cities,