ment to moment they explode.

In her final letter Mrs. Ward shows other great efforts which Great
Britain has made since the war began; that the taxes imposed for the
support of the war and cheerfully borne demand a fourth part of his income
from every well-to-do citizen; that five hundred million sterling, or
twenty-five hundred million dollars have been already lent by Britain to
her allies, a colossal portion of her income; that she has spent at the
yearly rate of three thousand million dollars on the army, a thousand
million dollars on the navy, while the munition department is costing
about four hundred million sterling, and is employing close upon two
million workers, one-tenth, I think, women; that the export trade of the
country, in spite of submarines and lack of tonnage, is at this moment
greater than it was in the corresponding months of 1913; she has raised an
army of four millions of men, and will get all she wants.

What is more precious than all the rest, besides the vast amount of
treasure that she has lavished upon the war, besides the rich mansions in
all parts of the land that she has devoted to the uses of the sick and the
wounded, she has given thousands, tens and hundreds of thousands of her
choicest youth, who have willingly surrendered their lives for the great
cause; young men of the noblest pedigree, without number, by their lives
and deaths have attested their right to be regarded as the flower of the
British youth; the professional classes and the universities have emptied
their halls so that the men of Oxford and Cambridge might take their
places with the rest, and offer up their lives as willing sacrifices, and
all the men of England of every degree have joined with them and been
welcomed as brothers in the ranks for the great sacrifice. The rank and
file, who are fighting and dying for England, are fighting in the same
spirit as their leaders and falling by the hundred thousand for the
nation's salvation. How exactly Emerson's noble verse fits them:

"So nigh is grandeur to our dust,
So near is God to man,
When Duty whispers low, 'Thou must,'
The youth replies, 'I can!'"

No one who reads this book can doubt for a moment, I think, that ENGLAND
HAS DONE ALL SHE COULD, has put forth efforts worthy of her history and of
her great traditions, that her national spirit is invincible, her national
resources inexhaustible, and that her irresistible will to conquer and to
rescue