What has the madness for world conquest done for her now? She has made enemies of all, and made all her enemies suffer. Like the strong blind man of history, she has seized the columns of civilization and brought the whole temple down. But has she not destroyed herself utterly amid the ruins? Her industry is paralyzed, her commerce gone. Her navy is dishonoured. Some force she still possesses at sea, but it is force to be expended on sea piracy alone. And it is not piracy that can save her. At most, in her extremity, it will do for her what a life belt does for a lone figure in a deserted ocean. It prolongs the agony that precedes inevitable extinction. It is the throw of the desperate gambler that Germany has made, when she flings this last vestige of her honour into the sea.
ARTHUR POLLEN.
"Weeping, She Hath Wept"
THE WIDOWS OF BELGIUM
While a world of mourners is plaintively asking, "What has become of our brave dead, where are they? Alas! how dark is the world without them, how silent the home, how sad the heart"; whilst the mourner is groping like the blind woman for her lost treasure, the Belgian mother, and the Belgian widow, and the Belgian orphan are on their knees, praying, "Eternal rest give to them, O Lord; let a perpetual light shine upon them," the Christian plea that has echoed down the ages from the day of the Maccabees till now, exhorting us to pray for the dead that they may be loosed from their sins. I would remind the broken-hearted mother beseeching me to tell her where can her brave boy be gone, adding, "His was such a lonely journey; did he find his way to God?" of the words of the poet, who finds his answer to her question in the flight of a sea bird sailing sunward from the winter snows:
There is a Power whose care
Teaches thy way along the pathless coast,
The desert and illimitable air,
Lone, wandering but not lost:
He who from zone to zone
Guides, through the boundless sky, thy certain flight,
In the lone way which thou must tread alone
Will lead thy steps aright.