world saw in the stricken heart of France. After all, what was the love of country but the white flame sprung from the mystical union of race and soil-Par l'immémorial et sévère hyménée. . . . Discipline-just that and no more. The stifling of weedy caprice; the calm O France, tant que tu voudras of young poets and painters, already swallowed in the ditch of deadly eyes. And what artists they were, what ministers of grace and high gifts! Of these lyric souls-écrivains morts pour la Patrie-France had a shining legion. They left the sunlit heights for a vile sewer of butchery; they chose a bloody death before the Chopin-life of beauty, incense, and dreams.

After all, that lovely spirit and unswerving choice was not peculiar to Europe. It glowed in George Washington's life as the American caller was reminded by his soldier-host. It was seen in Lincoln's faith when his friends fell away in the night of terror. There was little need for the United States to seek advice abroad, for she had heroic voices of her own. "A nation is not worthy to be saved," President Garfield told the Lower House in '64, "if in the hour of its fate it will not gather up its jewels of manhood and go down into the conflict, however bloody and doubtful, resolved upon measureless ruin or complete success.

Nevertheless, Joffre's "quality of discipline" proved a hard saying to the prosperity of the United States, where military service was ever a hateful thing. In the stormy 'Sixties it was called "unconstitutional"-an attack upon liberty which inflamed the mob to murder and madness. Boston, Philadelphia, and Chicago ran red with riot against the Lincoln "drafts"; the New York streets were full of furies carrying firearms, iron bars, and knives. Federal troops were clubbed to death with their own muskets; and when Colonel O'Brien drew a pistol to defend his men he was hanged upon a lamp-post and his body beaten by the outraged proletariat. Yet one and all knew America's

future was at stake on that fateful April day when Beauregard's guns opened fire upon Fort Sumter.

Down to 1917 the panoply of war was decried by the zealots of moral suasion, of whom Mr. Bryan was the great exemplar. At dove-and-brotherhood meetings these men deplored the genius wasted in war devices and proposed a more rational use for them. Thus aeroplanes might locate the forest fire-that summer curse of the wilderness-and warn American settlers in the path of the flames. The submarine was given a clear commercial future up and down the Alaska coast, where the winter floes prevent ordinary craft from landing Uncle Sam's mails.

So the first idea of a national army vanished, and with it went War-Secretary Garrison, whose plan the President would not openly endorse. For Woodrow Wilson, with perfect knowledge of his people, was a slow and cautious convert to the "Get Ready" creed. He knew that America in the mass was indifferent to a huge army, if not actually hostile to it.

His attitude to the notorious Hay Army Bill was a serious error. It was a deplorable measure; the largest and most recent looting of the Federal Treasury by politicians who love "pork"-America's name for graft which use and custom have made respectable, especially in the State centres that profit by it. Never has Washington seen such flagrant lobbying in both Houses of Congress as that which marked the passage of the so-called Army Reorganization. Never were the meanest of provincial interests arrayed so cynically against the nation.

The forty-eight States have armies of their own. I shall not dwell upon the performance of these troops, for the story is tedious as well as grotesque. As soldiers they were all but entirely negligible-untrained, unequipped, illdisciplined, and physically unfit. They were a social as well as a quasi-military body; on festal days they gave the

Governor's estate a certain figure and equipage. The Militia or National Guard could be called out to quell riots, but they were not under national authority, and swore allegiance only to their several States. The Dick Law of 1903 brought a certain measure of Federal control, and this was carried further by the National Defence Act of 1916. But the State Militias were still forty-eight easygoing armies. They served the local politicians, but were of little use to Federal officers worried over the problems of invasion and all-American defence.

"Could anything be more scandalous," asked General Butt, "than to take green men off the streets and send them down to the Border half-equipped, or with no equipment at all?" The men of Arkansas left with umbrellas and straw hats. Minnesota had "everything but uniforms and guns." The Illinois cavalry had no horses. Iowa boggled over the Federal oath; so did New Jersey, Maryland, and Massachusetts-whose Guardsmen were presently poisoned by their own rations! It was an aggrieved citizen army that kept watch on the Rio Grande and wrote letters to Colonel Roosevelt, of which the burden was "Never again!"

The Hay-Chamberlain "pork" Bill was jockeyed through Congress by parochial lobbies and local champions, who are the worst enemies of their country, and are now thoroughly discredited. The idea underlying "pork" and political loot is that the Federal authority exists, not to be loyally served, but to be milked and plundered whenever possible; that Federal taxation of the States is really a system by which money flows to a common centre, and is-or should be— piped back again for distribution in "our district." A typical case was a bill to appropriate $75,000 for a postoffice in McKee (Ky.). This turned out to be a village with a population of two hundred souls! But the appetite for "pork," like other ugly symptoms, is not so keen as it was.

There is everywhere a desire and demand for decency and social service among the mixed communities of this vast land. Thus the little town of Ripon (Wis.) renounced an appropriation for a public building that was to cost $75,000. Ripon's Commercial Club asked to have that sum applied to Preparedness for national defence, preferably in the matter of aircraft.

CHAPTER IV

"STATES' RIGHTS" VERSUS THE NATION

It is no easy matter to present in brief a clear idea of a "country" whose frontier has advanced two thousand miles in a single life-span. Let me take that of Colonel W. F. Cody, better known as "Buffalo Bill," because of his task of feeding with buffalo-meat the trackmen of the KansasPacific Railway. Advancing in years, the Colonel settled down at last as farmer and irrigator in the dry lands of Wyoming. But the man's real nunc dimittis came in 1883, when he put his big Show on the road and knew the Wild West for ever tamed.

Dan Boone, Dave Crockett, Kit Carson, and Bill Codyhere in four dare-devil names is evoked the fascinating story of pioneer conquest in the United States. Her epic period is strangely near to us. The figure of Lincoln has all the magic of myth for America's younger generation, yet their fathers knew the Slave-emancipator in the flesh. Colonel Cody's life saw the passing of the Redskin, with his teepees, and squaws and scalps. Today the Shoshone brave wears a billycock hat and a Semi-Ready suit by Kuppenheimer "as advertised for dressy College men"! The Five Civilized Tribes-Choctaw, Chickasaw, and the restare now demurely herded and taught in the Reservations. Black Hawk and Sitting Bull of 1918 are flourishing dentists and attorneys; the smaller fry accept bread-andblanket doles from a paternal Government in Washington. The big chief, once lord of the lonely horizon, now scuds abroad in a Ford car hunting a drink of bad whisky in some corrugated iron cave, far from the omniscient eye of Prohibition. Sic transit gloria mundi!