This fact is well illustrated by the stupendous losses the country has suffered from floods because the Army Engineers have for years so stubbornly refused to consider plans for controlling floods at their sources.
Solid arrays of facts presented to them have contributed nothing to breaking down their stolid egotism.
They will not originate, or approve, any plan that does not center everything that is proposed to be done in the War Department and thereby enlarge its influence and prestige. They oppose every plan to coördinate the War Department with other departments, or to put the Army on the same plane with the others in working out plans for constructive coöperation.
The members of the military caste do not seem to be able to comprehend that the stamp of an inferior caste which they put upon enlisted men, and the menial services exacted from private soldiers by their officers, create conditions that are revolting to every instinct of a man with the right American spirit of self-respect. They are a relic of the barbaric period when the private soldier was an ignorant brute. Those conditions alone are sufficient to render impracticable any plan for a reserve composed of soldiers who have served out their term of enlistment.
In "On Board the Good Ship Earth," Herbert Quick says:
"All institutions must sooner or later be transformed so as to accord with the principles of democracy—or they must be abolished. The great objection to standing armies is their conflict with democracy. They are essentially aristocratic in their traditions. The officers must always be 'Gentlemen' and the privates merely men. The social superiority of officer over man is something enormous. Every day's service tends to make the man in the ranks a servile creature, and the man with epaulettes a snob and a tyrant."
The standing army to-day represents an economic waste of labor of the entire body of enlisted men. Many soldiers are demoralized by the inactivity or idleness of the life of the camp or the barracks.
The whole conception of the military caste as to what the Army ought to be is medieval and monstrously wrong. The United States Army should be a training school for the very highest type of self-respecting, independent, and self-sustaining citizenship that this country can produce. It should be a great educational institution, training every enlisted man to be an officer in the Reserve, or to be a Homecrofter after he returns to private life. Daily manual constructive labor should be a part of every soldier's duty. The relation between officer and enlisted men should be that of instructor and student. Such a relation is entirely consistent with the absolute authority that would be vested in the instructor.
The Army System should be such that an opportunity to serve a term as an enlisted man would be coveted as much as an appointment to West Point is now coveted. The Army should train men for civil life and citizenship, not ruin them for it as it now so often does.
The many wrong conditions above referred to result from the unfortunate attitude of mind of those who compose the military caste. They would make it impracticable to ever successfully carry out any plan for useful constructive labor by enlisted men in the military service. If such a Reserve were made subject to the control of the War Department, it would be impossible to ever enlist as a Reserve a construction force composed of men who believe in the dignity of labor and refuse to recognize the superiority of any caste in American life or citizenship.