feminine, gracious in her smile, low-voiced, using two pretty hands in effective gestures as she conversed earnestly on topics of a personal

nature.

She was not an "intellectual," altho she delighted in some such scholar as John P. Mahaffy with his inexhaustible fund of Irish anecdotes. Mahaffy told stories with inimitable drollery to an admiring circle at the palace, after which the Empress herself would serve him with tea. Her conception of entertaining was to supply guests with food and drink; nor did she disdain explanations of the merits of her kitchen. She was reported the best cook in Germany, and a very good nurse. Nor was she above such cares as the heat of her consort's morning bath, which she prepared for him at the palace as well as at a country seat, where she had her own particular brood of chickens, milked a cow and pursued other vocations upon which are based claims to being a farmer's wife. She had a passion for needlework, which she could gratify, however, only when she was living in the country. She was a great stickler for church attendance. No tenant on her country estate would risk her displeasure by not appearing in his place for divine worship. With a chapel on the estate the Kaiserin was as likely as not to appear early in the village church to look about her as worshipers trooped in and make pointed inquiries after the services about the health of the absentees. These essentially feminine traits in his consort were not always palatable to William. She was not sufficiently imperial. He would have liked her to be more of a spectacle, to assume something of the grandeur of a Theodora, the majesty of a Zenobia, and the inspiring deportment of a Maria Theresa. His idea of feminine royalty was the famous Queen Louise of Prussia, whose career he knew by heart. The Kaiserin had been brought up in a German country mansion, the seat of the house of Schleswig-Holstein-Augustenburg, leading there the simple life of a German Marguerite, visiting the sick on her father's estate, doing a little needlework, watering flowers and reading books prescribed by the chaplain. She never in her life wore a pair of silk stockings until the day of her wedding. She was a wife and mother before she knew anything about lawn-tennis. Her diversions were horseback-riding, croquet, and archery, but she never was a good dancer. She had the indiscretion, not long after her marriage, to be caught asleep while the Emperor's mother was reading from a philosophical book aloud to the circle at Potsdam.

In the first years of this union, William soon thrust his wife into the background and she was long absorbed in the cares of a prolific maternity. At the time of the birth of her seventh child, the Princess Victoria Louise, her one daughter, afterward Duchess of Brunswick, she seemed to have become old. Her hair was already gray, altho she

was only thirty-four. Her only official recognition in the military life of her husband's empire was comprised in her rank as colonel of a hussar regiment with the black eagle, which was conspicuously worn when she went on horseback at the head of her troops in a uniform that was not in the least becoming to her Gretchen type of beauty. If the worst came to the worst she could have lived well on her own fortune. It was quite large, and, according to the Paris Temps, very wisely invested in securities of dividend-paying American railroads. The silk industry of the United States also yielded her a comfortable revenue as she had put money into large American mills.61

61 Adapted from an article by Alexander Harvey in Current Opinion, one by Herbert Bayard Swope in The Herald (New York), and a Berlin letter to The Daily News (London).

THE FORMER GERMAN EMPRESS ENTERING THE GATEWAY
OF AMERONGEN, IN 1919

In the distance is seen the Castle. At the gate stands one of the
military guards of the grounds

WOODROW WILSON, PRESIDENT OF THE UNITED STATES

Perhaps the Entente Allies could in time have defeated Germany with the United States remaining neutral. After the signing of the armistice it was revealed as a certainty that British sea-power was slowly strangling Germany to death, that Germany was starving as the Confederacy starved under the resistless pressure of the Northern blockade; that the battle of Jutland, proclaimed to the German people as a great German victory, was in reality the death blow to German hopes. So it was possible that the Entente might have won alone, provided it could have held out long enough, but without the material assistance of the United States, her men and money and abundant resources, her inventive genius and adaptability, the task would have been far longer and far harder and the ruin of Europe would have been in every sense greater. Moreover, without the cooperation of the United States Army and Navy, the ships that rose from American shipyards, the food that America denied herself so that the Entente nations might be fed, Europe would not have been able to end the war in 1918. Then the problem would have been, could the Entente hold out for a 1919 campaign?

