of office and your instructions and your suspending clauses are the things that hold together the great contexture of this mysterious whole. These things do not make your Government. Dead instruments, passive tools as they are, it is the spirit of the English communion that gives all their life and efficacy to them. It is the spirit of the English Constitution which, infused through the mighty mass, pervades, feeds, unites, invigorates, vivifies every part of the empire, even to the minutest member.

And the doctrinaires of Centralization, vociferating their fad of Imperial Federation, would have that Constitution, in the moment of its supreme triumph for unity, cast away! Cast away for a new and written one by which Great Britain

and all her children alike would chain themselves together! Well may practical statesmen view the doctrinaires with some disdain, not unmindful of Burke's immortal scorn of such formalists:

"A sort of people who think that nothing exists but what is gross and material, and who, therefore, far from being qualified to be directors of the great movement of empire, are not fit to turn a wheel in the machine. To men truly initiated and rightly taught, those ruling and master principles which, in the opinion of such men as I have mentioned, have no substantial existence, are in truth everything and all in all. Magnanimity in politics is not seldom the truest wisdom; and a great empire and little minds go ill together."

ISS MARIE VAN VORST, who nursed the wounded at the American Ambulance in

Paris, will speak to you of it as an eyewitness. From her you will receive direct news of your splendid work of humanity. While she was caring for wounded French, English, and German I was attached to another hospital at Chartres. It happens, therefore, that I have never seen the American Military Hospital created by you, but I am not in ignorance concerning it any more than any other Parisian, any more, indeed, than the majority of the French people.

I know that the American Ambulance is the most remarkable hospital that the world has seen. I know that you, since the beginning of the war, have brought the aid of medical science to wounded men and that you have given not only money, but an institution, all ready, complete and of the most modern type, and, even more, that you have sent there your best surgeons and a small army of orderlies and nurses.

I know that at first one could not find a place; that there was available only a building in course of construction, intended to be the Pasteur School at Neuilly. This building was far from completion; it lacked doors and there were no stairs. I know that in three weeks your generosity, your energy, and your quick intelligence has made of this uncertain shell a modern military hospital, with white walls, electric light, baths, rooms for administering anaesthetics, operating rooms, sterlizing plants, apparatus for X-rays, and a dental

clinic. I know that automobiles, admirably adapted to the service, carried the wounded. And yet I do not know all. I know only by instinct of the devotion of your young girls, of your women, and of your young men, belonging often to prominent families, who served as stretcher bearers and orderlies.

I am not ignorant of the fact that they count by the hundreds those who have bcon cured at the American Ambulance at Neuilly, nor of the further fact that the rate of mortality is extremely low, although they have sent you those most gravely injured. I know that it is all free; that there are no charges made for the expenses of administration; that for the service rendered by your people there is no claim, and that every cent of every dollar subscribed goes entirely and directly to the care of the wounded. I know also that the expenses at the hospital are $4,000 a day, and that ever since the beginning your charity has met this demand.

Such splendid effort has not been ignored or misunderstood. The President of the French Republic has cabled to President Wilson his appreciation and his gratitude; General Fevier, Inspector General of Hospitals of the French Army, has publicly expressed his admiration; the English physicians and public men have shared their sentiments.

As to the people of Paris, as to the French nation, they have been touched to the depths of their being. And yet in France we have found all this quite natural. I shall tell you why. We have so high a regard for you that when you

do anything well no one is surprised. I believe that if a wounded soldier arriving at your hospital exclaimed, "This is wonderful!" his comrade who had been ahead of him would answer in a tone of admonition: "That surprises you? You do not know then that it is done by the Americans, by the people from the United States?" In this refusal to be astonished in the face of remarkable achievements, when they come from you, there is a tribute, a praise of high quality. which your feelings and your patriotism will know how to appreciate.

I have said that all that comes from you which is good and great seems natural to us, and I have given you a reason; but there is another. In France we are accustomed to consider the Republic of the United States as an affectionate, distant sister. When one receives a gift from a stranger one is astonished and cries out his thanks, but when the gift comes from a brother or from some one who, on similar occasions, has never failed, the thanks are not so outspoken but more profound. One says: "Ah, it is you, my brother. I suffer. I expected you. I knew that you would come, for I. should have gone to you had you needed me. I thank you."

And, indeed, we are closely bound together, you and we. Without doubt, common interest and an absence of possible competition helps to that end, but there is something more which unites us—it is our kindred sentiments. It is this kinship which has created our attraction for each other and which has cemented it; it is our common ground of affections, of hatreds, of hopes; our ideals rest upon the same high plane. To mention but one point, one of you has said: United States and France are the only two nations which have fought for an ideal." And it is that which separates us, you and us, from a certain other nation, and which has served to bring us two close together.

