a thirtieth part of the Harvard men who were in the war.
My predominant desire is to emphasize the fact that the best way to regard these memoirs is not as obituaries, but as lives of the American educated class, edited by a capital biographer, the first three volumes wholly written by him—lives of all sorts of American college men drawn into one tragic story by their relation to one college and to the war, but even more profoundly unified and linked with all of us by their relation to one country, its culture, and its ideals. Every American university has materials for a record similar to this. This record happens to be—no, such things, alas! don't happen—this record is extraordinarily rich, and it has been handsomely made. I should like to persuade skeptics that they had better not pass it by as designed for a special audience or for respectful repose amid the dust of university archives. I wish to assure readers who feel no special interest in Harvard men as such, and who wish to forget the dead and to "study war no more," that here is an astonishing collection of materials for study of the great human qualities available for American life and the tasks of peace.
If, however, you are not in the skeptical class, which requires conciliation, you may be assured that Mr. Howe and his associates have brought out in these memoirs everything that can be said in honor of heroic virtues and fighting men and to the glory of Harvard and America militant. If your belief in the World War is unabated, if you instinctively honor young men who die at the behest of their country, if a relative of yours is commemorated here, if you feel an unmodified traditonal satisfaction in the military exploits of
