In so far as autocracy is the rule of the few for the benefit of the few it is paganism.  In so far as democracy is the rule of the many for the benefit of the many it is Christianity.  He who believes this will perhaps believe with me that in a true sense this is a religious war, the war of conscience, honor, the moral sense against the rule of the bayonet and the bullet.

The cynic who thinks this war demonstrates the failure of Christianity should not forget such facts as the heroic struggle of Belgium to maintain her neutrality, the resolve of England at every cost to maintain her pledges to Belgium, the Red Cross following the armies in the field and ministering to the sick, the wounded and the suffering, regardless of their nationality, the general kind treatment to prisoners, accentuated by some very horrible exceptions, and all this contrasted with the enslaving, torturing, the crucifying, the flaying alive of prisoners captured in war by barbaric nations before the dawn of Christianity.

LYMAN ABBOTT.

Cornwall-on-Hudson, Sept. 17, 1914.

VIGIL

By HORTENSE FLEXNER.

I have waited with my mothers down the dim, uncertain ages,
I have waited in the cave and hut and tower,
  From the first dawn’s nameless fear
  To the death-list posted here
I have slain my soul in waiting, hour by hour.

Under pelt of beast, trap-taken, or the leaves by chance winds blow,
Under tunic, peasant hemp, or cloth of gold,
  By the fire, in low flame burning,
  I have crouched in silence, yearning,
And as now, my helpless heart has waited cold.

Ancient is the part I play—­like a cloak of heavy mourning,
I take it, bending, from a million women’s hands. 
  They have worn it, they have torn it,
  Agonizing, they have borne it,
And its folds are dark with heart-break of all lands.

Oh, the woman figure standing, with the face toward the horizon,
Oh, the hand above the eyes to ease the strain! 
  Gaunt and barren, stricken, lonely,
  With the empty memories only,
We have stood, the dry-eyed sentries of our pain.

Nothing we can do to stop them, nothing we can say to hold them;
Taking sunlight, laughter, youth, they swing away,
  And the things they leave grow strange,
  House and street and voices change,
But the women and the burdened hours stay.

I have waited with my mothers down the dim, uncertain ages,
While my children die, I pray the centuries through,
  And I wonder in my fear
  At the death-list posted here
If God has left the women waiting, too!

Nietzsche and German Culture

By Abraham Solomon.

A Letter to The New York Evening Post.