he spirit's
gifts--toleration.

"You can't help loving your country," she said.

"Let's go indoors," he answered. "You'll catch cold out here. I want
to show you my alcove of books on the war."

"Of course one can't help loving one's country," he added. "I love
mine so much that I want to see her take the lead in making a new era
possible. She has sacrificed least for war, she should be ready to
sacrifice most for peace. As for me," he said, smiling, "I'd be
willing to sacrifice the whole Republican party!"

"I don't see why you call the war an absurdity," said Titania. "We HAD
to beat Germany, or where would civilization have been?"

"We had to beat Germany, yes, but the absurdity lies in the fact that
we had to beat ourselves in doing it. The first thing you'll find,
when the Peace Conference gets to work, will be that we shall have to
help Germany onto her feet again so that she can be punished in an
orderly way. We shall have to feed her and admit her to commerce so
that she can pay her indemnities--we shall have to police her cities to
prevent revolution from burning her up--and the upshot of it all will
be that men will have fought the most terrible war in history, and
endured nameless horrors, for the privilege of nursing their enemy back
to health. If that isn't an absurdity, what is? That's what happens
when a great nation like Germany goes insane.

"Well, we're up against some terribly complicated problems. My only
consolation is that I think the bookseller can play as useful a part as
any man in rebuilding the world's sanity. When I was fretting over
what I could do to help things along, I came across two lines in my
favourite poet that encouraged me. Good old George Herbert says:

A grain of glory mixed with humblenesse
Cures both a fever and lethargicknesse.

"Certainly running a second-hand bookstore is a pretty humble calling,
but I've mixed a grain of glory with it, in my own imagination at any
rate. You see, books contain the thoughts and dreams of men, their
hopes and strivings and all their immortal parts. It's in books that
most of us learn how splendidly worth-while life is. I never realized
the greatness of the human spirit, the indomitable grandeur of man's
mind, until I read Milton's Areopagitica. To read that great outburst
of splendid anger ennobles the meanest of us simply because we belong
to the same species of animal as Milton. Books ar