By doing so, they ask nothing for themselves, unless asking the opportunity to undergo the rigors of training can be so construed. Yet along with the professional pacifists some politicians, notably Representative Madden of Illinois, have attempted to create the impression that these civilian business men, merchants, lawyers, and doctors are overstepping their rights as Reserve Officers when they appeal to individual congressmen and appear before congressional committees. 20 In 1922 representative Reserve Officers from all over the country met in Washington and formed a Reserve Officers' Association, without political purpose and solely to encourage the carrying out of the provisions of the National Defense Act. The constitution of the association is such that it would be well-nigh impossible to use it for any political purpose. As the membership is nation-wide and contains men of both political parties, the difficulties in the way of any such movement, should it be planned, are apparent. The members of the association have not hesitated to point out to their individual congressmen, at every session, that under the planned appropriations it was impossible for Reserve Officers to get even the minimum amount of training essential, if they are to be of any value to the government. Also, they have repeatedly called attention to the fact that the so-called War Depart ment budget, as sent to Congress, does not represent what the War Department really believes necessary, but merely the amount the director of the budget has assigned that department. In thus appealing to Congress to see that enough money is appropriated to carry out the provisions of the National Defense Act, they are in no way infringing on the rights of the War Department, nor are they attempting to establish any new or alter any old policy. As a matter of fact, the point had been reached, by reason of penuriousness in appropriations, where the Reserve would have gone out of existence unless steps were taken to change the situation. Men who become Reserve Officers expect some attempt on the part of the government to organize and train them. One appropriation bill omitted the small amount of money necessary to assign and keep Regular Officers at the headquarters of the Reserve units. This would have meant the abolition of these headquarters, and the consequent loss of all cohesion, all real organization in the Reserve. the Reserve. Through appealing to their congressmen, the Reserve Officers succeeded, on the floor of the House, in having this provision restored despite the vigorous efforts of Mr. Madden, Mr. Anthony, and others to keep it out. Similarly the Reserve has had to fight to get money appropriated to send a small proportion of its ranks to summer training camp. Last year's bill allowed something under 14,000 to go. This year the budget item was not sufficient for even this number. By appealing to Congress, the amount was raised to 16,000. That 100,000 Reserve Officers should struggle to keep their headquarters, the keystones of their military or ganization, and to send 16 per cent of their number to summer training camps, certainly bears no evidence of any attempt to form a military caste or threaten the liberties of the republic. Yet this absurd tale has been spread abroad in an endeavor to hide the fact, so clearly brought out by the Reserve Officers, that the socalled War Department budget does not represent the real needs of the War Department, if the provisions of the National Defense Act are to be carried out; that it merely represents the allowance given the War Department by the director of the budget; that the War Department, having been silenced, cannot itself bring out these facts. Attacked from some quarters as inefficient, because insufficiently trained, and from others as endeavoring to create a military caste, because they try to obtain training, some Reserve Officers have given it as their deliberate opinion that it was the intent to destroy the Reserve by discouraging its members and thus lead them to resign, or, at the end of the five-year period for which they are commissioned, to decline to apply for recommission. Mr. Madden, as chairman of the House Appropriations Committee, and Mr. Anthony of Kansas, as chairman of the War Department Subcommittee of that committee, cannot escape at least part of the responsibility for the crippling cuts in Army appropriations. Mr. Weeks, when secretary of war, declared in an declared in an annual report, in which he called attention to the fact that in a general sense we have been relatively decreasing, not increasing, our ex penditures for national defense, "It is the height of folly to continue the recent policy of cutting our financial support of the War Department to such an extent that the National Defense Act is endangered." Attacks on Regular Officers, on the charge that they are militarists, are as baseless as those on the National Guard and Reserve Officers. They are made to appeal to prejudices brought by Americans or by their ancestors from European countries, where armies were not of the people and for the people, but bulwarks of kings and aristocracies. These attacks are smoke-screens to hide pacifistic or political designs against national defense. Approximately two thirds of the officers of the Army to-day came from the ranks, from civil life, or from our war Army. West Point, which furnished the remaining third, and the Naval Academy, are the two most democratic schools in the world, in the method of entrance, in the social and academic life of the students, and in the determination of graduation rank, which is the basis of entry into the services. The cadets come from all parts of the country, and from all classes of society. The records of the Regulars show them to have come from the people as a whole, and to have remained typically American, with the same habits of mind, customs, and loyalties; their profession differentiating them from their countrymen only as the doctor's or the lawyer's or the architect's profession differentiates him. 229 There has been no subject on which our indifference and easy good nature, coupled with foreign and domestic propaganda, have led us further astray from the facts than has the subject of disarma ment. From the beginning of the advance publicity concerning the Washington Arms Conference, many of our people thought that the European powers and Japan looked at the question as they looked at it themselves. They believed that all the participating nations considered disarmament as a way to insure peace, and have only differed as to the details of an equitable arrange ment. The records of the Washington Arms Conference, the Geneva conferences, and the various negotiations entered into by this country to obtain a second naval conference show this is not the fact. They demonstrate clearly that Europe and Japan regard such conferences as opportunities to strengthen their relative position as to armament at the expense of their neighbors. The whole matter is merely a new form of armament race, based on diplomatic ability "to put one over," rather than the old-fashioned method of simply building more ships than a rival could afford to construct. It