make the final sacrifice. It is the man who is not ready that hangs back. Now, every citizen of the republic is supposed to have an equal chance with every other citizen in the manifold life in which we live. If he has that chance, every citizen should take his chance in time of great national stress, and be as ready as any other man to perform his service. Moreover, as an employer, I would rather have a man who has had military training engaged in the civil occupations with which I might be connected - I don't care what they might be — I would rather have the man who has had the military training than the man who has not, other conditions being equal. It is not any sacrifice for a young fellow to take the military training, and I agree with General Wood, after careful investigation, that six months of intensive training will make a pretty good soldier. It is not sufficient for a finished soldier, but it will do very well. If we take the boys nineteen years old in this country and there are a million of them, and we assume that one half of them are physically fitand we train those 500,000 boys for six months in the summer, we are catching them at about the time they are passing from the high schools into the colleges, or from the high schools into the business in which they are to engage. It is not a great sacrifice for them to give six months' service at that time, and they will be prepared to do real service afterward." SONS OF MEMBERS NIGHT For the fourth time members and their sons sat down to a dinner annually called to enable the coming as well as the dominant generation of citizens to know what the felicities of life in the City Club are, and why they as coming voters need to be informed as to contemporary civic problems. Hon. Geo. S. Smith presided, as he has at the previous dinners. The first speaker was Hon. Edmund Billings, collector of the port of Boston, who described how the national revenues are collected and what some of the problems he has to meet are. Mayor Curley described some of the difficulties and perplexities of his post. He also made it clear that in many important respects the city is making a creditable record of debt reduction, fire prevention, diminished death rate, elimination of defective housing, and extension of practical education. Hon. Wm. F. Garcelon, graduate manager of Harvard athletics, and a veteran adviser of youth in the sporting world, described the benefits of sports carried on in an honorable and clean way. James H. Hustis, temporary receiver of the Boston & Maine Railroad, a successful administrator of transportation business, as his Boston & Albany and New York & New Haven record shows, told of the special tasks that he and men of his calling face as they try to meet the demands of the law, of investors, and of patrons of the railroads. He also quoted high military testimony as to the part played by Germany's railroads in her offensive and defensive campaigns, and went on to describe what the railroads of the United States were planning to do should the United States enter war. He asserted that the American railroads, with the lowest capitalization in the world and paying the highest wages, charge the lowest freight rates. Mr. Joseph Lee, of the Boston School Committee, and president of the Playground Association of America, then talked about the need of recreation in the life of youth and men of to-day, and gave practical hints as to how it should be gained. James J. Storrow, president of the Club, also spoke. PREPAREDNESS AND THE STATE OF THE UNION At a meeting held in the auditorium, which was crowded with an enthusiastic and highly aroused audience, prominent citizens and public officials considered "The State of the Union and Preparedness." The President of the Club, Mr. Storrow, who also is chairman of the state's Committee of Public Safety, introduced the chairman of the occasion, Hon. Michael J. Murray. Other speakers were Hon. Calvin Coolidge, lieutenant-governor of the Commonwealth; Hon. Guy Ham, Mr. Charles J. Martell, Mr. Judson Hannigan, Col. Harry L. Hawthorne, and Rev. Edward Cummings, Edward Everett Hale's successor in the South Congregational Church and an official of the World's Peace Foundation. The temper of the occasion and the point of view of the citizens who make up the Club were best expressed on this occasion by the words of Mr. Cummings, who said: REV. EDWARD CUMMINGS "A few minutes before I came to this hall I was called on the telephone by an amiable voice, which said it belonged to one of the Boston newspapers. The voice wanted to know what the Women's Peace Party was going to do about the war. I replied that I did not belong to the Women's Peace Party, and suggested that the owner of the voice might be laboring under some misapprehension about my sex, and possibly about my opinions. The voice then wanted to know if I could not tell what some peace organization was going to do about the war. I said the only one I was connected with was the World Peace Foundation; and that, so far as I knew, it was not going to make any change in its program, but was going on supporting the President of the United States now, just as