Page:"The next war"; an appeal to common sense (IA thenextwarappeal01irwi).pdf/156

 Belgian police were forced, for the first time since Barons ruled in Flanders, to fight organized gangs of bandits. England boasted in old years a low murder rate; and her courts had a swift and certain way of hanging for murder without regard to wealth or social rank. “The unwritten law” did not exist for British juries. Just after the war, England experienced a series of “murders of passion,” by ex-soldiers and ex-officers; and British juries acquitted the murderers as lightly as once did Latin judges. How much of this mentality back of these crime-waves sprang from actual experience at the Front and how much from the education in brutality of the new military training, no one of course can say. Doubtless both influences bore on this crime wave.

Here in America and abroad, there are plans afoot for knitting army training a little more closely into civilian life. Experts on physical culture have testified that drill and setting-up exercises, as hitherto practiced by armies, give an imperfect and one-sided physical development. It is proposed to revise army physical training on modern lines. It is proposed, further, to teach the men, while they are in the ranks, the elements at least of useful civilian trades. These are compromises, at best designed to reduce the ultimate cost of armies to society, at worst sops to public opinion. The chief end of military training is to teach men to fight. They must be drilled, first in order to inculcate the instinct of perfect obedience and second so that large bodies