communications and arsenals from attack by spies and agents and to perform transport and base-line duties. Thus we arrive at a minimum total of at least 2,500,000 men necessary to defend us against the attack of a single great nation, or an army which would be ranked eighth in size among the armies of the world.

It is manifestly undesirable that we should ever attempt to maintain a standing army of this size. The objections which Americans have to great standing armies like those of Germany and Russia are well founded. How, then, can we ever be prepared to mobilize the needed number of trained and disciplined troops in so short a time? In answer to this question, our military experts unanimously advocate the adoption of a system of universal compulsory military service based upon and largely copied from the Swiss. system and its counterpart in Australia. These offer us for adoption not an experiment, but a tried and adequately tested method of national defense.

The underlying ideas of the German standing army and of the Swiss military system are diametrically opposed. Militarism in the extreme type is overbearing, aggressive, and brutal. The patriotism it fosters is two-faced, for it inculcates hatred of neighboring nations quite as much as love of one's own country. In extreme cases it develops a patriotism gone mad, while it makes aggression easy and even necessary. By contrast the Swiss and Australian systems make no preparation for aggressive warfare, and therefore do not hold up before the minds of the young any ambition for conflict beyond their own borders or for the conquest of their neighbors. Adequate preparation for self-defense curtails aggression, and brings nearer and nearer the possibility of combined international action to curb truculent nations and to civilize barbaric races.

In the Australian system, military science and gymnastics, taught by competent official instructors, form a compulsory part of the education of every boy between the ages of twelve and eighteen; during those years he undergoes military instruction co

incidently with his other studies, so that he reaches the age of nineteen a trained soldier. His military education is imparted to him at the most acquisitive age, and does not interfere with his later productive industrial occupations. When he reaches the age of nineteen he is enrolled as a soldier in the battalion of the region in which he lives. From that time he is in active service for two weeks of every year, practice which is intended to keep fresh in mind his military knowledge. He remains an active member of the battalion for eight years, until he reaches the age of twenty-seven, and throughout that period he is at all times liable for service in defense of his country. He cannot, however, be sent out of Australia unless he expressly volunteers for foreign service. The Australian army unit is a battalion of one thousand men. The country is therefore divided into units of population each of which contains approximately one thousand young men between the ages of nineteen and twenty-seven.

In Switzerland the young men, after having undergone this preliminary training in school, join their regiments in their twentieth year, and during the summer of that year undergo two months of continuous, intensive military instruction. For twelve years thereafter they are at all times liable for immediate service in defense of their country. During each of these years they perform two weeks' training in the field.

The system recommended by American experts for adoption by their country would begin with the training of all boys between the ages of twelve and eighteen in gymnastics, hygiene, the manual of arms, rifle practice, and platoon and company formations. In the summer of his nineteenth year every boy would be assigned to his regiment and begin his active service, with two months of intensive training in battalion, regimental, and brigade manoeuvers, and afterward be enrolled for service in his regiment for four years until he is twenty-three, his service in time of peace being limited to two weeks spent in camp every summer.

At

twenty-three the young man would be mustered out of his regiment and placed in the reserve, from which he could be called to active service only in case of dire need. This system would eventually furnish the United States with an active army of 2,500,000 men under twenty-four years of age, and with a reserve of nearly 8,000,000 trained soldiers between the ages of twenty-four and forty-five who could be called upon in case of a long

war.

Military training and service would be completely finished by all men before they reached their twenty-fourth birthday, thus interfering as little as possible with their productive life. In the event that war were thrust upon us, the casualties would be borne by men who for the most part had not yet acquired families or reached positions of great responsibility.

It should not be forgotten that the adoption of a system of preparedness in no way increases the liability of the individual to serve as a soldier in the event of war. If we have a big war in the near future, the draft will be instituted and enforced, and our citizens will all have to fight, whether they like it or not. Preparedness makes such an eventuality less likely, and makes it improbable that if we do fight, we shall have to die in vain.

It will not be necessary for the United States to institute new units of population, since she already possesses such units in her national congressional districts. Every district could be called upon to furnish a mixed brigade composed of two regiments of infantry, two batteries of field artillery, a squadron of cavalry, at transport train, a signal-corps detachment, a company of engineers, and a field-hospital. Certain Western districts would be called upon to support brigades composed of cavalry regiments and a battalion of horse artillery.

The brigades thus formed would be organized into divisions, corps, and armies under the supervision of the general staff at Washington, presided over by a military secretary of war. The standing army would be limited to staff-officers, instruc

tors, and engineers; to a certain amount of infantry, cavalry, and field-artillery for foreign garrison duty in Alaska, the Philippines, Hawaii, and the Panama Canal Zone, and for manning in part our coast defenses; to a number of line-officers sufficient to supervise the training in our schools and to maintain the reserve munitions; and to certain highly trained crack regiments, especially of mountain, siege, and field artillery, by which the experimental work necessary to determine the proper standard of military efficiency would be carried on. West Point, the army service schools, the garrison regiments, and the crack artillery regiments would all be used as means of training professional officers for staff appointments and for high commands in the national field forces. All the company officers and a certain number of the field officers of the line regiments would be civilians who had voluntarily undergone special training and won promotion by marked ability.