it had been doing in the months past. [Applause.] The voice wanted to know why. I said, because the plan for a league of nations presented by the President of the United States to the foreign nations, months ago, and again presented in the memorable state paper which has just been given to the world, is the policy which represents the constructive peace-makers of this country and of other countries; because we are proud to recognize, in the President of the United States, one of the most distinguished peace-makers in history; because we are glad that his constructive peace policy has become the policy of this nation and of other nations. "Constructive peace-makers like the President of the United States have no illusions with regard to the price of peace. They know that the price of world peace is world organization. They know that the price of all the kinds of peace that have already been attained has been organization; and that always the price has to be paid in advance. Municipal peace was purchased by organizing the municipal family and providing the judicial substitutes for private war; state peace, by organizing the Commonwealth and providing judicial substitutes for war between the cities, and proper guaranties for the preservation of law and order; national peace, by organizing a national family, and providing a Supreme Court for the states, with adequate guaranties for the preservation of law and order and the repression of disorder. "And the peace-makers who follow your President know perfectly that international peace has got to be bought in the same way, and that the price has got to be paid in advance. They know that the nations of the world to-day have no right to peace, and no right to complain about the prevalence of war, because they have not yet paid the advance price. "In time of war, prepare for peace, is a good maxim; and the proposition that the President has put before this country and before the world, - the proposition that we should work together and fight together with the friends of freedom for the organization of a league of nations, — that program is one which you can work for in time of war as well as in time of peace. "It has been suggested that there are other less desirable kinds of peace-makers; and one enthusiast has been urging that the senior Senator from Massachusetts has proved such a successful curer of the morbid variety of pacifism that he ought to give up his other occupations and open a clinic for the treatment of these unfortunate cases. I hold no brief for the patients or the cure. "Great calamities are great revealers, because they bring great opportunities and great duties; and opportunity and duty are the tests that try the souls of nations, as well as of individuals, as by fire, and tell us which is gold and which is dross or common clay. Until the test comes, it is very hard to tell a plain-clothes hero from a coward; it is very hard to tell when you are walking through the street cars, whether you are treading on the toes of heroes and heroines or common people. But, when the earthquake shakes down a great city, or a fire breaks out in one of your tall buildings, or the Ship of State is being submarined, then all at once you find yourself surrounded by heroic men and women, who show their heroism by doing heroic things; not that the opportunity created heroic characters, but that it revealed them. It is one of the great compensations for the calamity of world war that it has revealed to us our fellow-men and fellow-women of such heroic mold. Men used to say cynically that our civilization was degenerate, and that we cared more for ease and gold than anything else. But no one any longer will ever dare to say those things, because, whatever else is true, the great world war has taught that everywhere heroism is the great common heritage of the human race; that we are a race of divine idealists, ready to lay our lives, and lives that are dearer to us than our own, upon the altar of patriotism, as a willing sacrifice for the ideals that we believe to be highest and best. So that, whether men are white or black, red or brown, or any other color, to-day they seem diviner, more heroic, and it seems better worth belonging to the human race, than before they were tested by the great opportunities and duties which this calamity has brought to the world. War Reveals National Character "The war has done another wonderful thing. Not only has it revealed unsuspected worth of character in individuals, it has also been a great revealer of the character of nations. The nations know themselves and know one another, to-day, as they have never done before. As the call of duty and of opportunity has come to nation after nation, and they have answered the call, fundamental differences of character and of purpose have been revealed; and gradually the human race has been divided into two great hostile groups. On the one hand the free nations, and on the other hand the free-booters. The world will never forget how the call of duty and of opportunity came to little Belgium, and revealed to her and to the world a band of Spartan heroes standing at the Thermopylae of our civilization, scorning all considerations of interest and of safety, holding fast and faithful unto death against the overwhelming host of pitiless and unscrupulous foes. 