it, involves a confession that he is not able to compete with the lowest competitor in an outside industry, and he gets a little less than the lowest pay. I say that involves a confession of failure, on the face of it, which no self-respecting American citizen likes to make. The increase we are talking about is small, compared with the expense of making any system of universal training effective. If you are going to make your universal military service worth anything, the difference in the Army pay necessary to get men into the Regular Army, will amount to but an insignificant fraction of what it will cost you to make universal service really effective. If you are going to train men to shoot with a rifle, furnish them with a rifle, furnish them with ammunition to shoot and train them, so that all over this country, with its millions of people we are training the available young men on a universal plan, figure up the cost of it, compared with the other expense. Of course, there is a lot of talk about the small expense of universal military training because it is going to be unloaded as far as possible on the local communities. That does not lessen the expense any. If you get the city and State in connection with the school system to add to their expenditures for this purpose, that does not lessen the total amount of expense to come out of the pockets of the people. I do not stop there, Senator. I would like to put my whole thought before you on the subject of this enlistment. If, in addition to the pay which you offer, which will be on a self-respecting basis, you offer to the men that go into the Army a real training in some mechanical or industrial pursuit, so that when they come out of the Army at the end of the year, or eighteen months, they will be a civic asset of value to the country, we should have no trouble in getting all the men we want.

Senator THOMAS. We have made a start in that present bill.

Mr. FISHER. You have started. It is exactly what I said a few minutes ago. I think you have made distinct progress in your bill, not in substance, because you have not got enough of it, but you have made a distinct forward step when you provide that there should be something of this kind, and when you provide that if a man attains a certain proficiency, his commanding officers could certify him out into the reserve, you have made another step forward. So long, however, as you leave essential links out of the chain you can not get results. There was a man, whom I have always regarded as exceptionally wise, who, when he was asked what he thought of the practical operation of Christianity, said he did not know; it had never been tried. So with regard to these other things. They have not been tried if you have left out some essential step in the process. I know the Army officers, as a rule, do not like to add civic training to military training. They say "We give them a certain amount of industrial or mechanical training as an incident to military service." That is particularly so of such branches of the service as the Coast Artillery; and there, and in other branches of the Artillery, you will find a far greater responsiveness to this particular idea than among the Cavalry. This is naturally due to differences in the service. I do not know how it happens to be now, but until very recently it has been true that the Cavalry arm of the service has politically dominated the service, and it is not sympathetic to any combination of civic and military training, but you get to a service like the Coast

Artillery, and you will find they were in motion before you passed the recent legislation.

They were working toward this thing I speak of-offering mechanical and industrial training as an inducement to enlistment, and successfully offering it. If you will require exactly that kind of training, you will get all the men you want, in my judgment. I speak with all possible deference on the subject, but I find much support for the opinion that I express.

There is the greatest difference of opinion about how long it takes to train a soldier. We get all the way from three months to two years. I think my friend, Gen. Scott, is now in favor of the twoyear requirement, but I have heard most emphatic statements from the very highest sources, that we can get the results in a year. Suppose it took 18 months. If you adopt a system under which it will be possible to give the men who come into it (and to assure them before they enlist that they will get it) a training that will be or civic value to them when they get out, you will have less trouble in getting enlistments; and in the opinion of other men, whose opinions are better qualified than maine, you will get all the men you want; but you must pay them the proper wages. Industrial training ought to be practicable without the slightest detriment to the military work. For instance, we all know that in modern military work, one of the things which sticks out is the increasing use of auto vehicles of one kind or another, the truck, the ambulances, even the guns using the automobile in various forms. Suppose a man went into the service and was told that at the end of his 18 months or two years, or whatever was found to be a proper period, he would come out so that the department could certify that that man was not only competent to run a machine-not only knew how to direct it and turn the wheel; to fill the gasoline tanks and oil cups and wash the car, but that he really had some understanding of the mechanism of that car; that he had been taught something about the engine? If you had thousands of these men a year, on a certified list, you would have employers in this country filing applications for them in advance and the man who went in would know when he came out that he would have men waiting to employ him. The same thing is true of many other branches of the service. There are things in modern military science that lend themselves peculiarly to this sort of training-stationary engineering, concrete work, a multitude of things that would occur far more quickly to military authorities than they occur to me.