"The

We love you and we are grateful for what you are doing for us. When the day came for my departure from France to represent here the French Academy I asked of Mr. Poincaré, who had visited

the American Ambulance at Neuilly, if duty did not forbid me to go. "No," he said to me. "Go to the United States. Carry greetings to the great nation of America." And he gave to me, for your President, the letter with which you are familiar, where he expressed the admiration and the sympathy that he has for

you.

I have been traveling North and South in the Eastern part of the United States. I have had many opportunities to admire your power and the extent of your efforts. Today, in thinking of the American Ambulance Hospital in Paris, I admire your persistence in labor. You have established this hospital. That was good. But it costs a thousand dollars a day, and yet you keep on with the work. That is doubly good. Indeed, one can understand that you have not been willing, after having created this model hospital, that some day through lack of support its doors should close and the wounded you have taken in be turned over to others; certainly those first subscribers undertook a sort of moral obligation to themselves not to permit the work to fail. But, none the less, it is admirable that it should be so. To give once is something, but it is little if one compares the value of the first gift to those which follow.

The first charity is easily understood. Suddenly war is at hand. Its horrors can be imagined and every one feels that he can in some measure lessen them, and he opens his purse. Then time passes, the war continues, and one becomes accustomed to the thoughts that were at first unbearable-it is so far away and so long. Others in this way were checked after their first impulse.

But you, you have thought that, if it is good to establish a hospital, that alone was not enough, and that each day would bring new wounded to replace those who, cured, took up their guns again and returned to the field of battle. And since at the American Ambulance the wounded are cured quickly, the very excellence of your organization, the science of your surgeons, and the greatness of your sacrifices all bring upon you other and new sacrifices to be made.

T

HERE has just appeared in Paris a book called "La Guerre Vue d'Une Ambulance," which brings

the war closer to the eye and heart than anything else I have read. It is written by Abbé Felix Klein, Chaplain of the American Ambulance Hospital at Neuilly, a suburb of Paris, and has the added merit of describing the noble work which American money and American Red Cross nurses are doing there for the French wounded. The abbé, by the way, has twice visited the United States in recent years, has many warm friends here, and has written several enthusiastic books about the "Land of the Strenuous Life."

When the war broke out this largehearted priest and busy author dropped all his literary and other plans to minister to the wounded soldiers brought to the war hospital established by Americans in the fine new building of the Lycée Pasteur, which was to have received its first medical students a few weeks later. There were 250 beds at first, and later 500, with more than a hundred American automobiles carrying the wounded to it, often direct from the front.

Through all these months Abbé Klein has labored day and night among these sufferers, cheering some to recovery, easing the dying moments of others with spiritual solace, and, hardest of all, breaking the news of bereavement to parents.

From day to day, through those terrible weeks of fighting on the Aisne and the Marne, with Paris itself in danger, the good abbé wrote brief records of his hopes and fears regarding his wounded friends, and set down in living words the more heroic or touching phases of their simple stories. Let me translate a few of them for the reader.

Take, for instance, the case of Charles Marée, a blue-eyed, red-bearded hero of thirty years, an only son who had taken the place of his invalid father at the head of their factory, and who had responded to the first call to arms. During his months of suffering his parents were held in territory occupied by the enemy and could not be reached. The abbé goes on to tell his story:

Let us not be deceived by the calm smile on his face. For six weeks Charles Marée has been undergoing an almost continual martyrdom, his pelvis fractured, with all the consequences one divines, weakened by hemorrhage, his back broken, capable only of moving his head and arms. * He is one

of our most fervent Christians: I bring him the communion twice a week, and he never complains of suffering. He is also one of our bravest soldiers; he has received the military medal, and when I asked him how it came about he told me the following in a firm tone and with his hand in mine, for we are great friends:

"It was given to me the 8th of October. I had to fulfill a mission that was a little difficult. It was at Mazingarbe, between Béthune and Lens, and 9 o'clock in the evening. Two of the enemy's armored automachine guns had just been discovered approaching our lines. I was ordered to go and meet them with a Pugeot of twenty-five or thirty horse power-I was automobilist in the Thirtieth Dragoons.

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"I left by the little road from Vermelles on which the two hostile machines were reported to be approaching. After twenty minutes I stopped, put out my lights, and waited. A quarter of an hour of profound silence followed, and then I caught the sound of the first mitrailleuse. With one spin of the wheel I threw my machine across the middle of the road. That of the enemy struck us squarely in the centre. The moment the shock was past I rose from my seat with my revolver and killed the chauffeur and the mechanician.

"But almost immediately the second machine gun arrived. The two men on it comprehended what had happened. While one of them stopped the machine, the other aimed at me under his seat and fired a revolver ball that pierced both thighs; then they turned their machine and retreated. My companion, happily, was not hurt, 80 he