universal revolution. Among our bourgeois, greater and less, among our proletariat as well, the destructive instincts, with whose possession we reproach the Germans, are carefully cultivated.

'A few days ago M. La Fouchardiere went to a bookshop and asked for some books for a little girl. They could give him only tales and pictures of killings, throat-cuttings, massacres, and exterminations. On next Mid-Lent day, you will see at Paris, on the Champ Elysees, thousands and thousands of youngsters dressed as generals and marshals. The cinematograph will show them the beauties of war; the children will be thus prepared for a military career, and as long as there are soldiers there will be wars. Our diplomats have even left some to the Germans. From childhood on, they will thus be busy preparing soldiers.

'My friends, let us break with these dangerous practices. It is the teacher's task to lead the child to love peace and its works and to detest war. He must banish from education everything that leads to hatred of the stranger, even to the hatred of yesterday's enemy, not because one should be easy with crime or ready to absolve the guilty, but because a people, no matter what it may be, is composed more of victims than of criminals, and because the punishment of the guilty ought not to be extended to innocent generations, and generally, because all peoples have much to pardon and be pardoned for.

'In a fine book which has just appeared, a book which I counsel you to read, Clean Hands, an essay on education without dogma, Michel Corday has pronounced these words which I use to reinforce my own: "I hate those who debase man to the brute level by hurling him upon all who are not exactly like him."

'My friends, cause hate to be hated! This is the most necessary and the simplest part of your task. The state of things into which a devastating war has plunged France and an entire world imposes on you duties of an extreme complexity which are difficult to fulfil. Pardon me for having returned to this, but it is the main point from which all depends. You must, without hope of finding either comfort or aid or even consent, be prepared to change education from roof tree to foundation stone in order to form constructive lives. Only workers have a place in modern society; the rest will be carried away in the whirlwind. Form intelligent workers, learned in the arts they practise, knowing what they owe to both the national community and the human community. Burn! burn all the books which teach hatred. Exalt toil and love. Form for us men who are reasonable, men capable of trampling upon the empty splendors of barbaric glories, capable of resisting the sanguinary desires of those nationalisms and imperialisms which crushed their fathers.

'Let there be no more industrial rivalries; no more wars; let us have work and peace. Whether we will it or not, an hour is at hand in which we must choose between being citizens of the world or spectators at the death of civilization.

'My friends, permit me to express an earnest wish which I must put before you incompletely and all too rapidly, a wish whose master idea, however, seems to me to be of a kind able to find root in all generous minds. With all my heart I look forward to a day when a delegation of teachers of all nations shall ally itself with the Workingmen's International, to prepare in concert with that organization a programme of universal education which shall sow in young minds the ideas from which the

REBUILDING A FRENCH VILLAGE

BY FREDERIC J. LIBBY

THE instinct of creation is a primal human instinct. Men might vainly envy the Creator the joy of the world's first daybreak when the morning stars sang together, were it not ours to fashion chaos into worlds, turn wilderness into heavy-laden fields, hew cities out of the forests and hills, ourselves, and shout for joy in godlike enterprises. Such is the present work in France -creation. It happens to take the form of re-creation but it loses none of its significance for that. Aubréville, for example, had been a thriving village and had died. After two years of buffeting there came a day when the great guns were turned upon it with deadly intent and its fluttering life was crushed. It ceased to be. Owls hooted among its staring ruins. The moonlight was reflected from fragmentary walls, but no soul walked visibly in or out of the crumbling doorways. The traveler on the Verdun train three months after the signing of the armistice found only in the wrecked railway station any resumption of village activity. Life might pass through the dead arteries and veins, but no vitality came to the members. The village was waiting in death for the revivifying touch of Love.

La Mission des Amis from its new center at Grange-le-Comte sent an outpost to Aubréville early in February of the current year. It was a group of builders who with such help as could be given by another building unit and by the earlier Neuvilly équipe, erected a three-roomed Malabry house and a long army barrack for sleeping rooms. Each sleeping room was soon proved capable of accommodating four men. There were no women in the équipe in

those days. Eve had not yet come to Aubréville. The colored soldiers who were guarding the American dump near the station found also no serpent. In fact, they were finding the place exceeding dull and sighed loudly for home.

The completion of living quarters for workers was promptly followed by their arrival. By the tenth of March there were a round dozen in the équipe, builders, aggies, cooks. The completion of the warehouse and the constitution of Aubréville as the distributing center of the region brought presently six more, warehousemen and truck drivers. The erection of houses amid the ruins began. Land, four years unturned except by the trench-spade, was now subjected to the rigid discipline of the plough and harrow propelled by the Mission tractor. From six in the morning until six at night its clatter was to be heard, weather permitting, in the huge piece of land above the équipe settlement. Other ploughs were held ready to rent at nominal prices to villagers as fast as they should return.

We say that the tractor ran, weather permitting. This permission was often refused in those March days and even well into April. Cold rains persisted day after day, week after week, as in the winter. Occasional bursts of sunshine brought hope that the gloomy spell was broken, only to deceive. Not until Easter did the sun become a familiar friend of builder and farmer. In May, though, the fine days became so continuous that there was widespread lament among the agriculturalists over the drought.'

