I saw something quite as fine when I went to Gretna for a five-day visit to the workers there. You know Gretna Green? Every good American does. It is one of the shrines at which you worship. The sweet old world village has been swept away, or rather become quite unrecognisable. A great new city like those to which you are so accustomed "out West" has sprung up. When I saw all the signs and symbols of organised industry on a gigantic scale, I looked away across the shifting Solway sands and wondered whether the ghost of Ravenswood, riding to his doom, ever comes back to marvel at the thing that has happened.
Great crowds of women and girls are employed there and the welfare superintendents have their hands full. The problems and grave menace to youth segregated in such numbers far away from home influences are big enough to keep some of us awake at nights. We are fully alive to them and tackle them with all the wisdom and foresight we can muster for the gigantic task.
The spirit is fine—patriotism is a holy fire indeed which can purge the human heart clean of the dross itself.
I spoke a big incontrovertible truth in answer to a woman who was condoling rather profusely on the loss of our dear home. "You can get another house, but there is only _one_ country."
There are several rows of danger shops at Gretna, where the most inflammable of all the high explosives is handled.
To minimise the loss in case of accident these shops have been made to accommodate only ten or twelve workers. There was an explosion when I was there, and some of the workers were killed. The girls behaved with such quiet courage and endurance that one can hardly speak about it without tears.
And every one of them insisted on being sent at once into another shop to take the same risks all over again. The true war spirit which danger and death only deepens and intensifies.
But oh, Cornelia, more and more I feel that it is all wrong.
If only all this splendid force could be dedicated to construction, instead of to destruction, why then our social vices and problems would melt like mist before the morning sun. But perhaps my vision is limited, so that I do not see far enough. Perhaps we are building better than we know in the midst of this mighty débâcle.