All this time the country had been going to war. The huge military machine was getting under way, the storm of public feeling was rising. Congress had voted a huge loan, a country-wide machine of propaganda was being organized, and the oratory of Four Minute Men was echoing from Maine to California. Peter read the American City “Times” every morning, and here were speeches of statesmen and sermons of clergymen, here were cartoons and editorials, all burning with the fervor’s of patriotism. Peter absorbed these, and his soul became transfigured. Hitherto Peter had been living for himself; but there comes a time in the life of every man who can use his brain at all when he realizes that he is not the one thing of importance in the universe, the one end to be served. Peter very often suffered from qualms of conscience, waves of doubt as to his own righteousness. Peter, like every other soul that ever lived, needed a religion, an ideal. The Reds had a religion, as you might call it; but this religion had failed to attract Peter. In the first place it was low; its devotees were wholly lacking in the graces of life, in prestige, and that ease which comes with assurance of power. They were noisy in their fervors, and repelled Peter as much as the Holy Rollers. Also, they were always harping upon the sordid and painful facts of life; who but a pervert would listen to “sob stories,” when he might have all the things that are glorious and shining and splendid in the world?
But now here was the religion Peter wanted. These clergymen in their robes of snow white linen, preaching in churches with golden altars and stained-glass windows; these statesmen who wore the halo of fame, and went about with the cheering of thousands in their ears; these mighty captains of industry whose very names were magic—with power, when written on pieces of paper, to cause cities to rise in the desert, and then to fall again beneath a rain of shells and poison gas; these editors and cartoonists of the American City “Times,” with all their wit and learning—these people all combined to construct for Peter a religion and an ideal, and to hand it out to him, ready-made and precisely fitted to his understanding. Peter would go right on doing the things he had been doing before; but he would no longer do them in the name of Peter Gudge, the ant, he would do them in the name of a mighty nation of a hundred and ten million people, with all its priceless memories of the past and its infinite hopes for the future; he would do them in the sacred name of patriotism, and the still more sacre............