been in force long enough to demonstrate that it is efficient. The Swiss system has repeatedly given abundant proof of remarkable efficiency.

The Swiss Republic resembles the American Republic in several important respects, although the two territories and situations are strikingly unlike. Switzerland is a federation of distinct political entities called cantons, in which four different languages severally prevail, part of the cantons being Catholic and part Protestant. Industrially the people are agricultural, pastoral, manufacturing, or commercial, but universally democratic in manners and customs. The federal legislation concerning education and taxation is more democratic than that of the United States. The country is annually invaded by large numbers of alien laborers. On the whole the stout little republic is a safe guide for the United States in respect to the organization of a competent modern army.

SAFETY WITHOUT MILITARISM

Given universal service, it would require only six or seven years to build up an American army fit to perform all the present functions of the Regular Army and of the militia in the several states, and also to meet the exigencies of an attack on this country by a great military Power. It must be confessed, however, that the United States is but ill prepared for the enactment by Congress of the new legislation required, or for submission by the people to the necessary statutes and regulations. In regard to the new laws and appropriations, it would be safe to copy for the most part the Swiss enactments; because the Swiss are not only a people intensely democratic in theory and practice, but also frugal by necessity. They have escaped war to a remarkable degree considering their exposed situation in central Europe; and they have developed no dangerous military class or objectionable military spirit. They are accustomed, however, to a minute regulation of their lives and labors by government, to which the native American people have never been subjected.

Many thoughtful Americans believe that nothing but heavy disasters in war can

bring the country to adopt the system of universal military service; but others, more sanguine about democratic capacity for wise action in matters which concern nearly the whole people, hope that the horrors of the present war and the example of the national army maintained by Switzerland can bring a majority of the American voters to the conviction that universal military service is the safest, most humane, and worthiest policy for the United States during the next fifty years at least.

The present American Navy can be built up in three or four years into a navy adequate in size, which will embody all the most recent improvements in naval equipment, without much legislation in addition. to that recently adopted by Congress in response to the urgency of the present Administration; provided means be found to procure the number of men necessary to keep the whole Navy in commission. Universal service would furnish the men.

AMERICA'S MILITARY NEEDS

The answer, then, to the question at the head of this article is-the United States needs a navy modeled on the British navy, and an army modeled on the Swiss army; and in order to procure both it needs to adopt the principle of brief universal service in the Army or the Navy. The time lost by the young men from the productive industries and the service of the family will be a trifling loss compared with the gain from an increased feeling of devotion to the country in the hearts of multitudes, and a quickened sense of responsibility for its welfare. The slight loss of individual liberty will be more than compensated by experience of a strict, cooperative discipline, and by an enlarged sense of comradeship and community interest among the people.

It is a grave conclusion to come to, that a great democracy whose primary object is the promotion of the public welfare and happiness must arm itself to fight, and must teach all its young men how to fightwhich means how to kill and wound other men with whom individually they have no quarrel, to destroy public and private property, to disrupt homes and extinguish

families, to interrupt commerce, and to waste on a prodigious scale the accumulated savings of generations.

What forces this Republic to so awful a conclusion? The same experience which has compelled civilized Society in general to defend itself by force against lunatics and criminals, and the demonstration given during the last two years that the existing governmental and ecclesiastical institutions of the civilized world afford no adequate protection from a sudden but longprepared outbreak of primitive savagery which has compelled nearly half the population of the earth to set to work with all their energy and ingenuity to kill each other and to destroy each other's property, and to use in that killing and destruction not only all the new instruments with which modern physics, chemistry, and mechanics have supplied it, but all the old instruments of hand-to-hand fighting, such as the spear -now bayonet-the short sword, and the hand grenade. Neither religion nor popular education has shown any power to prevent this relapse into savagery. The modern means of easy communication by printing press, telegraph, and telephone have not prevented governments from misleading their people by withholding the truth and circulating falsehoods. Censors and martial law have triumphed over the ordinary means of publicity. Never in the whole history of the world has despotic government wrought such immense mischief; because never before have despotisms been able to wield with so much skill such highly organized and accumulated forces.

A GRAVE BUT NECESSARY CHOICE

For the nations that already possess a good deal of freedom, and mean to have more, there is no other way to security and peace than to organize and use their own forces with greater skill and more devotion than the nations despotically ruled exhibit. Like all the other free nations, the United States must be prepared to defend its territory and its ideals. Submission

and non-resistance are not safe policies either for the United States or for civilized | Society. Therefore the United States needs a navy of the best possible sort as regards men, vessels, and equipment, and an army of the most patriotic quality and surest efficiency. To secure this navy and this army it needs to adopt the principle of universal service. To do nothing and run for luck is not good sense, when such vital interests are at stake. Those who think it high time for men to learn war no more, and that all teaching of the military art is to be deplored, can console themselves with the reflections that, whereas many millions of young Americans, on the principle of universal service, would learn how to fight, only a small proportion of the total mass would ever be called on actually to fight, and that the better the teaching the smaller that proportion would probably be. Moreover, the small proportion of American youth that in the course of years would come to the actual killing of fellow-men would be actuated at the moment by lofty motives, such as love of home and country, and unselfish devotion to the highest interests of humanity.

FACING THE FACTS

Despite the heterogeneous character of the people of the United States as respects race or stock, the masses of the people worship the same precious ideals of liberty, law, and public happiness. At heart they know that these ideals, so dear to them, will have to be protected and furthered by force for many a year to come, the world being what it is. Everybody hopes that the world is going to be very different hereafter from what it is in these grievous days of return to primitive savagery; but the conduct of the liberty-loving nations to-day and to-morrow must be determined by the hard, actual facts. They cannot organize now the perpetual defense of liberty under law; but they can provide promptly, through practicable alliances, securities which will last at least for one generation.