PRESIDENT HARDING RECEIVING MEMBERS OF THE NATIONAL Mr. A. C. Davis, Secretary of the National Farmers' Union, is addressing President Harding, AN INFORMAL PHOTOGRAPH OF THE JAPANESE CABINET Here we see, in an informal group, Premier Hara of Japan and members of his Cabinet. The photograph was made at the Premier's home in Tokyo during a reception to foreign newspaper correspondents. Left to right: The Minister of Finance, Mr. Takahashi; the Minister of Communications, Mr. Noda; Premier Hara; the Minister of Railways, Mr. Motoda; the Minister of Home Affairs, Mr. Tokunami; the Minister of Foreign Affairs, Count Uchida (seated); the Minister of the Navy, Baron Kato (in uniform); the Minister of Agriculture, Mr. Yamamoto; and the Minister of Education, Mr. Nakabashi A MOTOR BOAT THAT CRUISES AT EXPRESS-TRAIN SPEED The fifty-foot cruiser Gar Jr. II won the cruiser championship at the recent regatta at Miami. After the races were over she started back for her home in Detroit via the Atlantic Ocean, the Hudson River, the Erie Canal, and the Great Lakes. She made the voyage from Miami to New York in 47 hours 23 minutes running time, 21 minutes faster than the elapsed time of the express train between these two points. The Gar Jr. II is equipped with two twelve-cylinder engines which develop a total of about 880 horse-power. Below decks she has all the comforts and conveniences required on a cruiser of her length. Automobilists who think that their gasoline bills are excessive are informed that this boat burns up one and one-half gallons of gasoline per mile. At top speed she can travel nearly forty-five miles an hour THE OUTLOOK'S SECOND PRIZE CONTEST “WHAT THE WORLD WAR A HUMAN RECORD IN INTIMATE LETTERS OF THE SPIRITUAL UPHEAVAL AND THE PARADE of sober introspection marched to our doors in answer to our call for letters on the subject of "What the World War Did to Me." We asked our readers to tell us of the spiritual earthquakes that reverberated through them during the conflict, what scars the war inscribed upon their characters, what changes and subtle reactions it caused. The first of our prize contests called for criticisms of The Outlook, and resulted in "amateurs' night" at the editorial council table. The present contest rapidly developed into a psychological clinic. It was an extraordinary experience meeting that sometimes resembled an old-fashioned mourners' bench. Super- But gloom and cynicism did not pre- A total of 544 contestants entered, against 401 who competed in the first contest. New York proved to be the most introspective State in the Union, entering 85 contestants. California was lasting changes in every human being during those four a first prize of Fifty Dollars a second prize of Thirty Dollars a third prize of Twenty Dollars How did the war change you? How did it alter your character? What did it add-what did it take away? Are you better for the war or worse? What spiritual upheavals, what subtle reactions, have you experienced? Search yourself for answers to these questions. Then write us a letter. In Contest Number One we asked you to write 500 words about The Outlook. Now write about yourself. Take 600 words to do it in-we are more interested in you than in ourselves. We don't like to impose a limit, but our restricted demands it. By a 600-word limit we merely mean the space that 600 words of average length will occupy. By using shorter words you can get in more. But be genuine; get down to realities. CONDITIONS OF CONTEST space 1. Write your name (add a pen name, if you like, for publication) and address in the upper left-hand corner of your letter. 2. All letters must be typewritten on one side of the paper only. 3. Limit your letter to 600 words of average length. 4. Your letter, to be eligible, must reach us on or before March 31, 1921. 5. We reserve the right to purchase desirable letters not winning prizes, and to publish them in The Outlook. 6. Unavailable letters will not be returned. 7. The staff of The Outlook will be the judges of the contest. CONTEST EDITOR, THE OUTLOOK COMPANY THE OFFER Reproduced from The Outlook of March 2 second, with 43; Massachusetts entered 37, Pennsylvania 35, Ohio 34, and Illinois 33. Forty-seven States and Canada were represented. All kinds of people came to confession. One was a rear-admiral of the United States Navy; another was a justice of the Supreme Court of Kansas. There were bank presidents and manufacturers, army officers and service men, editors and laborers. College presidents, professors, students, and country schoolteachers flocked to the contest. A portrait painter portrayed what the war had done to her; a Greenwich Village art student abandoned her easel for her writing-pad; one letter came from the Friars' Club in New York, and one from Zion City; fiction writers left off writing stories to write us facts. A linotype operator dashed off a contribution on the typesetting machine. TOO INTIMATE EVEN FOR PEN NAME From New York's Tenderloin to remote prairie