It is not easy without apparent hyperbole to write of the service which America would thus render to mankind.  She would have discovered a new sanction for human justice, would have made human society a reality.  She would have done something immeasurably greater, immeasurably more beneficent than any of the conquests recorded in the long story of man’s mostly futile struggles.  The democracy of America would have done something which the despots and the conquerors of all time, from Alexander and Caesar to Napoleon and the Kaiser, have found to be impossible.  Dangerous as I believe national vanity to be, America would, I think, find in the pride of this achievement—­this American leadership of the human race—­a glory that would not be vain, a world victory which the world would welcome.

SIR CHRISTOPHER CRADOCK.

By JOHN E. DOLSON.

    Through the fog of the fight we could dimly see,
      As ever the flame from the big guns flashed,
    That Cradock was doomed, yet his men and he,
      With their plates shot to junk, and their turrets smashed,
    Their ship heeled over, her funnels gone,
    Were fearlessly, doggedly fighting on.

    Out-speeded, out-metaled, out-ranged, out-shot
    By heavier guns, they were not out-fought. 
    Those men—­with the age-old British phlegm,
    That has conquered and held the seas for them,
    And the courage that causes the death-struck man
      To rise on his mangled stumps and try,
    With one last shot from his heated gun,
      To score a hit ere his spirit fly,
      Then sink in the welter of red, and die
      With the sighting squint fixed on his dead, glazed eye—­
    Accepted death as part of the plan.

    So the guns belched flame till the fight had run
      Into night; and now, in the distance dim,
    We could see, by the flashes, the dull, dark loom
    Of their hull, as it bore toward the Port of Doom,
      Away on the water’s misty rim—­
    Cradock and his few hundred men,
    Never, in time, to be seen again.

    While into the darkness their great shells streamed,
      Little the valiant Germans dreamed
    That Cradock was teaching them how to go
      When the fate their daring, itself, had sealed,
    Waiting, as yet, o’er the ocean’s verge,
      To their eyes undaunted would stand revealed;
    And, snared by a swifter, stronger foe,
    Out-classed, out-metaled, out-ranged, out-shot
    By heavier guns, but not out-fought,
    They, too, would sink in the sheltering surge.

Battle of the Suez Canal

A First-Hand Account of the Unsuccessful Turkish Invasion

[From The London Times, Feb. 19, 1915.]

ISMAILIA, Feb. 10.