(He walks once or twice up and down the room..)

I’ve had another letter.

Dr. Jonathan.  This morning?

Asher.  No—­I got it before I left for Washington.  But I didn’t bring it in to you I wanted to think about it.

   (He draws the letter, together with a folded paper, from his pocket,
   and lays the paper down on the bench.  Then he adjusts his glasses
   and begins to read.)

“Dear dad,

“The sky is the colour of smeared charcoal.  We haven’t been in the trenches long enough to evolve web feet, so mine are resting on a duck board spread over a quagmire of pea soup.  The Heinies are right here, soaking in another ditch beyond a barbed wire fence, about the distance of second base from the home plate.  Such is modern war!

“But these aren’t the things that trouble me.  Last night, when I was wet to the skin and listening to the shells—­each singing its own song in the darkness—­I was able to think with astonishing ease better than if I were sitting at a mahogany desk in a sound proof room!  I was thinking over the talk we had the day I left home,—­do you remember it?—­about the real issue of this war.  I’ve thought of it time and again, but I’ve never written you about it.  Since I have been in France I have had a liberal education gathered from all sorts and conditions of men.  Right here in the trench near me are a street car conductor, a haberdasher, a Swedish farm hand, a grocery clerk, a college professor, a Pole from the Chicago Stock Yards, an Irish American janitor of a New York apartment house, and Grierson from Cleveland, whose father has an income of something like a million a year.  We have all decided that this is a war for the under dog, whether he comes from Belgium or Armenia or that so-called land of Democracy, the United States of America.  The hope that spurs us on and makes us willing to endure these swinish surroundings and die here in the mud, if need be, is that the world will now be reorganized on some intelligent basis; that Grierson and I, if we get back, won’t have to rot on a large income and petrified ideas, but will have some interesting and creative work to do.  Economic inequalities must be reduced, and those who toil must be given a chance to live, not merely to exist.  Their lives must include a little leisure, comfortable homes, art and beauty and above all an education that none of us, especially those of us who went to universities, never got,—­but which now should be available for all.

“The issue of this war is industrial democracy, without which political democracy is a farce.  That sentence is Dr. Jonathan’s.  But when I was learning how to use the bayonet from a British sergeant in Picardy I met an English manufacturer from Northumberland.  He is temporarily an officer.  I know your opinion of theorists, but this man is working out the experiment with human chemicals.  After all, the Constitution of the United States, now antiquated and revered, once existed only in the brains of French theorists!  In the beginning was the Word, but the deed must follow.  This Englishman, whose name is Wray, has given me the little pamphlet he wrote from his experience, and I shall send it to you.