The chief work performed by President Wilson probably was not seen in concentrating the strength of his country on the common cause, so much as in finally investing the war with a wider scope of moral grandeur. The United States might still have coined the ultimate victory into profit, by territorial or other gains, but these were not her motives. The long record of history affords few samples of a nation going into a great war, knowing that it would be compelled to make great sacrifices in lives and fortunes and asking no reward except the privilege of doing service for a cause vital to her national life, the cause of freedom. In history there is nothing quite parallel to the action of this country when, on April 6, 1917, it took up the challenge Germany had flung down. Almost from the first day of the war President Wilson had preached from the text of duty and service, for the high privilege of championing the rights of mankind. When war first broke out, however, he had tried to play the part of mediator, and his offer was declined. Many Americans condemned him for counseling neutrality and continuing in that state.

But, looking back afterward, many could see how, in some sense, it was fortunate that the United States did not take up arms in 1914, but that more than two years and a half elapsed before she began to play her part. Had the United States declared war in 1914, or in the early months of 1915, when the costly and tragic experiences of Eng land and France had still to be learned, it seems more than doubtful if Congress could have been induced to impose on the country the

PRESIDENT AND MRS. WILSON LUNCHING WITH ALBERT, KING OF THE BELGIANS, IN 1919
President Wilson's visit to Belgium, the last of his visits to European countries, was made just before he sailed for
home after signing the Peace Treaty. The scene of this luncheon is the devastated forest of Houthoulst, protection
from the sun and from falling caterpillars having been secured by a piece of striped canvas. At the extreme left of
the table is Miss Margaret Wilson, next to whom is King Albert. The President follows, with his cap on, and then
comes Mrs. Wilson. Opposite them are Brand Whitlock, Rear-Admiral Grayson, and others

selective draft; but even if Congress had done so, America, like England and France, would have had to pay the dear price of ignorance. American armies, insufficiently trained, insufficiently equipped, knowing little or nothing of the art of modern war, would have been thrown into that furnace of death to be slaughtered as the British and French were slaughtered; bravely they would have had to face machine-guns, their bravery futile.

But in 1918, when America had marshaled her legions, the technical superiority of Germany was no longer feared. The advantage Germany had at the beginning, because she alone of all nations was prepared, had definitely passed. Even more than that gain was the spiritual strength gained by the delay. What Mr. Wilson said in his appeal for neutrality in August, 1914, and what he said in his address to Congress on April 2, 1917, he had said scores of times in the intervening months, and was to say again and again between the time when America declared war and Germany, broken and defeated, signed the armistice. On all these occasions he had preached the moral side of the war. The duty imposed upon the United States was to uphold democracy against autocracy, to champion small and weak nations, to be the means whereby justice should be done to the weak as well as the strong.

The great purpose Mr. Wilson had in view was not always understood in his own country. Nor was this surprizing. Men's blood boiled in the Eastern States in 1915 (but not yet in the Western) when they heard of the crime of the Lusitania, and in their leaping passion were ready to fight to avenge the crime; but to fight for a thing so abstract as international morality, to be the champion of peoples with whom they had no intimate relations, of whose existence almost they were unaware, simply to spread the gospel of altruism, stirred no great emotion in 1914, 1915, or even in 1916. And yet in time Mr. Wilson stirred emotion as no man had done in our day, and as few men had in the long struggle between liberty and absolutism. Men will always fight with the gallantry of their blood in defense of their country, or to avenge old and deep-seated wrongs, but they will fight more desperately and die more gladly for a great and vital principle, once they fully understand it. That extraordinary trait in human nature is due, perhaps, to the fact that in every man there is planted some divine spark; in every man, even the most material, there is a touch of the mystic, to which some great spiritual cause, the meaning of which may be only dimly revealed, makes a powerful appeal. Americans of learning and men illiterate, from great cities and remote rural communities, even from isolated mountain homes, became in this war thrilled and uplifted at the thought of being