parsonages came these engrossing records of changes inflicted by the conflict. Metropolitan ministers and army chaplains wrote with candor that has never sounded from their pulpits. Physicians rolled their experiences into epistolary pills. A woman in Providence, Rhode Island, submitted a vigorous letter, and a few days later ordered it withdrawn from the contest and destroyed, since it was "too intimate an admission to appear even over a pseudonym." Many thanked us for giving them an opportunity to write these letters; to express the inner turmoil helped them. Many put their emotions into original verse. Many, in their search for expression, quoted poets and others nearly every one from Socrates to Irvin Cobb. They went to Browning, Burns, Wordsworth, Lamb, Cowper, Ruskin, and Kipling. They leaned upon Tolstoy, Mirabeau, Nietzsche, Goethe. The groping for adequate expression led to Longfellow, Whittier, Lowell, Abraham Lincoln, Lyman Abbott, Hermann Hagedorn, and Sinclair Lewis. Barrie and Huneker were invoked. Sir Oliver Lodge was cited. Statements by Woodrow Wilson and President Harding were marshaled. If this contest has done nothing more, it has sent hundreds back to the poets. Browning's "God's in his heaven, all's right with the world" was quoted often est, with Sherman's "War is hell" a persistent second. BROMIDES VIE WITH REALITIES Many of the letters were remarkable for their genuineness. But the platitudinarians had their day. Such phrases as "vaunted civilization," "saw red," "flower of our manhood," and "torch of liberty" often bobbed familiarly into view. Some contestants, in their eagerness, forgot to write on the subject of the contest and submitted essays on Wilson's policies, discourses on the strategies of Foch, dissertations on political economy, theses on the Negro problem, and tabloid histories of civilization. The religious note was sounded in the majority of the letters; a note of bitter cynicism crept into others. Some confessed that the war drove them into the ministry; others, that the war drove them out of it. Hardened newspaper reporters described their passionate love of country. "Disappointingly unchanged," writes one of the few who experienced no spiritual earthquakes; another "never even mailed a letter to France." The war taught thrift, loyalty, patriotism, courage, thoughtfulness, and sympathy. It taught geography and love of books. It made "citizens of the world." One contestant was stricken with apoplexy; another's hair turned white; some were infected with tuberculosis. "It has made an American out of me," recurs repeatedly. Many learned for the first time in their lives to hate. "THE MIDNIGHT OF MY LIFE" "I can no longer pray;" "For me the war will never be over;" "I am weary, unhappy, restless, and adrift;" "It robbed me of much of my capacity for sympathy, kindness, and love;" "I am more nervous and my appetite for tobacco, liquor, and the ladies has increased," are various statements of nervous depression. "This is the midnight of my life," says one whose business has gone to smash. "Things I once held dear are now pitifully cheap," expresses the disillusionment of one writer. "Would my patriotism induce me to buy another Liberty Bond? Never!" writes one who has lost his faith in his country. "The war pulled me up by the roots; my health is shattered; I am an irritable pessimist. There are no holy wars-no government has a right to draft a man to fight," states another. CONFESSIONS FROM CLERGYMEN Theologies were disrupted and rebuilt. A Presbyterian minister writes: "Men of knotted hearts are not attracted by easy things. Jesus has been thought of as 'dear' and 'precious' Jesus. And it has not appealed to men. Men did not follow a 'dear' Lincoln, a 'dear' Roosevelt, a 'dear' Foch, but men will follow a rugged, granite, and majestic Christ." "For the first time in my life I learned that the greatest test of character is what we do when we know we will not be found out," concludes another Presbyterian minister. Many told THE CHIEF PRIZE WINNER MISS LEE RAMSDELL us with candor of their faith that divine intervention would keep their sons and husbands from falling in battle. "It made me lose my interest in religion; the war stopped me from going to all places of amusement. When I see people dancing, I feel like rebuking them. . . . It seems as though all the feeling had been drained from everything else and had been embodied in me. I find I cannot get over the war. I am morbid, grief-stricken, inconsolable," confesses one. An anonymous New Yorker who wrote his contest letter on Hotel Claridge stationery and claims to be the pastor of one of the largest metropolitan churches, confesses that the war destroyed his belief in God, his faith in Christ, in the Church, and in human nature, and bereft him of his belief in himself. "The war taught me to hate; it disjointed my theology," writes a Cleveland clergyman. "It furnished my heart with a proud sorsow," writes a Pennsylvania clergyman, whose son was killed