love and devotion I have had a happy time all my life.
Death will have delivered me from experiencing unhappi-
ness.

It has always seemed to me a very pitiful thing what
little difference the disappearance of a man makes to any
institution, even though he may have played a very impor-
tant r"le. A moment's regret, a moment's pause for read-
justment, and another man steps forward to carry on, and
the machine clanks onward with scarce a check. The death
of the leader of the nation is less even than a seven days'
wonder. To a very small number is given to live in history;
their number is scarcely one in ten millions. To the rest it
is only granted to live in their united achievements.

But for this war I and all the others would have passed
into oblivion like the countless myriads before us. We
should have gone about our trifling business, eating, drink-
ing, sleeping, hoping, marrying, giving in marriage, and
finally dying with no more achieved than when we were
born, with the world no different for our lives. Even the
cattle in the field fare no worse than this. They, too, eat,
drink, sleep, bring forth young, and die, leaving the world
no different from what they found it.

But we shall live forever in the results of our efforts.

We shall live as those who by their sacrifice won the great
war. Our spirits and our memories shall endure in the proud
position Britain shall hold in the future. The measure of
life is not its span, but the use made of it. I did not make
much use of my life before the war, but I think I have done
so now.

One sometimes hears people say, when a young man is
killed, "Poor fellow, cut off so early, without ever having
had a chance of knowing and enjoying life!" But for my-
self, thanks to all that both of you have done, I have
crowded into twenty years enough pleasures, sensations,
and experiences for an ordinary lifetime. Never brilliant,
sometimes almost a failure in anything I undertook, my
sympathies and my interests somehow or other--why,
I cannot tell--were so wide that there was scarcely an
amusement, an occupation, a feeling which I could not

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