Page:Popular Science Monthly Volume 47.djvu/246

236 fairly under way in the State of New York, to establish throughout the country a system of military drill in the public schools and colleges? At a time when so much is heard about Germany groaning under its military system, rigorously maintained by its young war lord, this announcement ought to be well calculated to make every unassuming, liberty-loving American rub his eyes in wonder and ask whether he is dreaming or not. Many there are, no doubt, who will look upon it with a smile as a mere fad, perhaps good-naturedly regard it as a means toward the improvement of the general deportment and physical conditions of the young. But if they for a moment will consider the source from which it springs and carefully weigh the reasons with which it is launched forth, it surely must take a more serious aspect. The fact alone that it originated in G. A. R. circles, is backed and indorsed by certain high military dignitaries, civil functionaries, and legal authorities ought to arouse a suspicion in the ordinary citizen of a supposed free industrial country. It is, however, when we examine the arguments in its favor by some of these high military and legal authorities that its real essence, its military and retrogressive spirit, becomes clear.

In the first place, there is the usual soldier's argument that "if ever an occasion should arise when a call to arms should again be sounded, those to respond (having been trained in the schools to military tactics and to the use of arms) would be tenfold more efficient than were, at first, the brave boys of '61 and '62, who mostly went to the war practically undrilled." To this it only needs to be said that, the business of the professional soldier being to kill, it also becomes part of his business to find or devise new occasions for the exercise of his professional duties. It is significant of the extreme plight in which the military authorities find themselves in this respect that the gentleman, an officer of high rank, who gave utterance to the above warning could find no other possible occasion for the call to arms than "the anarchistic and socialistic forces tending to undermine our democratic republican government." Whatever influence, therefore, he may exert on the timid and the unthinking, to the philosophical, the trained minds, who recognize that these anarchistic and socialistic forces are the natural effects of real causes in our industrial and political conditions, to these his suggestions will have the weight of the professional soldier's pleading for his own existence and no more.

But the burden of argument in favor of this proposed military training of our boys and young men is that it will make them better citizens of this free country—that "a vote in the hands of a man who has been taught to love his country, and to recognize the value of obedience to law, and to toe out and hold his chin up