In addition to their protective value, such military systems yield educational and economic benefits which at least equal their defensive importance. The result most generally obtained, and the one which would be of the greatest importance to the United States, is the fostering of that sense of mutual responsibility which is promoted between the state and the individual by such a constructive system of universal military service. Even if there were no need of national defense and no rumors of wars, the Swiss system would more than repay its cost to any nation adopting it in the increased physical vigor and improved mentality of its citizens. It inculcates promptness, obedience, exactness, self-control, and truthfulness. It teaches discipline, hygiene, and unity of action. It tends to mold the heterogeneous elements of a nation into homogeneity, a result sorely needed by the conglomeration of assorted nationalities assembled, but not yet blended together, under the American flag.

Her military system has made of modern Switzerland a fearless and united country, notwithstanding the fact that her population is made up of French, Ger

mans, and Italians, speaking three languages and acknowledging two religions.

If such a system were adopted by the United States, every boy would be constantly under inspection by trained surgeons and military experts. His physical weaknesses and mental defects would be considered and, as far as possible, remedied. It is now well recognized that a large proportion of the ineffective, criminal, or insane members of society suffer from physical defects that could so far be modified during childhood as to make useful citizens out of potentially dangerous persons. Many defects which cannot be detected by superficial inspection become very evident during military training, which not only provides the instructors. with an opportunity to study deficiencies, but furnishes also the means and time for applying the remedies.

Military training, outdoor life, and expert supervision by men who understand crude boyish impulses would do much. toward converting lawless energy into disciplined power. The women of Australia at first so strongly opposed the adoption of compulsory military training that they retarded and nearly defeated its adoption, but within two years' time the wonders which it had wrought in their boys converted them into its most ardent advocates.

One of the strongest arraignments of our American civilization is the great number of inefficient, unmoral, or criminal persons in whom the state takes no interest unless they have been labeled paupers, idiots, or criminals. We make no effort to diminish by protective measures such wastefulness of a nation's best asset —its citizens. Another serious defect in our national life in America is the lack of loyalty for or sense of duty toward the Government. Europeans declare us to be the most unpatriotic nation in the world.

Military training rapidly develops civic consciousness. It teaches the young to revere their flag. Their patriotism is kindled at the susceptible age, and abides with them all their lives thereafter. It becomes no longer a phrase, a song, a momentary emotion, but the mainspring of

their civic life. It grows with their growth, they breathe it in with every inspiration; as their country makes herself responsible for their well-being, they, in return, feel responsibility for her safety and prosperity, and that it is the right and duty of every citizen to defend his country; they learn that if the need arises, they must even make the supreme sacrifice of dying for it. It is a wholesome thought, which teaches them to make cheerfully the thousand smaller sacrifices of good citizenship.

If any one of us questions whether it is worth while to make the supreme sacrifice of dying for the ideals and the safety of his native land, the best authority to accept in answer to this question is the man who is actually making that sacrifice; as, for instance, a mortally wounded soldier. It sometimes happens that fatally wounded men lie without pain and with clear minds for several hours before they die. They realize their approaching fate with a certainty which comes only to men who feel that the very foundation of life has crumbled. They live a very long time in those last few hours. They review minutely their whole lives, weighing and considering. They are detached and unprejudiced, as only men can be who have absolutely nothing more either to gain or to lose. They can justly estimate what is of true value and what is not.

In France I have talked with many such men, have taken down their last messages; have, in answer to their craving for human companionship, sat by them. until they died. They were not philosophers, they were not officers, but only simple soldiers who before the war had been clerks or farmers; and yet each and every one of them was filled with a sublime and radiant contentment because he was dying for his conception of right, for his patrie, for his ideals.

Their faces wore beatific smiles, and their eyes shone with a light of great happiness. Never again can one who has seen such heroic deaths ask himself that coward question, Is it worth while to make the supreme sacrifice in defense of one's ideals?

THE

June 26, 1915.

HE whole beautiful Aisne valley lay spread out before us, vineyards and fields in the foreground, winding roads with sentinel-like trees, wooded copses, the glint of a stream, the landscape shimmering in the June sunshine. Stretching from east to west, framed in by the trees beneath the ridge, ran a long white line, broken in places where it disappeared beyond a knoll-the French trenches. In the distance, extending across the whole stage from one proscenium-arch to the other, a second white scar marked the German positions on the Craonne Plateau. The land beyond that second white scar was also France-that part of manufacturing and coal-bearing France that is now in the hands of the enemy. A puff of white smoke arose-shrapnel. A yellow cloud showed where an explosive shell came in contact with something. Other white puffs appeared farther away on the slope, but with no sound of firing. The wind was behind us, and it was so quiet in the drowsy sunshine that we could hear the hum of insect life in the garden.