So it seems to an outsider, a man whose only excuse for expressing an opinion is his interest in the subject and the time he has devoted to its study-that no system of so-called universal military training that is regarded as within the reach of practical adoption in this country can possibly take the place of your first line of defense. With or without universal military training you have got the same need for a trained army of approximately half a million men, which is the only possible justification for treating this matter as seriously as we are treating it.

Now, if that is so, then we revert to the question as to how valuable universal military training will be aside from that. One of the principal arguments that is now being made for universal military training is that it is going incidentally to give us certain results of civic value. For instance, take Senator Chamberlain's bill; and

going only as far as that, believing that it is substantially as far as we can hope to go, it is being advocated, not because it is of any very great military value, but because it has civic value along lines which are in themselves of military value. In other words, we are being urged to adopt universal military training for the sake of the civic byproduct. Why not turn this right around? Why should we not adopt a system of universal civic training that will have military byproducts? Why must we give this whole thing a military complexion? What is it we expect to get out of it? In the first place, we are told we are going to get out of universal military training certain physical advantages. We are going to develop our young men from a physical point of view. Excellent; nothing more important than that. The only reason we are talking about the subject, however, is because our system of education has failed in that direction, and when we have failed to secure physical development through our public-school system we propose not to directly supply it, not to go after it and see what is wrong and do whatever is needed to correct it, but we propose to do something else in the hope that the results will come hereafter, indirectly, as an incident. It seems to me that is fundamentally unsound. This bill illustrates it. The first period, it states, shall be devoted to calisthenics, without arms. That is the earlier stages.

If there is anything that has been demonstrated by physical directors and physicians, it is that calisthenics, certainly unless they are applied with a very much higher degree of intelligence and skill than has been found practical in this country thus far, is an exceedingly poor method of physical development. Sargent, the physical director at Harvard, says that the young men who come from the military schools are distinctly inferior. President Eliot once told me of an experience he had. He went to a very large industrial establishment that was looking out for the welfare of its employees, had a magnificent gymnasium, well equipped, and he was very much interested. A few years later he came back and was taken into the same building, and there was not a shred of all that appliance left there. He said, "What is the matter? You have given up your physical work." They said, "Not at all; quite the contrary; we do more than we did then." He said, "What is the matter with the gymnasium?" They said, "We have found that a system of organized free play is much better than the system of calisthenics and gymnastic exercises." It is organized systematized play that is compulsory in the best private schools. Why do we not have that in the public schools? Simply because of the fact that we are unwilling to put that degree of compulsion on the boys that attend those schools, and that we are unwilling to pay for the training that is necessary to secure teachers that are capable. Somehow or other, we think we are going to "lift ourselves by our boot straps" by doing somthing somehow or other for the sake of an indirect benefit we think we are going to get. One of the chief reasons why I think universal military training ought not to be adopted, is because it will be essentially artificial. It will not produce the result that we hope. It is not practical in this country, by that indirect method to accomplish the civic results that we have in mind.

We are told, aside from physical development, that the great thing we need is to discipline our young men. Now, military discipline

consists primarily in obedience to orders, a discipline which, as is pointed out in the reports of the War College, can only be obtained by making prompt obedience to orders so constant that it becomes a habit—that it becomes unconscious. That is the reason why they insist upon so large an amount of drill; it is because they wish to have the individual go through it, over and over again, until the habit of unquestioning obedience is instinctive. Now, a system of that sort, in my opinion, does not even tend toward civic discipline, valuable as it is for military purposes, and I do not wish to underestimate it. I say if you want civic discipline, that is to say, the conscious and willing subordination of the individual to superior direction for the good of the community, you have got to go after it exactly the other way around. I would dislike to see my boys go into military training of the kind that is provided in this bill, but if you said to me, "I propose to take those boys out, by the arm of the law; when they reach a certain stage in their education I am going to take them out in the country, along with the hod-carrier's boy and the chauffeur's boy and put them in a camp, to get up and go to bed by the trumpet and to work on the road, to dig ditches and to build concrete bridges, all under an ordered discipline so that they may have a real experience in constructive democracy and may learn the value and effectiveness of cooperative effort for a common end, and so that when they get through they will have been instrumental in the creation of assets for the community, and not dig trenches so that the next squad will have to fill them up," I am with you and the country will be with you.