is not that our view is fundamentally virtuous and that of the others fundamentally evil. It is simply that Europe and Japan see nothing in past history, or in the present condition of the world, to warrant them in trusting anything as precious as national security to the good-will of the other powers, who are their trade, racial, and frequently territorial rivals. They simply believe that national security depends upon adequate armament. Lord Balfour's opening speech at the Washington Arms Conference stressed the view that not sentiment but national security must govern Britain in any negotiations concerning her Navy. The representatives of all the other powers, except ours, expressed the same opinion. Our people were too wrapped up in their desire to inaugurate a new era based on peace and good-will to heed the few American voices that were raised in an endeavor to make their countrymen understand the truth of the situation. Great Britain is primarily dependent on overseas trade for her wealth. She has never tolerated the possession by a trade rival of a navy larger than her own. Spain, Holland, France, and Germany have successively learned this fact. Our Navy, in capital ships built and building, was superior to that of Great Britain at the time the negotiations which led to the Washington Arms Conference were begun. Our purpose in the conference was to establish a uniform ratio for all classes of ships. After we agreed to sacrifice our superiority in capital ships, Britain tried to force France to agree to abolish submarines as the price of Britain's agreeing to a ratio for cruisers and destroyers. The war proved Britain susceptible to great damage by submarine attack in the waters surrounding her home island. Also, the route to India passes through the Mediterranean, a sea which furnishes excellent opportunity for such attack. Having deprived us of our supremacy in capital ships, Britain needed only to secure the abolition of submarines to be supreme. On the other hand, France, which entered the war one of the four great naval powers of the world, finished it with virtually no navy at all. This partly because of naval losses, but mostly because she threw her whole strength into her army, instead of using part of her resources to augment her navy, as did Britain. At the same time she became more than ever dependent upon her North African possessions. It is essential It is essential to her in war-time that she keep open the communications between France and North Africa, across the Mediterranean. To do this, and to prevent absolute domination of her Channel and Atlantic coasts by Britain, the submarine is essential. At the time of the Washington Conference, this country was flooded with British propaganda against submarines. No mention was made of their proper military uses, but only of the sinking, without warning, of passenger ships. The French readiness to sign any agreement that would limit the submarine to military uses, and the few warning voices of Americans who tried to point out the vital part submarines must play in our own defense, were lost in the whirlwind of sentimental outcries against submarines. Japan, both from the point of view of capital ships and from that of naval bases, gained greatly, in relation to ourselves, through the Washington Arms Conference. Japan have outbuilt us in cruisers and other auxiliaries. If additional proof is needed of the fallacy of the idea that disarmament as a means to peace is the motive actuating Europe and Japan in any arms conference, a study of the answers to Mr. Coolidge's recent invitation to another conference should be convincing. Britain will not give up her supremacy in cruisers, despite the fact that we gave up ours in capital ships. Her propagandists have again started a campaign against submarines based on on the horror aroused by their improper use, and not on the facts of their military value. France has not changed her position since the Washington Conference. Japan, like Britain, is unwilling to give up her cruiser supremacy established since the conference, despite our generosity at that conference in regard to capital ships and to the fortification of our Pacific islands, which so increased her effective naval strength. We are a practical people. We pride ourselves on our hard-headedness. We practise it in our business dealings. It is therefore all the more strange that when it comes to national defense we are anything but businesslike. We act spasmodically as the result of sentimentalism and prejudice, instead of continuously as the consequence of a thorough understanding of the facts of our past history, the world as it is to-day, and the danger to our material and Since the conference, Britain and spiritual welfare. A CAPITALIZING PROSPERITY How Wall Street Converts Earning-Power into Stocks SILAS BENT NEWFANGLED Contrivance, invented by an unknown named James Ritty, was offered for sale back in the early eighties to the owners of a mining store in Coalton, Ohio. When punched forcibly, it registered on a strip of paper the amounts of cash sales. The device could not have cost more than twenty dollars to make, and the price was $100. The mining store, moreover, was steadily losing money; yet the Patterson brothers, who owned it, bought two of the devices, because the salesman recommended it as a good thief-catcher. During the next year, without any apparent increase in turnover, the business made a profit of $12,000. One of these brothers was the late John H. Patterson; and after three years had passed, at a time when the contrivance seemed an assured failure, he bought control of the manufacturing business for $6500 and renamed it the National Cash Register Company. He had faith in it, although his neighbors grinned. To keep the new enterprise going required prolonged effort, and for years it remained just what it was represented to be when he bought it, a thief-catcher. But as time went on many changes were made in it, and many new inventions were either patented or bought. Now the register is advertised as assuring correct change for the customer, credit for payments on account, accurate bills, and proof of purchase when goods are returned. The boast is made that it protects the clerk from others' errors, from misunderstandings, and from making mistakes himself. Whether the transaction is in cash, on part payment, or for a charge account, it can be registered on one of these machines; for they issue not only receipts but charge-slips, paidout vouchers, and received-on-account records, "in every desired form." The National Cash Register Company now sells nine tenths of such contrivances in the United States, as well as covering the world with them, wherever retail business is done. In its plant are forty-four acres of floor-space, and its employees number twelve thousand. From gross sales in 1890 of less than two million dollars, it had grown at the beginning of this century to more than a thousandfold of what John Patterson paid for control of the business at the beginning of his career, when he was forty-one years old. At the end of 1925 the firm had in' accounst receivable alone, thanks partly to the sweep of instalment buying, |