The farmers were not the only ones who got on haltingly at Aubréville during the wet March. The builders were being delayed, too, but by other factors. Cars were arriving daily at the little station, cars of lumber, cars of tar paper, of cement and plaster, of

houses; and they had to be unloaded, more was the pity, by men who longed to be throwing together houses like the sister-équipe at Neuvilly, by sixes and dozens. There was no escaping the imperative summons of those waiting and much-needed cars. Day after day and even weeks passed and still the cars came, and still only a paltry sprinkling of new Mission houses in the village showed that the Friends were at work. The freight yard filled and the warehouse nearly burst and finally overflowed into dugouts near by; but by the test of houses, Aubréville équipe was a failure.

It was early in April that German prisoners came to the rescue and made possible the great work that has been wrought since, by which a village has been restored to life. Some opposition to their employment developed in the Mission in those first days, despite the need. The similarity of prison labor to slave labor was remarked with some acerbity by men who knew in their own spirit and flesh what the former meant. But the opportunity of applying our principles as Friends to a class of men woefully in need of friendship outweighed theoretical objections with the majority both at Aubréville and throughout the Mission, and it was not long before eight Germans from a camp near Neuvilly had added their strength to the Aubréville group. They could not stay nights, but otherwsie they were like members of the équipe. They ate with us; they worked with us; we were friends. Heute ist wie im Himmel gewesen' To-day has been as it were in Heaven' was the earnest comment of one of them at the close of his first day. Try to keep us till the end' was their request after three months of loyal service. Their coming released the builders for building, and a newera of productivity was inaugurated.

The very reasonable instructions

carried out by the builders demanded that they try to make possible at once the return of the farmers and the tradesmen and others essential to the organized life of the village. First, a few farmers came back with their families to newly-built homes. Then a carpenter returned. A baker was needed, and he came. The post office, a schoolhouse and mairie, a hotel of five rooms, homes for railway employees, for more carpenters, for more farmers, finally a simple churchthus the village has come to life before our eyes. At night we would carry our tools away from a finished house, and, passing next day, we would find a cart being unloaded at the door and the beginnings of housekeeping visible. Two or three days more, and white curtains would hang in every window, a miniature flower garden would have been dug beside the door, and, after the Mission had held its chicken sale, a rooster would be crowing on an incipient dung heap in the front yard. Wars devastate and pass, but the French peasant remains faithful to tradition.

When women had made their appearance in the village in appreciable numbers, the time had come for women to join our hitherto monastic équipe. A veteran relief worker ventured first to spy out the land. Her report was clearly favorable; for scarcely had she gone when two gentle ladies of the gentleladies agricultural department were there hard at work planting kitchen gardens for the families that might reach the village in late spring. The drought, a blessing to the builders, cut seriously into the success of all young gardens and much of this labor went for little. The project was none the less admirable and the appreciation accorded it was proportionate to the effort, not the fruits.

The relief department followed hard

on the heels of the agricultural department in assigning a permanent worker to our growing community. Children were now playing in our streets. A family was being reëstablished almost daily. The village was beginning to look alive. At the same time each household lacked many unprocurable necessities of decent living. To provide these invaluable trifles and to provide them in such a spirit as to express the great maternal heart of the Mission des Amis a woman was required. She came in the middle of May. It was her privilege to call from door to door and to become familiar with the more intimate life of individual families, to help those that needed help, to gather the children afternoons into a play-school, to distribute precious bed linen, to interpret in quiet conversations with wondering housewives the Mission's ideals and purpose. These conversations were supplemented at a concert which was given at the mairie during the latter half of June, to which all the village came and where after music and merriment the president of the Mission in happy phrases explained as clearly as can be done who we are and why we came to Aubréville.

Last and by no means least among the women to be added to the Aubréville group, was a housekeeper. She came in June. February would have been better. The Aubréville équipe is unanimously in accord with the opinion expressed in the Executive Committee not long ago that housekeepers are invaluable in maintaining the morale of every group of men. Let future expeditions of the Mission des Amis into Poland or Patagonia or Timbuctoo take notice!

As for the expedition to Aubréville, it is nearing the completion of its task. More than seventy families have now been provided with homes. Livestock

has been found for them and sold at cost or less. A Coöperative Store has been equipped two kilometers away at Neuvilly, where food and clothing can be bought cheaply. A summer school which is to be maintained by a philanthropic villager has been stocked with books and other paraphernalia. Mission mowing machines are cutting the grass of a score of villagers centering in Aubréville, and they will be followed by community harvesters and threshing machines also lent by the Mission.

To direct this activity and to finish the last houses a small group will stay on through the summer. Before the August Reconstruction shall appear, however, the main body of the Aubréville équipe will have moved to Avocourt, there to begin a fresh creation. The Mission artist on a recent visit to this unhappy site found nothing standing but a crucifix with a bit of barbed wire hanging from one of its outstretched arms. When he visits Avocourt again, it may be hoped that it will be not crucifixion but resurrection to which, like Aubréville, the village will bear witness, life restored by Love.

Reconstruction

WHEN FRENCHMEN AND

AMERICANS MEET

BY ROBERT DE TRAZ

In spite of the progress of knowledge, and the facility of traveling, it is clear that before the war the various nations had only false and incomplete ideas of each other. This reciprocal ignorance should be considered one of the causes of the conflict. It is a pressing matter that for the sake of the future of the world, allies should deepen their intimacy, and that enemies should actually get to know each other. We ought to see studies, psy