If you will adopt civic discipline because it includes the military by-product-not military discipline for the sake of the civic byproduct-you can carry the country, and you can not carry it the other way around. It is not impracticable. The fact of the matter is that all we need to do is to apply the principles that are now embodied in our compulsory educational system. All we need is to carry them a step further. The most significant experiment that has happened in this country in a hundred years is going on in the town of Gary, on the outskirts of Chicago, where they are teaching the young men and the young women the significance of the things that go on in school in relation to the things that go on outside. The head of that school is being taken to New York City to attempt to inaugurate certain principles of that system there, while in the city of Chicago we are passing through the school board, perfunctorily, a motion for universal military training that is a farce on its face, and we do not even send anybody down to Gary, across the State line. We are not aware in the school system of the city of Chicago that there is such a thing as an educational revolution going on at our doors. That is the reason our young men are not trained. You say, "Look at the statistics of crime in the United States." Do you think military training is going to change all that? Do the schools which have military discipline or strict discipline along military lines produce this result? When a boy is released from such a school, is it not notorious that he is apt to run amuck, to be a bit wild, to show some contempt for law and order? Does military discipline in school or army conspicuously produce respect for law and order in the individual who has been disciplined? Are not some of

us thinking rather of the use of the Army to enforce law and order on those who are not in the Army?

Now, it is very hard to get any statistics on these matters. I hold in my hand a book called "The Soul of Germany," written by Thomas F. A. Smith, an Englishman with considerable bitterness in his point of view, but an Englishman who spent about 12 years in Germany, in a position which entitled him to receive the certification of constituted authority as to his efficiency and character and standing. He wrote this book under stress of the war. I am not referring to it for the sake of anything that appears in the text, and I can not vouch for the accuracy of his figures, but in his last appendix he has undertaken to present some statistics of crimes of violence and crimes relating to law and order, statistics which, if correct, would seem to have some bearing on the subject to which we are now referring. These statistics are for Great Britain, where they have not had compulsory military service, and for Germany, for 10-year periods. The 10-year periods are not exactly the same. The 10-year period of the statistics for Germany is from 1897 to 1907. The statistics for England 1900-1910. He says the English statistics are taken from a publication of the Home Office and the German are found in the publications of the Imperial Statistical Office, Berlin, 1908. They are the most astounding statistics I have ever read. I have been trying to find an explanation. During the 10 years in question in Germany there were 172,153 recorded cases of malicious and felonious wounding as against 1,262 such cases in Great Britain for the equivalent period of time. Do you get the significance of the figures-172,000 as against 1,262? Now, I imagine there must be some explanation for that. There must be something that modifies those figures. They are altogether too extraordinary, but I have had no opportunity to check them. I do not know whether you gentlemen can find an opportunity to check them.

He says there were 350 murders in Germany during that 10-year period, as against 97 in England; 25,759 cases of malicious damage to property in Germany, as against 358 in England; 610 cases of arson in Germany, as against 278 in England.

The CHAIRMAN. What is the purpose of that appendix? Is that to show that the German citizen is worse than the British?

Mr. FISHER. This is what he says: "The comparison between England's and Germany's crime statistics is not made in any critical spirit, but it is of interest in view of the fact that we find an appalling number of brutal crimes against the individual and his property." The CHAIRMAN. It surpasses anything I have seen or heard of before.

Mr. FISHER. I present it with the greatest hesitation and merely because it is the only table of statistics on this subject that I have had called to my attention.

The CHAIRMAN. Do you undertake to use it for the purpose of showing that in a country where they have compulsory service there is more crime than in a country where they have no compulsory service?

Mr. FISHER. If the statistics are correct, I would think that it would certainly tend powerfully to show that universal military training did not tend to produce that respect for law and order which is claimed for it, if a country which has compulsory military service of the kind that exists in Germany has such a disproportionate number of crimes