Evening Republican, Volume 22, Number 107, Rensselaer, Jasper County, 7 May 1919 — BEYOND ALL MEED OF PRAISE [ARTICLE]

BEYOND ALL MEED OF PRAISE

Impassible to Form Ward* That WUI De Ivwi MmpU American Mothers. Just before the war the “cellar mother” was spoken of with understanding (in America), if not with laughing sympathy—the woman who decoyed husband and sons into the cellar, and then sat on the door, resolved that ne mankind of hers should in such a fool business as war! Many of the mothers who so spoke had made the schoolmaster’s life a burden by their nervous telephoning when Ned or Harry went to school; yet when tho country demanded it and their boys war* ten years dearth-, they gave them * the war without a sign es anything but pride, L»cy H. M. Boel shy writes in the Atlantic. They had never been trained, like MkgUsh mothers, to live through ordinary life with a boy in danger on some frontier firing line; but they learndd heroism and nerve when the need same. _. - The American mother learned dally seif-denial, too; the most extravagant ofjaatlons learned thrift in food conservation ; and the most set in her ways of any woman on earth, the New England house mother, altered those ways In that most unalterable part of her house, the kitchen, where everything had been “thus and so" for generations. And this thrift and adaptability were not drawn out of her by the needs of her own men, but by a quick imaginative sympathy, which bridged 3,000 miles of ocean and felt, with all Sir Philip Sidney’s chivalry, for the stranger of alien race, “whose necessity was greater than hers."