We walked on a few yards, then looked to the northwest. Rheims lay basking in the sunlight, the twin towers of the cathedral and the broken chimneys silhouetted against the clear sky.

It was only yesterday, I thought, that I had last driven my car from Metz westward over that same white ribbon of road to Rheims. Now the road lay almost

midway between the French and German positions, and was daily swept by a murderous shell-fire. And the cathedral! But to the naked eye, from this distance, the damage done to it was negligible. The roof was partly gone; except for this the graceful outlines were unchanged. The towers and belfries still soared majestically above the town, apparently undaunted by the engines of war now sweeping the wide expanse of the Aisne and Vesle valleys. Brought nearer under the field-glasses, we could see plainly the great white blotch on the façade where the stone became calcined by the flames that followed the first bombardment by the Germans on the seventeenth of last September.

We had some difficulty in getting closer to Rheims. There were four motors in our expedition, each with two drivers. The chauffeurs were for going directly down the hill and meeting the main road to the city below. They were ordered back by our staff-captain.

"I am not responsible for you correspondents," he said, "but I must be careful of my own men."

That thought for the men was always uppermost. A sudden shower, as we slipped through country byways, found only one of the chauffeurs on our car with a raincoat. The captain offered his own to the other. These drivers were very intelligent men, attentive and respectful and exceedingly solicitous about our welfare. A few days later, when our tournée was ending and we were about to take the train back to

when we found that in peace times one owned a factory employing 350 hands, another was a book publisher in Paris, a third managed a hotel on the Riviera. We made a detour to avoid the exposed portion of the road, then a short dash into Rheims. Nearing the town gates we called on the brigade commander, a fine grizzled type like one of our old Indianfighters, such as Lawton or Crook. His quarters were not imposing-the four bare walls of a low-ceilinged office room, dingy windows; large scale-maps, plans, and official papers strewn over a table; the clump of the hobnailed boots of the sentries in the hall outside and the tinkle of a telephone bell in the adjoining room as reports came in from distant batteries raking the Aisne valley. The staff-captain who took us in charge said that he had followed on the heels of the Germans when they were driven out last September, and that on one occasion since over three thousand shells had been fired into the city during the short space of twenty-four hours.

That was easy enough to understand once we had reached the cathedral and the devastated district behind it. What had appeared from a distance to be minor damage became real havoc on closer acquaintance. On the splendid west front. the hundreds of little statues set in their niches are all damaged, some minus hands and legs and arms, and others swept away entirely. The stained-glass of the great rose-window is wrecked, many of the columns supporting the smaller arches are twisted or cracked by the fierce heat, the gargoyles shot off, and the splendid portals, inside and out, so badly damaged that it is unlikely they can ever be restored.

The white scar that sweeps up the northwest tower tells better than words the graphic story of shell-fire and confla

gration. It is one of the wonders of the world that Rheims Cathedral, desecrated, shot at continually for months, preserves its majesty unimpaired, its towers rising above the grass-grown cobbles of the square serene and unconquerable.

On one side of the place the GrandHôtel has a hole in its second story big enough to accommodate the traditional coach and four. The hotel awakened old memories. I thought of it as I had known it in the early days of aviation, when Farman and Lorraine and Cockburn made it their quarters, and the courtyard echoed the explosions of the motors coming in at all hours from the flying-field of Bétheny. Now a ditch extends across the flyingfield of Bétheny. In front of it are barbed-wire entanglements and chevauxde-frise, and in its shadows are men in Joffre blue, with rifles and hand-grenades, who burrow farther into its depths when they hear the warning crackle of a shell from the direction of the Craonne Plateau.

On the other side of the place is the Hôtel Lion-d'Or. Gone are its American bar and the little French Canadian who made the only worth-while cocktail in France outside of Paris. The windows are gaping holes, the shutters blown away. There is debris heaped up in the rooms and courtyard, and the walls are punctured with holes where the shells have ricochetted off the cobbled pavement.

Back of the cathedral is a dreary waste: houses gutted, outer walls swiped off as though a curtain had been raised in a theater showing the intimate interior-the wall-paper of the different rooms, the broken rafters, fragments of beds and tables, fireplaces, bric-à-brac, and tattered curtains blowing in the wind. The Rue de l'Université, the Rue des Cordeliers, the Rue Eugène Desteuque looked like the streets of Salem after the fire. In many cases the people insist on returning to their homes. One little old lady was calmly knitting in the broken doorway of her house, though the corner of it was crushed back like the bow of an ocean steamship after a collision.