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 LECTURE I

DISCIPLINE AND AUSTERITY

Whether there should be compulsory military training in America is a question which some people will answer yes or no according to their general theories and others according to their observation of the actual effects of such training on moral character. But whatever our views may be on this familiar question, whether we regard military service as ethically helpful in its influence or as morally injurious, we cannot differ as to the need in our national character of those qualities of self-control, of quick and unquestioning obedience to duty, of joyful contempt of hardship, and of zest in difficult and arduous undertakings which, rightly or wrongly, we consider soldierly, which we attribute in such rich measure to our forefathers, and which the moral exigencies of our national task to-day as peremptorily demand. To put these primary and elemental needs as sharply as possible, let us call them discipline and austerity. Our American character needs more of both.

I do not know a better starting point than is found in one of those vivid modern touches upon