But doesna it a’ come to the same answer i’ the end—­that it wall tak’ more than even this war to change human nature?  I think that’s so.

It’s unfashionable, I suppose, to talk of love.  They’ll be saying I’m an auld sentimentalist if I remind you of an old saying—­that it’s love that makes the world go round.  But it’s true.  And love wall be love until the last trumpet is sounded, and it wall make men and women, lads and lassies, act i’ the same daft way it always has—­thank God!

Love brings man and woman together—­makes them attractive, one to the ither.  Wull some matter of economics keep them apart?  Has it no been proved, ever since the beginning of the world, that when love comes in nothing else matters?  To be sure—­to be sure.

It’s a strange thing, but it’s aye the matters that gie the maist concern to the prophets of evil that gie me the greatest comfort when I get into an argument or a discussion aboot the war and its effects upon humanity.  They’re much concerned about the bairns.  They tell me they’ve got out of hand these last years, and that there’s no doing anything wi’ them any more.  Did those folk see the way the Boy Scouts did, I wonder?

Everywhere those laddies were splendid.  In Britain they were messengers; they helped to guard the coasts; they did all sorts of work frae start to finish.  They released thousands of men who wad have been held at hame except for them.

And it was the same way in America.  There I helped, as much as I could, in selling Liberty Bonds.  And I saw there the way the Boy Scouts worked.  They sold more bonds than you would have thought possible.  They helped me greatly, I know.  I’d be speaking at some great meeting.  I’d urge the people to buy—­and before they could grow cold and forget the mood my words had aroused in them, there’d be a boy in uniform at their elbows, holding a blank for them to sign.

And the little girls worked at sewing and making bandages.  I dinna ken just what these folk that are so disturbed aboot our boys and girls wad be wanting.  Maybe they’re o’ the sort who think bairns should be seen and not heard.  I’m not one of those, maself—­I like to meet a bairn that’s able and willing to stand up and talk wi’ me.  And all I can say is that those who are discouraged about the future of the race because of the degeneration of childhood during the war do not know what they’re talking about.

Women and children!  Aye, it’s well that we’ve talked of them and thought of them, and fought for them.  For the war was fought for them—­fought to make it a better world for them.  Men did not go out and suffer and die for the sake of any gain that they could make.  They fought that the world might be a better one for children yet unborn to live in, and for the bairns they’d left behind to grow up in.