It would be impracticable to adopt the Swiss system as a whole in the United States. It would fit some communities but not others. Military training would be beneficial to all boys, but our public school system is controlled by the States, counties, and local districts, and not by the nation. To adapt it to the Swiss system of universal military training in the public schools will require a propaganda to educate public sentiment that will necessitate years of patient work. A generation will pass before we will be able to mobilize a force for national defense from Reservists who will have received their military training in the public schools.
A system of national defense would fail of its purpose if it crippled the industries of the country by depriving them of the labor necessary to their operation. In the United States, one of the most urgent reasons for having an automatically acting system of national defense perfectly organized in advance and ready in case of emergency, is to insure the continuance of the industries of the country without interruption, and to prevent any industrial depression or interference with the prosperity of the country. A system of national defense would fail of its purpose if it crippled industries by drawing away their labor.
It would cause serious industrial derangement to mobilize an army of citizen soldiers from men already enlisted in the ranks of labor in mill, shop, factory, or mine. Besides that, the majority of them have families, and live from hand to mouth with nothing between them and starvation but the pay envelope Saturday night. The impracticability of recruiting soldiers or mobilizing a reserve force from wage earners or clerical employees with families dependent on their earnings for their living, must always be borne in mind.
In Switzerland, the active, out-of-door life of the people makes the majority of them rugged and vigorous. They have sturdy legs and strong arms. They are sound, "wind, limb, and body." They are already inured to the work of a soldier's life and its duties, any moment they may be called to the colors.
In this country the life of the apartments, flats, and tenements, and the frivolous, immoral, and deteriorating influences and evil environments of congested cities, are sapping the vitality of our people, and rapidly transforming them into a race of mental and physical weaklings and degenerates. Even now the great majority of them utterly lack the physical hardihood and vigor without which a soldier would not be worth the cost of his arms and equipment.
It would overtax most city clerks and factory workers to walk to and from the football or baseball games that constitute our chief national pastime. About the only thing to which they are really inured is to sit on benches, for hours at a time, and to yell, loud and long, to add zest to games that are being played by others. It has been most truly said that "We are not a nation of athletes, we are a nation of Rooters." Many of our devotees of commercialized sport would perhaps be able to yell loud enough to scare the enemy off in case of war, but they would not be able to march to the battlefields where this soldierly aid might be required. A special automobile service would have to be provided for their transportation.
Think of this the next time you see a howling mob of fans or rooters at a baseball or football game, and "Lest we forget," think also of England's lesson when she undertook to enlist soldiers from such a citizenry. Then consider very seriously whether you don't think we had better in this country create some communities of real men, like the Homecrofters of Scotland. There are many rural neighborhoods in Scotland from which every man of military age enlisted when the call came for soldiers to fight to sustain Britain's Empire power in this last great war.
Do we want a citizen soldiery composed of such men as those who, since 1794, have served in the ranks of the Gordon Highlanders, or composed of such men as the Gardeners of Japan, who wrested Port Arthur from the Russians, or do we want to depend on a national militia of citizen soldiers enrolled from among the pink-cheeked dudelets and mush-faced weaklings from the apartments, flats, and tenements of our congested cities or factory towns, whose highest ambition is to smoke cigarettes, ape a fashion plate, or stand and gape at a baseball score on a bulletin board? They like that sort of sport, because they can enjoy it standing still. It necessitates no physical exertion. If they could ever be induced to enlist as soldiers, their feet would be too sore to walk any farther, before they had marched forty miles. A day's work with a shovel, digging a trench, would send most of them to the hospital with strained muscles and lame backs. And yet, trench-digging seems to be the most important part of a soldier's duty in these days of civilized warfare, when the machinery for murder by wholesale has been so splendidly perfected.
If we are going to have a citizen soldiery in this country, the first thing we had better set about is to produce a soldierly citizenry—a race of men with the physical vigor of the Swiss Mountaineers, or of the men who founded our own nation, who fought the battles of the Revolution, who dyed with their red blood the white snows of Valley Forge, who marched through floods and floating ice up to their armpits to the capture of Fort Vincennes, who floated down the Ohio River on rafts or walked down the Wilderness Road with Boone, who fought Indians, broke prairie, traversed the waterless deserts, and conquered the wilderness from the crest of the Alleghenies to the shores of the Pacific, sustained by the strong women who stood by their sides and shared their hardships.
The weakness of the United States as a nation to-day, a weakness much more deeply rooted than mere military unpreparedness, lies in the fact that as a nation we have no national ideals that rise above commercialism, no national ambitions beyond making or controlling money, which the devotees of Mammon delight to call "Practicing the Arts of Peace."