all that the brave can venture to carry their faith into life and action. In the American civil war, in the Franco-Prussian, the South African, the Balkan, the Russo-Japanese, small bands of Quakers revealed the same spirit of service and the same obliviousness to danger which have marked the larger groups that have manned the ambulance units and the war-victims' relief and reconstruction work of this world war. In this present crisis they

have gone wherever they could go,—to Belgium, to France, to Russia, to Italy, to Serbia and Greece and Syria and Mesopotamia,—to carry into operation the forces of restoration and of reconstruction. They have not stood aloof as spectators of the world's tragedy. They have entered into it and shared it, and they have counted neither money nor life dear to themselves in their desire to reveal the power of redeeming and transforming love.

Slowly the sincerity of the Quaker conviction about war has made itself felt and limited legislative provisions have been made, especially in England and America, to meet the claims of conscience. The problem which confronts the law-maker, even when he is sympathetic with the rights of conviction, is the grave difficulty of determining where to draw the line of special exception to general requirements and how to discover

the sincerity of conscientious objection to war. The "slacker" is always a stern possibility. There must be no holes in the net for him to escape through. The makers of armies naturally want every man who can be spared from civilian life and can be utilized for military operations. It has consequently often seemed necessary for law-makers to be narrow and hard toward the obviously sincere for fear of being too easy and lenient with those suspected of having sham consciences.

During the Civil War in America, President Lincoln, eager as he was to win the war, was always deeply in sympathy with the Quakers, and he stretched his administrative powers to their full limit to provide relief for conscientious convictions. In the early stages of the great conflict the President wrote the following kindly note in answer to a message from New England Yearly Meet

ing of the Society of Friends: "Engaged as I am, in a great war, I fear it will be difficult for the world to understand how fully I appreciate the principles of peace inculcated in this letter [of yours] and every where by the Society of Friends."[1] Both he and Secretary Stanton made many positive efforts to find some way of providing for the tender consciences of Friends without being unfair to the rights of others. They even requested American Friends to call a conference to consider how to find a satisfactory solution of the problem. Such a conference was held in Baltimore, December 7th, 1863, and the Friends there assembled expressed great appreciation of "the kindness evinced at all times by the President and Secretary of War." A delegation from this conference visited Washington and, in co-operation with

Secretary Stanton, succeeded in securing a clause in the enrolment bill, declaring Friends to be non-combatants, assigning all drafted Friends to hospital service or work among freedmen, and further providing for the entire exemption of Friends from military service on the payment of $300 into a fund for the relief of sick and wounded.[2]

On several occasions Friends in larger or smaller groups went to Washington for times of prayer and spiritual communion with the great President. These times were deeply appreciated by the heavily burdened man. Tears ran down his cheeks, we are told, as he sat bowed in solemn silence or knelt as some moved Friend prayed for him to Almighty God. Writing of the visit of Isaac and Sarah Harvey of Clinton County,

Ohio, in the autumn of 1862, Lincoln tenderly said: "May the Lord comfort them as they have sustained me." A letter written by the President in 1862 to Eliza P. Gurney, one of a small group of Friends who visited him and prayed with him in the autumn of that year, reveals forcibly how he regarded these occasions:

Somewhat later President Lincoln wrote again to Eliza P. Gurney requesting her to exercise her freedom to write to him as he felt the need of spiritual help and reinforcement. Her letter of reply so closely touched him and spoke to his condition that he carried it about with him and it was found in his coat pocket at the time of his death, twenty months after it was written. In the autumn of 1864, President Lincoln, still impressed by the message which he had received, wrote a memorable letter to Eliza P. Gurney. It was as follows:

It is, then, not surprising that President Lincoln was "moved with sympathy" when he heard the story of Pringle's suffering for conscience, or that he quietly said to the Secretary of War, "It is my urgent wish that