THE PERFORMANCE OF A GREAT PUBLIC DUTY
July 3, 1918
It is announced from Washington that the President has been converted to the need of universal military training of our young men, as a permanent policy. This is excellent. If this policy is forthwith incorporated into our laws, it will represent an immense national advance. In the first place, it will guarantee us against a repetition of the humiliating experiences of the last four years, when our helpless refusal to prepare invited Germany’s attack upon us and then forced us to rely entirely upon our allies to protect us from that attack while for over a year we slowly made ready to defend ourselves. In the next place, it will immeasurably increase the moral and physical efficiency of the young men who are trained and fit them both to do better for themselves and to perform in better fashion the tasks of American citizenship. Finally it is essential that the policy should be adopted now while we are at war and therefore while our people are awake to the needs of the situation. As soon as peace comes, there will be a revival of the sinister agitation of the pro-German or other anti-American leaders and of the silly clamor of the pacifists, all of whom will with brazen folly again reiterate that preparedness ends with war, and that, anyhow, all war can be averted by signing scraps of paper. The adoption at once of the policy of obligatory universal military training will be the performance of a great public duty.
For three years the foremost advocates of this policy have pointed out that it can advantageously be combined with a certain amount of industrial training. It is earnestly to be hoped that this element of industrial training will be incorporated in the law. Of course, in such case the length of service with the colors in the field, aside from preliminary training in the higher school grades, ought to be a year, so as to avoid superficiality. Credit should be given the graduates of certain scholastic institutions or to individuals who speedily attain a high degree of proficiency, and for them the time of service could be shortened. All officers or other candidates for officers’ training schools would be chosen from among the best of the men who had gone through the training, without regard to anything except their fitness. This would represent the embodiment in our army of the democratic principle which insists upon an equal chance for all, equal justice for all, and the need for leadership, and therefore for special rewards for leadership. The industrial training could be so shaped as to emphasize the need that hard workers who are efficient should become in a real sense partners in industry, and that insistence upon efficiency should be accompanied by a fair division of the rewards of efficiency, and by insistence that the work should be made healthful and interesting, so that its faithful performance would be a matter of pride and pleasure.
At this moment our training camps are huge universities, huge laboratories of fine American citizenship. Let us make them permanent institutions. They develop both power of initiative and power of obedience. They inculcate self-reliance and self-respect. They also inculcate respect for others and readiness for discipline, which means readiness to use our collective power in such shape as to make us threefold more efficient than we have been. To make these camps permanent training schools for all our young men would mean the greatest boon this Nation could receive.