W

E HAVE nothing but money over here now," said a Norwegian friend to me when I passed through Christiania in July last year.

Those words give the crux of the peculiar situation which the war has created in the small northern countries. To them the war has come carrying fortune in one hand and famine in the other. They have never been richer in the one thing supposed to be capable of procuring everything else. They have probably never been so poor in all those things that, under normal circumstances, make money worth having.

The war, however, has brought them more than this supreme lesson in the real nature of wealth. It has taught them-in a most painful and, therefore, most convincing waythat, while neutrality may be a sacred duty both to oneself and others, it has evils and trials of its own, secondary only to those of belligerency. It has over and over again placed them between the devil and the deep, deep sea. It has forced them to turn the smitten cheek to the smiter, and to hide their clenched fists in their pockets. It has made them doubt whether right can exist without might. It has brought them some fortitude and patience, but much more dissension and corruption. It has put a new edge on their old strifes, and it has turned most of their old hopes and faiths into so many worthless rags. America is no longer a neutral-thank Heaven! It was a very big neutral before it became a belligerent, and it lived very far away from the heart of the maelstrom that is now trying to submerge the whole world. America has never known and can never know what it means to be a small neutral surrounded on every side by the great contending Powers. In trying to tell what such a situation implies I shall use Sweden as an illustration-not

because it is more important than other countries in the same bad fix, but because I have spent some nineteen months within its borders during the war, and because what I saw then and there is typical of what I glimpsed during shorter stays in Norway and Denmark. I may add right here that, since August, 1914, I have spent about eight months in England; and comparisons thus placed in my way make me believe that, leaving loss of life aside, the existence of the average man is rather less trying in war-scarred Blighty than on the "peaceful" Scandinavian peninsula.

When the alarum bells sounded in August, 1914, Sweden suffered a shock that it has not yet quite outlived. The Swedish people had been told that any European outbreak on a large scale would give Russia its long-cherished chance to seize the upper part of the peninsula, where the northernmost railroad in the world leads from the Finnish border to the icefree port of Narvik on the Norwegian coast. They had been told this so long and so loudly that they believed it like a gospel. As the churches rang out their call of duty, sad-faced women hustled about to get their men folks ready, and the men ran with burning eyes and close-pressed lips to the appointed meeting places. There was no division of opinion in those early days. Every one thought that their country's "hour of destiny" had struck, and every one prepared to meet it with such courage as he could muster, though most of them felt rather helpless and hopeless in the face of the expected ordeal. Practically the same things happened and the same feelings. were experienced in Denmark, with the single difference that everybody was looking toward another aggressor.

I speak of these things chiefly because I think that the tremendous relief following the disappearance of that first unwarranted fear helps to account for certain things that hap