in battle. "War, always futile, lacks purifying power and brings about no true progress," one contestant laments. "We have lost the tone of our women. Mothers throw their daughters at the heads of soldiers in an ecstasy of patriotism," complains an Atlanta woman. One woman finds comfort in a knowledge that her brother, wounded in the war, is now at home nights instead of getting into entanglements. Another naïvely confesses that before the war she was afraid to go downstairs after the lights were out, but that now she goes all over in the dark and sometimes late at night she even goes "to the back porch to get something from the icebox." REALISM OF THE TRENCHES The reactions of men who were in the fighting are vividly portrayed. "Before the war," confides a Pennsylvanian, "the sight of blood made me shudder. .. I became an aviator, and watched, tigerlike, all the movements of a group of Germans, fondled tenderly the bomb in my hands; my whole body trembled lest something untoward should turn up and spoil my kill." "Had I not been afraid of the scorn of my brother officers and the scoffs of my men, I would have fled to the rear," confesses a Wisconsin officer, writing of a battle. "I see war as a horrible, grasping octopus with hundreds of poisonous, death-dealing tentacles that squeeze out the culture and refinement of a man," writes a veteran. A regimental sergeant-major: "I considered myself hard-boiled and acted the part toward everybody, including my wife. I scoffed at religion as unworthy of a real man and a mark of the sissy and weakling." Before going over the top for the first time he tried to pray, but had even forgotten the Lord's Prayer. "If I get out of this, I will never be unhappy again," reflected one of the contestants under shell fire in the Argonne Forest. To-day he is "not afraid of dead men any more and is not in the least afraid to die." "I went into the army a conscientious objector, a radical, and a recluse. . . . I came out of it with the knowledge of men and the philosophy of beauty," says another. "My moral fiber has been coarsened. The war has blunted my sensitiveness to human suffering. In 1914 I wept tears of distress over a rabbit which I had shot. I could go out now at the command of my Government in cold-blooded fashion and commit all the barbarisms of twentieth-century legalized murder," writes a Chicago man. A Denver man entered the war, lost himself and God, and found manhood. "I played poker in the box car which carried me to the front and read the Testament in the hospital train which took me to the rear," he tells us. "To disclose it all would take the genius and the understanding of a god. I learned to talk from the side of my mouth and drink and curse with the rest of our 'noble crusaders.' Authority infuriated me and the first suspicion of an order made me sullen and dangerous. . . . Each man in his crudeness and lewdness nauseated me," writes a service man. REACTIONS OF STAY-AT-HOMES "When our boy came back," complains a mother, "we could hardly recognize for our strong, impulsive, loving son whom we had loaned to Uncle Sam this irritable, restless, nervous man with defective hearing from shells exploding all about him, and limbs aching and twitching from strain and exposure, and with that inevitable companion of all returned oversea boys, the coffin-nail, between his teeth." "In the army I found that hard drinkers and fast livers and profanetongued men often proved to be the kindest-hearted, squarest friends one could ever have," one woman reports. ས ""You lost an arm?' asked a woman of a soldier. 'No, I gave it,' he returned, proudly. If patriotism can breed such an answer from a man who has known the hell of blood and exploding shells, then war must have some soul-growing process," she concludes. Numerous letters came from women whose husbands or sons were killed in battle. One wife lost her soldier-husband to a French girl; a poignant companion letter describes the tragedy of a soldier who returned home to find his wife devoted to another man and lost to him. SOCIAL BARRIERS VANISH Friendship thrived as the result of the war. A North Carolina woman became acquainted with every white person and nearly every colored one in her township. One left her snobbishness in the first hospital ward she entered. Judging from these letters, there are enormous quantities of snobbishness on America's side-tracks for which there is no further all foreigners in America and that he hates the term "melting-pot,” while a Harvard Master of Arts admits that he can never be a good democrat again. From British Columbia: "We are a small people living small lives in a faroff corner of the world. But for once we lived. We can never be quite so small again." A Kansas woman was drawn into strenuous Red Cross work by a letter from a dying soldier urging her to carry on. An Illinois woman "learned to dictate pamphlets and speeches while six typewriters banged about me. I came out of the war knowing how to work, not