It Might Have Happened To You

yourself insulted by the suggestion that it might have happened to y

to you were the merest accidents; they did not arise from your own inherent merit. It was your good luck to be born in America. No protest of

would not have been shared by you. You would have risen above them; you would have been too astute, too far-sighted, too resourceful

If society were disrupted and temporarily bankrupt, so that the delicate mechanism of modern business ceased to function, your way of earning your living would no longer find a market. You would have to turn from working with your brains to working with your hands. Everyone in your class would be doing the same; there would not be enough manual labour to go round. You might have made investments in the days of your prosperity; but in the face of national insolvency your former thrift would not avail you. Your investments would be so much worthless paper, totally unnegotiable. You m

have claimed as the ideals which urged them to fight precisely the same ideals for which we sacrificed and ultimately triumphed—liberty, justice, righteousness. Had their Governments not convinced them that their inheritance of freedom was in danger, they would not have risked their happiness in carnage. This at least is certain, whatever else is in doubt: the ordinary, home-loving citizen, whatever his

ity dies. One ceases to question how far their suffering is the outcome of their folly; his sole desperation is to bind up their wounds—especially the wounds of their children. When witnessing death and starvation on the wholesale scale now prevailing in Euro

lorn as you," he would have been laughed ta scorn and sent into exile. Yet that day has come. In Warsaw you may see the princesses, the generals, the fops, the plutocrats, the law-givers of that resplendent Court, clothed in rags, their feet in sodden boots, waiting their turn in the breadline. After such a sight, no reversal of fortunes, however far-fetched, seems impossible. It might happen to anybody. It might happen to me or you. There is even a likelihood that it will happen unless we l

rope, "It might have happened to you," there is a grim possibili