But we can, and must, plan so that the transition from peace to war may be made in the future with less tearing up of industry by the roots. We must plan to carry such reserve of up-to-date material as will be necessary to tide us over the period of transition without delaying the start of operations. And we must have a personnel reserve that can take hold from the day of mobilization, without further delay than is necessary to throw at each man a bag of clothes, a hammock and a typhoid shot.

The ships of the Emergency Fleet will be turned over in some way to normal and lawful trade-we of the navy are not concerned in that. Those ships, however, will need men, and men for them will never be obtained under the pre-war conditions that put the Dollar Line under the Chinese flag and banished the Pacific Mail from the trans-Pacific lanes. And here the navy is interested, and vitally so. Think, brothers, what would it have meant to the part of the navy you began the war with, if arming and manning the merchant ships had meant only a trip to the nearest yard to mount the guns, a thunderous and unanimous "I do!" from all hands on each ship as the skipper read out the oath of allegiance, and a scamper to get out of slop-rig and into regulation blues? What would it have meant in your home yard if on April 7th of last year a thousand "limited service" mechanics had walked in through the gate and into your shops, each knowing the way to his own lathe or drill? How much younger would you be now if the first reservists who marched aboard your ship had plumped full bags down on the deck, and in response to your inquiry had saluted smartly and answered "Broadside guns, Sir. Sevens or sixes. Ten crews, complete, and 50 extra shellmen."

The other side of the picture is this-three or four million returned soldiers, three or four million munition workers, their pay envelopes suddenly stopped. During the transition and before complete relocation, there are going to be several restless people in this land. Can we help any of them?

II. THE KEY HOLE

The war has taken the daily life of every one of us and transformed it into something we do not yet quite understand. We watch ourselves going about our daily business with a speculative wonder. Things are the same outwardly; but so subtly different

within. We feel neither discomfort nor regret-not many of us feel any conscious exaltation or setting of jaws. Things are just different, and we are surprised at how easily we have slipped into the new order which we have not yet even formulated in our minds. We know vaguely that our entire national attitude has been violently wrenched through 180°. We know that our postwar commerce, society and organization must never be again the happy-go-lucky, purblind scheme of things that made this crash possible. We know that not even an international boundary line will mean the same in the future that it has in the past. We don't know what all the changes will be, nor how they will affect us personally; but we do know that, with our newly awakened national solidarity, our new national soul, we are going to do our level best to make the reorganization a real one and a wise one. and one that will make a better, stronger America and a cleaner, sweeter world. And we have realized one thing very solidly, and having realized it, have gained something worth fine gold. And that something is that UNIVERSAL SERVICE IS THE MOST DEMOCRATIC, THE MOST UNMILITARISTIC, THE MOST RELIABLE FORM OF PREPAREDNESS; AND THAT UNIVERSAL SERVICE IS THE BEST THING THAT EVER HAPPENED TO AMERICAN BOYS AND THEIR FAMILIES. Hundreds of thousands of flat-chested, timid, shifty-eyed, mouthy boys have gone to war, but not one of them will return with peace. In their place will come back quiet, level-eyed, self-respecting, broad-shouldered, self-reliant men. Hundreds of thousands of boys whose hands had no cunning have joined the colors. Very few will come back without at least the rudiments of a useful trade at their finger-tips, and this is especially true of the boys who have come to us, the NAVY. We need few "gun-toters," but we can turn out machinists and artisans by the thousand.

If we abandon universal service, be the term ever so short, after the war, we will throw away the greatest national blessing we have found so far, from the point of view not only of national safety, but also of national economy and national health and national education. And we will lose something else that has cost us much to learn. To-day, the ARMY and the NAVY are not strange collections of peculiar men, apart from the rest of us, necessary but perfectly unintelligible. The word "officer" does not mean tyrant or bully or martinet to the layman now, and the newest recruit knows before he joins what an officer is really

for-to teach, to guide, and to provide for the welfare of his men. As a nation America has learned that discipline is not to exalt the few above the many. It is to provide for the safety of the many and to place the responsibility, therefore, squarely on the officers whose raison d'être it is. America and her soldiers and sailors must never again become strangers to each other. Moreover, nothing but universal service is going to tide over our transition period and utilize our waste.

FOR THE SAKE OF OUR SAFETY, FOR THE SAKE OF OUR HEALTH, AND FOR THE SAKE OF OUR SOUL, LET US HOLD FAST TO UNIVERSAL SERVICE.

