in its ruins!" Nevertheless, it had to be so, if so it was. Political ethics had to be cannon-swept away in spite of their sacredness, even as the fond rites of old religions must give place to new worship through doubts and denials that seem sacrilegious. The life

of the nation was more sacred than any of its symbols. The life of the nation lost, its symbols symbolized naught but death-dead laws, dead rights, dead guarantees, dead sanctities. What was there in a loose bundle of little States, jealous of their independencies, to justify the promise of history in the founding of a New World and the establishing of a new political system on it. Was the New World no world whatever, but only a new wrangle and confusion of false hopes turned into bitter memories that swore by a past that had no antiquity to make it august or worshipful?

Hither

The war for the nation was a war for the world. But it took yet another war to disclose its worldwide import. Notwithstanding its presentiment of a destiny worthy of its historic preparations, the nation had somehow felt that that destiny was to be wholly wrought out on the American continent, where it was to have a separate and ocean-guarded home for its marvels of work and wealth. the Old World was to come in its decrepitude and be renewed. Here the oppressed of every clime would find freedom; the down-trodden a sursum corda of equal lift with counts and earls; and man as man, without distinction of race, man's utmost opportunity. Here! So swore the American Idea and the oath sounded in American ears like "the last syllable of recorded time.”

But close to the American continent lay an island not free, and, therefore, not American. The Old World still reigned there with Old-World tyrannies. This Old-World nearness was a sore, scarcely acute, but uncomfortable. It worried the American Idea. And yet the Idea had to suffer it. Political ethics forbade interference. International law said thus and so, and so and thus. A revolution broke out on the island in imitation of the Idea's own, and encouraged by the Idea's own success and sympathy. Still the Idea could not help. Garcia was a hero, but he must die in despair. The reconcentrados were a sad disgrace to civilization, but civilization preferred its disgrace to any unethical remedies. Once more the popular surge was felt, but the men in power stood as a breakwater in the way, and threw it back. Back, but only for awhile. As it swung and tossed, it gained tempestuous energy by delay. Then a strange night fell, and through the night rose a flare of explosion, reddening all its gloom, as one of the nation's battleships went down beneath murderous seas, while an embassy of souls flew swift as flame to heaven to plead for vengeance. Their prayer was heard. The red smoke was heaven's signal for war. War for Cuba alone-the near-sighted misdeemed it; but ere one foot of invasion set its print on a Cuban shore, another signal shot across the farthest Orient sky and traced its summons there as with the fiery autograph of God.

If God's signature was not beneath that summons, never has it appeared in history. The sign of Constantine was not more unmistakably divine or more

divinely imperative. A double dawn, a dawn of sunbeams and a dawn of battle-beams marked a new day for America—a day whose sunset was to be sunrise all 'round the earth until west turned to east, and the nation's only frontier was the splendor of the sky. "Read in the dawn," it seemed to say, "the story of your progress. Now it blushes along the Hudson and the Potomac. Now the Ohio shimmers beneath its beauty. Now the long serpentine Mississippi uncoils leagues of sheen at the sound of its breeze-sandaled feet. Anon the Rocky Mountains hail the skyey oriflamme: and the Sierras burn with its reflected colors as with forest fires, and California bares many a mine in one broad, golden gleam; and the Pacific coast, once a border, becomes a frill of foam in the vast westward spread.'

Its

For, no more than could the Blue Ridge or the Sierras, can the sea-waves stop the nation's career. The sea has lost its perils, and is sea no more. paths are smoother than ever cut through wilderness or climbed the ranges of mountains; its ship lines are as sure, and almost as swift, as railways; its solitudes have grown populous with sails that swarm along thoroughfares of commerce. It does not separate peoples, as it did of old, but brings them face to face. Every battleship carries a fortified shore, and makes all frontiers fluent. Like the hyaline of heaven, the sea shines with intimations of the Throne-will of the world. America is henceforth America of the seas. The asylum of the oppressed shall seek the oppressed, who once had to seek it. The home of man shall no longer remain far from any man's sense of exile. The New World

shall be true to its title, and mean more than a new half-world. The whole world is smaller now to travel and trade and intelligence and sympathy than the half-world was a century ago, and none too large for American enterprise and the sway of the American type of man.

Behold his flag afloat amid Philippine air as if a strip of stellar sky had suddenly wavered down to prove the lure of a brighter than stellar destiny. "He is mine," saith the World-Spirit, "I have chosen him by my only mode of choice. He cannot loiter or go back. His destiny is his duty. Dangers do but solemnize it. Costs render it more precious. Sacrifices convert the islands of its acquisition into the altars of a royal priesthood. By virtue of such priesthood alone has any nation a right to the high offices of history. If elect to honor, it is elect for service, the service of humanity. Let it fail here and it fails everywhere; the craven heart shall cower on its own hearth. But America shall not fail. To this task it was annointed in its youth. Its past years have been but the school of future performance. Its failure now would be the failure of history, the failure of mankind. Lift up holy hands, O chosen nation, and swear the oath of fealty. Thine be the sword of sentinelship that shall pace the round earth, and outwatch the latest years of barbarism. Rightly wield it, and with every stroke that sword shall sing, as the refrain of its victor-song, not 'The World for America,' but 'America for the World.'"'

XI

THE RED CROSS

VERY Brother of St. Andrew wears a Red Cross

EVER

on his breast. Of that Cross I speak. It is the sign of life by death. Such a life has its philosophy no less than its sentiment and action. Indeed, it is the only life that is rational. I know that sense doubts the Cross as it does all reason, the whole progress of science as well as of religion being a reproof of the credulity that sees the sun move around the earth, and the earth around self.

But if anything is certain about man, it is that pleasure is not his true end; that he can never acquire a permanent state of pleasure; that no folly is more foolish than to estimate him by his capacity for so contradictive a boon, or the use of things by their fitness to bestow its chimerical good.

Criticised by such a test, the world is indeed, as the pessimists say, the worst possible, an exquisite and tantalizing hell, and man the fiend of his own torment.

Dr. Bushnell, in his sermon on Christian joy, has made very clear and beautiful the distinction between happiness and joy that lies in the roots of the words themselves - happiness referring to what happens, the outward and circumstantial, which, however pleasant, has no essential relation to