exclaimed. "You don't think those Dutchmen were right
to drown babies and--"

"No! I think they were ghastly murderers! I think they were detestable
and fiendish and monstrous and--"

"Well, then, my goodness! What do you want?"

"I don't want war!"

"You don't?"

"I want Christianity!" she cried. "I can't think of the Germans without
hating them, and so to-day, when all the world is hating them, I keep
myself from thinking of them as much as I can. Already half the world is
full of war; you want to go to war to make things right, but it won't;
it will only make more war!"

"Well, I--"

"Don't you see what you've done, you boys?" she said. "Don't you see
what you've done with your absurd telegram? That started the rest; they
thought they _all_ had to send telegrams like that."

"Well, the faculty--"

"Even they mightn't have thought of it if it hadn't been for the first
one. Vengeance is the most terrible thought; once you put it into
people's minds that they ought to have it, it runs away with them."

"Well, it isn't mostly vengeance we're after, at all. There's a lot more
to it than just getting even with--"

She did not heed him. "You're all blind! You don't see what you're
doing; you don't even see what you've done to this peaceful place here.
You've filled it full of thoughts of fury and killing and massacre--"

"Why, no," said Ramsey. "It was those Dutch did that to us; and,
besides, there's more to it than you--"

"No, there isn't," she interrupted. "It's just the old brutal spirit
that nations inherit from the time they were only tribes; it's the tribe
spirit, and an eye for an eye and a tooth for a tooth. It's those things
and the love of fighting--men have always loved to fight. Civilization
hasn't taken it out of them; men still have the brute in them that loves
to fight!"

"I don't think so," said Ramsey. "Americans don't love to fight; I don't
know about other countries, but we don't. Of course, here and there,
there's some fellow that likes to hunt around for scrapes, but I never
saw more than three or four in my life that acted that way. Of course a
football team often has a scrapper or two on it, but that's different."

"No," she said. "I think you all really love to fight."

Ramsey was roused to become argumentative. "I don't see where you get
the idea. Colburn isn't that way, and back at school there wasn't a
single boy that was anything like that."

"What!" She stopped, and turne