Page:The web (1919).djvu/146

 wars of the world, as the boys always have been asked to do.

Youth and middle age volunteered, old age itself volunteered, but the truth became obvious that our volunteer army would not spring armed over night in sufficient numbers. In fairness, we passed our draft acts, euphonically termed "Selective Service Acts," it being intended that this action should bring America to its focus, and should put under arms warm and lukewarm lovers of our flag alike. As it seems to this writer, that originally was unfair only in that it made the maximum service age too low. It cast the burden of the war on the boys, the young men, most of whom had never felt hate against any country, and knew little about the causes of this war; for soldiers often do not really know why they fight.

Under the weak American pacifist propaganda, there lay much human nature and very much more of shrewd German propaganda. Germany always has had this country sown with spies and secret agents, as we have shown, and always has counted very largely on the German-American loyalty to the flag of Germany. That very able spy, Prince Henry of Prussia, brother to that now very contemptible but once very arrogant coward, William Hohenzollern, carried back to his royal brother the most confident reports regarding potential German forces in America. He was especially well received in Milwaukee and Chicago, where he was met and welcomed by officials not unmindful of the value of the German vote.

We find all these influences enlisted to aid and abet any natural reluctance of boys to go to war, boys of the noblest and bravest souls, who none the less had mothers to weep over them, sisters and sweethearts to hold them back. So there became apparent, in more cities than one, the truth that a great many young men had not registered, had not filled out questionnaires, were deserting, or were in some way evading the draft.

Very naturally, an intense feeling grew up against these draft-dodgers and slackers, a feeling based on the fair-play principle. If one man's son must go, why not the next man's, especially as that next man might be a secret pro-German trying to protect his blood as well as his property?