'The call of duty and of opportunity came likewise to England, and revealed to England, and to the world, a new England, in a new rôle, as the champion of the weak against the strong in the great family of nations, and the champion of democracy and liberty all around the world. It was the better nature of England that responded to the call of duty and opportunity, and went to the rescue of France and Belgium; and the new England has been faithful to that better self; and the world, under her leadership, has been organizing the great battle for democracy and liberty. 64 The call came to France, whom the world had often thought of as frivolous and weak. And it revealed to France and to the admiring world a glorious country, whose every field of battle is a field of honor, because, whether victorious or defeated, fighting men or fighting fiends, she never stoops to any reprisals that sully the honor of a soldier. [Applause.] "But there was one great anomaly which puzzled the world. Russia, for centuries the synonym for autocracy and despotism, intolerance and cruelty, was seemingly in the wrong camp; and everywhere one heard the query: How can the Allies be sincere in their contention that they are fighting the battles of freedom and liberty when they are fighting on the side of the most dreadful foe that human liberty knows in all the world? But that anomaly has happily been removed. Great Russia heard the call of opportunity and duty. The trial came to her with foes without and traitors within; and almost in the twinkling of an eye the nation that had been regarded as the dreaded foe of human progress was revealed as democratic, tolerant, progressive. "There was one anomaly more striking still. It is not so compli mentary to you and me as some of the things that have been said here to-night; but the fact remains that the great republic of the new world, who loves to hear her children boast that she is the leader and the champion of freedom always and everywhere, took no side in the great struggle; was content to stand aloof and watch the death grapple of democracy and autocracy while weeks grew to months and months grew to years; content to warn the nations grappling in a mortal combat to be careful how they trod upon a neutral's right to pursue its pleasures and its business without any interruption; content to talk of peace when there was no hope of honorable peace; content to tell those who were struggling that they must not hope for victory! But at last, thank God, that anomaly has also been removed [applause], and Americans can look a Belgian, or a Frenchman, or an Englishman or a Chinaman in the face again; and can look a German in the eye again. [Applause.] "What brought about the change? Why, at last the blind eyes of the great republic were opened, and her dull ears were unstopped, and she saw that it was not the sinking of merchant ships which was at stake, or the sinking of passenger ships, or the sinking of warships; but that it was the sinking of the Ship of State itself; that it was democracy, the great Ship of State, freighted with the hopes of humanity, that was being torpedoed on the high seas! Then she, too, joined the hosts of the free peoples, late, late and tardy, but very, very welcome. A Nation Prepared "People seem to take great satisfaction in telling you that your country is unprepared. I take great satisfaction in telling you that no country was ever better prepared to do the great, patriotic, practical work that it is given this country to do in this great crisis than we are. You may not have great armies of young men in reserve; but you have what those whom we are now proud to call our allies and our brothers in arms need far more you have your bank reserves, and you can draft them. You have your gold reserves, and you can send those shining soldiers of fortune by the billion to fight your battles; and the gold bullet goes a long way, farther even than the silver bullet, in this war. And we shall be recreant to our duty as individuals, and recreant to our duty as a nation, if we do not send our war eagles, our gold eagles, by the million, promptly across the ocean, bearing in their talons food for the hungry and clothing for the naked, and healing for the sick and wounded, and lightning for the soldiers in the field. 'There is another reason, in addition to the fact that you are so splendidly prepared, why you should send these shining legions of your gold reserves. Many of them came from the countries that now need them most, and they would be glad to go back if you gave the word. And that tricolor flag there reminds you of a debt of honor that you owe to glorious France, who gave you in your struggling infancy gold and blood and help and sympathy you can never repay. [Applause.] But you can take a billion of your shining legions and send them as a partial payment of the debt of honor that you owe to glorious France; and, if every man among you would make it his business to do what he can to |