only one day, but every day and all day and all night if necessary." Α Texas woman found that "it is terribly important to our Nation what the average American woman thinks and feels." "The war has brought the rest of the world to us, has given us the world for our home, instead of 'Main Street,' " comes from North Dakota. A Tacoma physician ably phrased the new sense of devotion to the home which the war deeply impressed upon many. "The pathos of distance, almost as if by death, made me know that nothing in life could take the place of home," he writes. "I Darned that there are unimaginable treasures of kindness and goodness in men and women. . . . It revealed hidden traits of character in my wife as fine as those of the heroines of history." The war drove in the lesson of thrift; one "learned to eat horse-meat with relish." A Massachusetts woman "patched impossible B. V. D.'s." "The war made us out-grandmother our grandmothers in point of thrift," claims one. A Rhode Island woman discovered that skill in cake-making counted for more than familiarity with the classics. "It taught the dignity of old clothes," recurs often. "The war doubled my income within the last twelvemonth and is going to double it again within the next few years," boasts a South Dakotan. Many women were enriched spiritually by discovering something to do. One of them now runs "a restaurant for undernourished children and a club where sixty young aliens nightly meet men and women of broader opportunity. The war has shown me my work and trained me for it. Thousands have had the same experience," she declares. An amazing record of changed lives is this pile of chronicles of the war. It is a startling panorama of what war does to the human spirit. It contains enough plots for a shelf of novels. One remarkable thing about these 544 letters is the fact that they disclose that so many people are able to write with candor and vitality about themselves. They reveal, on the whole, a breaking away from traditions of thought and conduct, a new concern with realities, an escape from ruts, a more rugged sense of comradeship with one's fellows. These letters reveal a diminished respect for conventional institutions and heightened respect for men and women. I FIRST PRIZE "DEATH BECAME A FRIEND" BY LEE RAMSDELL WAS in France in 1917-19, first work It ing with the French refugees, then in American hospitals. I went there a snob. I got over it. The uniform was the great leveler. For once we humans looked into each other's eyes, not at each other's rags or Rolls-Royces. was a liberal education. The fineness that existed in rough, uneducated men, the guts that developed in pampered pets, was unbelievable. Now that it's over, shall we be able to keep on seeing the man instead of the manicure? Life, trouble, even death, seem less momentous than they did. The only real calamity is not to meet life gallantly. I remember the troop trains of Americans hip-hurrahing past our hospital on their way to the front, and the ambulance trains slipping quietly back with them, very silent. A terrible Juggernaut had rolled over those eager boys; but had it crushed them? Not they! They climbed on top and made it carry them along! One man suffered agonies for months in the hope of saving a shattered leg. His cot backed against rough boards that smelled of Dakin Solution, and gas gangrene, and fog from the muddy fields outside. But when he talked his room became a drawing-room, with sunshine pouring in, and apple blossoms. And when, months later in Paris, I met him on crutches, the leg gone, he joked about it until he fairly persuaded us that he was glad to have the thing off. And I can still see a young French convalescent, his right sleeve empty to the shoulder, swinging past us down the Champs, so erect and debonair that I almost envied him that badge of honor. Of such metal were our armies. And, lastly, I came to realize that death was not the end. Oh, yes, I learned it as a child; but when my father died I only knew that he was gone, blown out like a candle. Where? Who knew? No one. Death was a solitary, terrifying thing. But in France it became a friend. Poor tortured boys would feel a blessed surcease from pain and look up to find the Great Physician at their side, bringing merciful rest and the supreme healing. Death was a daily commonplace. Lads were here to-day and to-morrow gone, but their spirits were too young and alive and vivid to vanish with the body, even after we had seen the flag-draped coffins lowered into the ground at "Taps." They were so close and real that at times I felt that I had more friends in the unseen world than in this. It sounds silly, but it's true. . . . And so, when I came home and my own mother died I did not lose her, as I had my father. She sits in the sunny east window with her mending, or we stroll together in the garden and I cry: "Mother, see how lovely your roses are, but what ails those sweet peas? What would you do with them?" During her sickness her little |