If there were, instead of military conscription, a conscription of the whole youthful population to form for a certain number of years a part of the army enlisted against Nature,... the military ideals of hardihood and discipline would be wrought into the growing fiber of the people.... To coal and iron mines, to freight trains, to fishing fleets in December, to dishwashing, clothes-washing and window-washing, to road-building and tunnel-making, to foundries and stokeholes, and to the frames of skyscrapers, would our gilded youths be drafted off, according to their choice, to get the childishness knocked out of them, and to come back into society with healthier sympathies and soberer ideas.... Such a conscription, with the state of public opinion that would have required it, and the many moral fruits it would bear, would preserve in the midst of a pacific civilization the manly virtues which the military party is so afraid of seeing disappear in peace.
A farm camp is not merely a recreational camp, although it may re-create the city youth in terms of country life. A group of Long Island Food Reserve Battalion boys with the working impulse strong.
Even hoeing requires special training and was one activity in the pre-vocational course in agriculture given at the concentration and training camp for Junior Volunteers of Maine.
Instruction in mechanics, electricity, friction, heat, horsepower, etc. nowadays centers about an automobile. This work at Wentworth Institute (Boston, Massachusetts) has a military-equivalent value.
To learn a trade in an essential industry is to enlist in national preparedness. A corner of a Buffalo (New York) vocational school, teaching plumbing and steam fitting.
Liberty Hyde Bailey, author and farmer, formerly director of the New York State College of Agriculture, in a chapter of a recent book on "Universal Service" expresses in concrete terms a similar thought from the angle of the open country.