"The officers of the Army and Navy are the professional servants of the government in matters pertaining to the military establishment. They are like engineers, doctors, lawyers, or any other class of professional men whose services people employ because they are expert in their line of work. They do not initiate wars. Nine-tenths of all wars have their origin directly or indirectly in {270} issues arising out of trade. The people make war; the government declares it; and the officers of the army and navy are charged with the responsibility of terminating it with such means and implements as the people may give them."
His voice raised in behalf of preparedness refers therefore to the military, because as a Major-General in the United States Army he is not empowered to speak of other walks in life. Yet his own wide experience in Cuba and the Philippines in administration, very little of which was military, is a witness of his belief in preparedness in an life.
He founded schools where there were none to prepare citizens for the new Cuban republic. He reorganized and built up customs laws and regulations where there were only attempts at such in order to prepare revenue to build roads and finish public works to make a busy and healthy nation. He reëstablished sane marriage laws in order to prepare a solid community resting upon the basis of the clearly defined family. In the Philippines he instituted local government to prepare the islands for self-government.
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None of these acts, nor many others of like nature, had anything to do with the military. They were all based on the law that a sound and successful community, whether that community be a village, town or nation, rests in the final analysis on personal, individual responsibility which in the group makes a responsible government, that personal responsibility comes only from preparation, from execution as a result of preparation and from efficiency which is its synonym.
We study for this or that profession. We cannot practice law unless we prepare and take a degree. We cannot enter the medical profession unless we study and take a degree. Wood's great thesis is that we cannot become sound citizens and, therefore, in the group a sound nation, unless we study and prepare to be such.
It sounds so simple that one wonders why it is written. And yet for the last two years under the guise of war necessity this country has been moving in quite another direction. Instead of personal responsibility we have been substituting more and more government responsibility. Instead of individual effort we have been advancing governmental {272} effort. Instead of natural competition we have been substituting government regulation. Instead of advancing patriotism, nationalism, Americanism, we have been letting all these give way to internationalism. We have not been preparing ourselves as individuals to assume individual responsibly, but in fact we have been giving up that responsibility to government.
It is through the sense of the people quickened by such men as Wood that we shall come back to sounder methods--not to where we were before. That can never be. If it were so, the world would not be moving forward. But we shall come back to the basic principle that individual initiative, energy and the rewards that accrue therefrom are and always must be the basis for collective initiative, energy and the rewards thereof; that no collective organization such as a government can remain virile and effective unless its component parts--the individuals--remain virile and effective.
The appeal which Wood's life makes to us is toward this responsibility of the individual for his own work, his own affairs, his own family, and {273} to his own country, and that has been found throughout history to be the groundwork, the foundation upon which civilization rests. Translated into current phrase this means that we must follow such men as he, keep eternally at work to improve ourselves individually, to make a good and honest living, to hand on the torch of patriotism, of sanity and of ever-increasing knowledge by furnishing to the world the new generations that shall carry on, and to weld and stabilize the whole structure by building up Americanism within our borders. In the vocabulary of General Wood this is translated again into the words: "Prepare! Prepare! Prepare!"
Such has been the career of the New Englander from Cape Cod who has worked in his own land, in the tropics, in many spheres, at many problems until at the age of fifty-eight in sound mind and body he stands firmly still in the prime of life ready for many years yet to come of service and work for himself, his family and his fellow countrymen.