To start with some prosaic proofs of the new life, I will take the liquor question, a test of social vitality. It is significant to examine how the different belligerent nations have treated this problem, which becomes acute whenever it is necessary to call upon all national reserves in a crisis. Turkey, Italy, and Germany apparently have no liquor problem; at least the war has not called attention to it. Russia, whose peasantry was notoriously cursed with drunkenness, eradicated the evil, ostensibly, by one arbitrary ukase, though, if persistent reports from the eastern war region are true, her great reform has not yet reached her officers. England has played feebly with the question from the beginning when the ravages of drink among the working population--what every visitor to England had known--became painfully evident to the Government in its efforts to mobilize war industries and increase production. Various minor restrictions on the liquor traffic have been imposed, but nothing that has reached to the roots of the matter--probably because of the powerful liquor interest in Parliament as much as from the Englishman's fetish of individual liberty. Although the direct handicap of drunken workmen did not affect France as it did England, the French authorities quickly realized the indirect menace of alcoholism and have taken real measures to combat it. Absinthe has been abolished. For the army--and that includes practically all the younger and abler men--the danger has been minimized by the strict enforcement of regulations as to hours and the non-alcoholic nature of drinks permitted, which are posted conspicuously in all cafés and drinking-places and which are carefully observed, as any one who tries to order liquor in company with a man in uniform will quickly find out! I never saw a soldier or an officer in the least degree under the influence of liquor while I was in France, either at the front or outside the military zone, and very few workingmen. Not content with the control of liquor in the army, the French have seriously attacked the whole problem, which in France centers in the right of the fruit-grower to distill brandy,--an ancient custom that in certain provinces has resulted in great abuses. Legislation against the _bouilleurs de crue_ is one inevitable outcome of the awakened sense of social responsibility in France.