Part 9 (1/2)

CHAPTER V

_The system of national defense for every nation must be adapted to the conditions and needs of that nation. All nations are not alike. Each has its distinct problems. The solution, in each case, must be fitted to the nation and its people. There is no system now in operation in any other country that could be fitted as a whole to the United States. A system must be devised that will be applicable to the needs and conditions of this country._

The Swiss system is ideal for Switzerland. A mountaineer is a soldier by nature. Switzerland has a soldierly citizenry and can mobilize it instantly as a citizen soldiery. The Swiss system would have fitted Belgium in spots, but not as a whole. It is adapted to a rural people, who are individually independent and self-sustaining, but not to a manufacturing community, where the people cannot exist without the factory, or the factory without the people.

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 pa.s.s 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 Sat.u.r.day 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 st.u.r.dy 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 const.i.tute 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 j.a.pan, 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 fas.h.i.+on 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 sh.o.r.es of the Pacific, sustained by the strong women who stood by their sides and shared their hards.h.i.+ps.

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.”

Manhood and womanhood are being utterly sacrificed to mere money-making.

National wealth is calculated in units of dollars, and not in units of citizens.h.i.+p. To acc.u.mulate wealth is the controlling ambition of our people, and not to perpetuate the strong racial type from which we are all descended.

Not only is the original st.u.r.dy American Anglo-Saxon stock being degenerated, but we are bringing to our sh.o.r.es millions of the strong and vigorous races from Southern and Eastern Europe, and crowding them into tenements and slums to rot, both physically and mentally. That cancer is eating away the heart and corrupting the very lifeblood of this nation.

Those conditions would soon be changed if the ma.s.s of our people, and particularly Organized Capital and Organized Labor, would place Humanity above Money.

Capital thinks only of Dividends. Labor thinks only of Wages. Neither gives the slightest heed to making this a nation of Rural Homes and thereby perpetuating the racial strength and virility of the people of the nation.

That can only be done by providing a right life environment for all wageworkers and their families, particularly the children. A home for a family is not ent.i.tled to be called a home, unless it is both an individual home and a garden home. It must be a Homecroft--a home with an abundance of suns.h.i.+ne and fresh air, in decent, sanitary surroundings--a home with a piece of ground about it from which in time of stress or unemployment the family can get its living by its labor, and thereby enjoy economic independence.

Industry will destroy humanity unless a national system of life is universally adopted that will prevent racial deterioration. The only way that can be done is by a nation-wide abandonment of the artificial and degenerate life of the congested cities. The people must be educated and trained so that they will desert the flats and tenements as rats would abandon a sinking s.h.i.+p.

Our first great national undertaking should be the creation of a national system of life that will realize the ideals of the Homecroft Slogan:

”Every Child in a Garden, Every Mother in a Homecroft, and Individual Industrial Independence For every worker in a Home of his own on the Land.”

Unless the united power of the people as a whole is soon put forth to check the physical and racial deterioration now going on at such an appalling rate among the ma.s.ses of our wageworkers,--the result of the wrong conditions that surround their lives,--nothing can prevent the eventual ruin of this nation. We are already on the downward course along which Rome swept to the abyss of human degeneracy in which she was at last destroyed by the same causes that are so widely at work in this country to-day.

Employers of Labor are most directly responsible for these evil conditions.