“Well, it’s a relief,” one of the ladies exclaimed, “not to be travelling with half a dozen trunks and a hat-box!  Oh, yes, I realize what I’m doing.  I’m going to live in one of those flimsy portable houses with twenty cots and no privacy and wear the same clothes for months, but it’s better than thrashing around looking for something to do and never finding it, never getting anything real to spend one’s energy-on.  I’ve closed my country house, I’ve sublet my apartment, I’ve done with teas and bridge, and I’m happier than I’ve been in my life even if I don’t get enough sleep.”

Another lady, who looked still young, had two sons in the army.  “There was nothing for me to do but sit around the house and wait, and I want to be useful.  My husband has to stay at home; he can’t leave his business.”  Be useful!  There she struck the new and aggressive note of emancipation from the restricted self-sacrifice of the old order, of wider service for the unnamed and the unknown; and, above all, for the wider self-realization of which service is but a by-product.  I recall particularly among these women a young widow with an eager look in clear grey eyes that gazed eastward into the unknown with hope renewed.  Had she lived a quarter of a century ago she might have been doomed to slow desiccation.  There are thousands of such women in France today, and to them the great war has brought salvation.

From what country other than America could so many thousands of pilgrims —­even before our nation had entered the war—­have hurried across a wide ocean to take their part?  No matter what religion we profess, whether it be Calvinism, or Catholicism, we are individualists, pragmatists, empiricists for ever.  Our faces are set toward strange worlds presently to rise out of the sea and take on form and colour and substance—­worlds of new aspirations, of new ideas and new values.  And on this voyage I was reminded of Josiah Royce’s splendid summary of the American philosophy—­of the American religion as set forth by William James: 

“The spirit of the frontiers-man, of the gold-seeker or the home-builder transferred to the metaphysical or to the religious realm.  There is a far-off home, our long lost spiritual fortune.  Experience alone can guide us to the place where these things are, hence indeed you need experience.  You can only win your way on the frontier unless you are willing to live there.”

Through the pall of horror and tragedy the American sees a vision; for him it is not merely a material and bloody contest of arms and men, a military victory to be gained over an aggressive and wrong-minded people.  It is a world calamity, indeed, but a calamity, since it has come, to be spiritualized and utilized for the benefit of the future society of mankind.  It must be made to serve a purpose in helping to liberate the world from sentimentalism, ignorance, close-mindedness, and cant.