is personally responsible for the misgovernment of every Southern European state. We cannot be expected to continue indefinitely responding with a lively pang to every toothache in the Balkans. Of course those who are appointed to the work must clean up the mess. But for the average man in America the motto should now be 'Business as usual.' In his recreative hours he should drop the war books and read Jane Austen's Emma. He should abjure the war pictures and visit an Arcadian musical comedy, Seriously, I see no remedy for despair but some form of profoundly attending to one's own business."
"Ostriches!" snorted Thorpe. "You tories are all ostriches. You started the war with your heads in the sand, you got them out towards the end of it, but you won't be happy till you have them snugly in again. Have you seen what Irving Babbitt calls the war?—'the crowning stupidity of the ages.' Babbitt is one of the people who occasionally look at the total human aspect of the thing. What he means is that the entire performance, if held off and scrutinized at arm's length—say, an arm the length of Socrates's—looks like the act of an angry and underbred child. Now the time to punish and admonish a child is when his mis-
