it is ninety-nine
to one they won't--they can't run away from their own degradation and
shame."

"Come on, Jimmie."

"Wait."

"Men of America, for every one of you who tries to dodge his duty to his
country there is a yellow streak somewhere underneath the hide of you.
Women of America, every one of you that helps to foster the spirit of
cowardice in your particular man or men is helping to make a coward. It's
the cowards and the quitters and the slackers and dodgers that need this
war more than the patriotic ones who are willing to buckle on and go!

"Don't be a buttonhole patriot! A government that is good enough to live
under is good enough to fight under!"

Cheers.

"If there is any reason on earth has manifested itself for this devastating
and terrible war it is that it has been a maker of men.

"Ladies and gentlemen, I am back from four months in the trenches with the
French army, and I've come home, now that my own country is at war, to give
her every ounce of energy I've got to offer. As soon as a hole in my side
is healed up. I'm going back to those trenches, and I want to say to you
that them four months of mine face to face with life and with death have
done more for me than all my twenty-four civilian years put together."

Cheers.

"I'll be a different man, if I live to come back home after this war
and take up my work again as a draftsman. Why, I've seen weaklings and
self-confessed failures and even ninnies go into them trenches and come
out--oh yes, plenty of them do come out--men. Men that have got close
enough down to the facts of things to feel new realizations of what life
means come over them. Men that have gotten back their pep, their ambitions,
their unselfishness. That's what war can do for your men, you women who
are helping them to foster the spirit of holding back, of cheating their
government. That's what war can do for your men. Make of them the kind
of men who some day can face their children without having to hang their
heads. Men who can answer for their part in making the world a safe place
for democracy."

An hour they stood there, the air quieting but chilling, and lavishly sown
stars cropping out. Street lights had come out, too, throwing up in ever
darker relief the figure above the heads of the crowd. His voice had
coarsened and taken on a raw edge, but every gesture was flung from the
socket, and from where they had forced themselves into the tight circle
Gertie Slaybac