It was, I suppose, this assertion of personal liberty which drove our extreme Liberal wing before the war into that determined fighting of the Naval and Military Estimates year after year, that determined hatred of anything that looked like "militarism," and that constant belittlement of the soldier and his profession which so nearly handed us over, for lack of a reasonable "militarism," to the tender mercies of the German variety.

In James Herne's sadly underrated play, Griffith Davenport, we were always conscious of "Mr. Lincoln" in the background; and the act in which Governor Morton of Indiana brought the President's instructions to Davenport might fairly be called an obligatory scene, inasmuch as it gave us the requisite sense of personal nearness to the master-spirit, without involving any risk of belittlement through imperfections of representation.