It's bigness of soul that makes nations great and not population.
Money, comfort, limousines and ragtime are not the requisites of men
when heroes are dying. I hate the thought of Fifth Avenue, with its
pretty faces, its fashions, its smiling frivolity. America as a great
nation will die, as all coward civilisations have died, unless she
accepts the stigmata of sacrifice, which a divine opportunity again
offers her.

If it were but possible to show those ninety millions one battlefield
with its sprawling dead, its pity, its marvellous forgetfulness of self,
I think then--no, they wouldn't be afraid. Fear isn't the emotion one
feels--they would experience the shame of living when so many have shed
their youth freely. This war is a prolonged moment of exultation for
most of us--we are redeeming ourselves in our own eyes. To lay down
one's life for one's friend once seemed impossible. All that is altered.
We lay down our lives that the future generations may be good and kind,
and so we can contemplate oblivion with quiet eyes. Nothing that is
noblest that the Greeks taught is unpractised by the simplest men out
here to-day. They may die childless, but their example will father the
imagination of all the coming ages. These men, in the noble indignation
of a great ideal, face a worse hell than the most ingenious of fanatics
ever planned or plotted. Men die scorched like moths in a furnace, blown
to atoms, gassed, tortured. And again other men step forward to take
their places well knowing what will be their fate. Bodies may die, but
the spirit of England grows greater as each new soul speeds upon its
way. The battened souls of America will die and be buried. I believe the
decision of the next few days will prove to be the crisis in America's
nationhood. If she refuses the pain which will save her, the cancer of
self-despising will rob her of her life.

This feeling is strong with us. It's past midnight, but I could write
of nothing else to-night.

God bless you.

Yours ever,
Con.

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