III. FILLING THE WARDS

We have in the navy and its branches, at present, a round half million of men. We need them, and every one of them is busy. But of that half million, a huge percentage are "one-specialty men." Ships that normally would go cheerily about their business with ten or a dozen regular officers are carrying twenty-five or thirty, not because the officers are slothful or inefficient, but because most of them are efficient only in one line, and have had no time to become proficient in others. The deck officers are good deck officers and the gunnery officers good gunnery officers; but a comparative few of the deck officers can run a gun's crew through a morning's drill period and teach them anything. It may be safely said that with a very moderate amount of all-around training, sixteen thousand officers and four hundred thousand men would have accomplished as much if not more than our present twenty thousand officers and half million men who have been trained for one job only.

We obviously cannot keep a regular, standing navy of four hundred and sixteen thousand officers and men. We don't want them, we can't afford them, and we have no real use for them. If we can build a reserve that can come aboard with the knowledge our present reserve will have when it goes ashore and musters out, we shall have found the real answer to sea-going preparedness, economy and safety. In the past we tried to bribe men into the reserve, and made the reserve so attractive that many regulars who otherwise would have stayed with us through life preferred to leave us for it. But we did not accumulate a trained reserve, and of our half million not 15 per cent had the vaguest idea

of what the NAVY wanted them to do when they joined us. Without the far-flung barrier of the British fleet a staggering per cent of them would never have lived to find out.

We must, then, have a regular NAVY just large enough to do our overseas business, just large enough to afford decent protection against surprise attack, to keep our fleets in readiness for business, and to form the backbone of the war NAVY. And we must have a reserve far larger than the navy itself, of trained or partially trained men, available at a moment's notice, each man plying his peaceful trade at home, but with his bag, hammock and mobilization orders stowed neatly in mothballs in the attic. When war comes, each man will shift into uniform, catch a train, walk aboard the destroyer he knows, hang his bag on the same old hook and shout into the galley, "Hey, Slim, have you learned how to cook a decent slum since I saw you last? And who's the new main gob?" Ahhh! Wake me up, someone!

A dream? Of course it is, BUT IT CAN BE DONE, and what is to the point, cheaply done! Done without a huge regular NAVY, done without a huge annual appropriation bill, done without dislocating either the patience or the pocket-book of the nation. And when it is done, merchants, manufacturers, and mothers will thank the NAVY for the reliable employees and clean, sturdy sons it turns out. We want no more " Snowbirds" in the navy. Give us clean boys, if only for a short time. We promise to send them back just as clean and considerably more useful to the community at large and the family pay-envelope in particular.

Rich or poor, educated or illiterate, the eighteenth birthday is a milestone in almost every boy's life. If he is lucky, he is starting or planning his college course. If he is not bound for college, he is trying to pick his trade, and only too often lack of mental and manual equipment forces him to pick a trade without a future or a decent competence. Have you ever heard of a boy of eighteen, even one who was the sole support of a family, who, in the absence of education of any sort, would not gladly embrace the opportunity to spend six months learning a trade if he could just send a few dollars a month home meanwhile? At seventeen he is too young. At nineteen he may be so settled in his job that to leave it would be a hardship; but at eighteen there is not one boy in five thousand that has not six months to spare for a profitable purpose before he starts his life work.

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Immediately comes the question, "Can we make a really serviceable reservist in six months in time of peace?" It is true that under the pre-war system, very few boys showed much promise before the end of their first year in the service, and many had barely learned to lay out a clothes-bag for inspection in six months. There is this great difference, however. A boy who enlisted in the past, was signing up either from a desire to the world" or for a job. To a boy of eighteen, neither object is a stimulus to immediate study or effort; and every old-timer in the service has seen cases without number where boys with undoubted ability and plenty of advice and encouragement have lazied away the greater part of their first enlistment "getting by," hunting the soft job from deck to bridge, from bridge to fireroom, from fireroom to sickbay, and finally ending as a galley-striker. But those boys were "seeing the world," and had a three or four year term stretching ahead of them-" lots of time to get busy." Moreover, as long as they stayed off the report, they were sure of three meals a day, enough money to make an occasional liberty, and were enjoying themselves hugely with their mates. Why work and worry?

Six months under universal service presents a different aspect. A boy's future may depend entirely on what he does with those six months, and he will know it. The poor boy no longer has an apparently endless four years to learn a trade at the navy's expense. Even at eighteen, six months is not a long time; and if he wants to learn a trade he will work. Rich or poor, every boy will know that his position and chances in time of war will depend entirely on his making good during his six months' service in the active reserve. Under universal service, the NAVY could pick and choose only the boys who wanted to learn, at that, and the NAVY could actually become the greatest trades school in the world, and would rapidly accumulate the sort of reserve that has been the dear dream of every regular since the navy began ;-sound, clean, ambitious boys, with their trades well in hand and the sea-habit at least partly acquired.

After the war we are not going to be able to keep in full commission or even in ordinary, all the vessels we have with a regular NAVY of any size that the country can afford. Neither can we afford to let them rot out of commission. Nothing will ruin a ship so quickly, and nothing is so costly in the end as to put a ship