impression for some time that it was the wish of our people to lead the nations of the world out of the way of war-to begin work for a warless world. War is the greatest curse of mankind, and peace the greatest blessing of mankind. The continued enlarging of militaristic forces is nothing more or less than following Nazi doctrines. Coercion is a mighty dangerous doctrine.

The president of one of our midwestern colleges has recently said that in the next war a large army would probably be as useless as a bow and arrow, because in the next war the weapons of warfare will be death rays and robot bombs, and the release of men given this full year of military training would be about 90-percent waste.

Now, I could call the names of many of our great men who are opposed to peacetime military conscription, but I am going to mention one whom we all admire, Jan Smuts, bitterly opposed to this plan, and he really is conceded to be one of the world's foremost statesmen.

Now, gentlemen, I must speak a moment on what to me is the serious side of this question, the deeper implication of this question before you: We must not forget that America is supposed to be a Christian land. That means we are supposed to follow the Prince of Peace. Now, I have in my hand evidence that during the life of Christ and for nearly 300 years after that, Christians took no part in war and many of them gave their lives for this belief.

Before I leave you, I want to present what I believe is a real solution to this problem we have before us.

I want to quote Hanson Baldwin in Harper's Magazine, March 1945: The present Army and Navy groups that are studying various aspects of the problem are too little integrated to produce a rounded study; moreover, Army and Navy studies are bound to be ex parte. Nor can a congressional committee do the whole job. What is needed is a fact-finding commission, after the pattern of the Morrow or Baker board composed of some of the most capable men in the country-a commission appointed by the President, or by Congress, or by both together, and made up of judges, lawyers, scientists, educators, and Congressmen. It should have Army, Navy, and Air Force advisers, but probably no military members. Thorough hearings on the broadest possible basis should be started immediately, and the commission should continue its studies until such time as world developments and its analysis of the war's lessons permit it to make final findings. Only in such a way can the framework of a sound integrated defense system, keyed to our foreign policy and to our social and economic and political life, be set up.

Whether or not such a solution is adopted, upon two things we should insist. First, that peacetime conscription is not a separate issue; it should be treated as part of a far broader problem-the whole problem of postwar defense. Second, that it must stand or fall on its military merits. If it is adjudged essential to implement our postwar military policy, we must have it, but we must remember that the harm it may do to our political and economic and social institutions may well outweigh its incidental political, economic, and social benefits.

Above all, we should not permit hasty legislation. The issue is too important to our sons and our sons' sons to be given a "once over lightly." We are legislating for tomorrow, not for today, and sound thought and long study are essential to the success of future investments.

Gentlemen, I urge you to give this idea of Hanson Baldwin's most earnest and profound consideration.

Chairman WOODRUM. Thank you very much. We are very glad to have heard from you, Mrs. Whitner.

Mrs. WHITNER. Thank you, sir.

Chairman WOODRUM. The next witness, who will represent the National Woman's Christian Temperance Union, Miss Smart, will now be heard.

STATEMENT OF ELIZABETH A. SMART, NATIONAL WOMAN'S CHRISTIAN TEMPERANCE UNION

Miss SMART. I am Miss Elizabeth A. Smart. My address is 100 Maryland Avenue, NE., Washington, D. C. I am representing the National Woman's Christian Temperance Union. May I say that we greatly appreciate your courtesy in permitting us to present to your committee the thinking of a group of women which reaches perhaps further than any other one group into every town, village, and hamlet of our country.

My organization has gone on record at our last national convention as opposing the peacetime conscription of men, women, and youth. I should like to insert this resolution and have it included as part of my testimony.

We oppose:

3. Peacetime conscription of men, women, or youth.

A statement from our national director of international convention for peace will be appended to and form part of my testimony. This elaborates further the thought of my organization, which is behind this resolution. I regret that because she is convalescing from illness she will be unable to be present in person and present her own statement.

Before I leave this phase of the question, may I point out to your committee one or two reasons why we feel that the question of conscription of youth for purposes of military training requires perhaps a more intensive study and fuller investigation than can be given under the pressures that are now placed on Members of Congress by the rapidly changing circumstance of our present wartime situation, with its immediate demands both for the exigencies of war, of wartime shortage, and of the economic readjustments of partial reconversion to production for civilian needs, the reemployment of discharged veterans, and the readjustment of our foreign relationships. For decisions on all these questions there is an immediate need. Since we have, and will continue to have for some time, an adequate Army and Navy to meet the requirements of national defense, the decision with regard to defense for the remote futuré can well afford to wait greater leisure and more unhurried consideration than might be possible in our present circumstances. Should our present war continue or war arise from any other source within the near future, the provisions of the Selective Service Act will take care of the training of all of those who would be likely to come under the provisions of a military training law, since I assume that we have no intention of following the example of Russia and inducting our 15- and 16-year-olds into any such system.

Merely to suggest one phase of the question that requires considerable unhurried thinking in an atmosphere further removed from present tensions and fears that we can now hope to have, may I recall some of the testimony that was presented several days ago and which pointed to Russia as a potential future aggressor. Russia is by way of emerging as the other most powerful nation in the world, and some of her recent actions have certainly not been reassuring either to lovers of true democracy or to lovers of peace. But may I say to you gentlemen that universal military training does not seem to me to fit the problem of our relations with Russia, considered from any

angle. Viewing her activities up to the present moment as an admittedly uninitiated and very ignorant outsider, and without any idea or wish of advocating war, would not the situation, if war were regarded as inevitable, call rather for immediate action than for long years of arming to meet an expected aggression? Surely, from the military standpoint, if Russia is really so potentially powerful and war with her inevitable, it would be better to settle the issue before she recovers and further expands and entrenches herself than to wait for a future time when she has revived her industry and repaired her resources and her very considerable losses in population and military personnel. The situation viewed from that angle has a haunting resemblance to the position of Mr. Chamberlain and Mr. Deladier at Munich. Future military training of our youth would have the wrong strategic value and be the wrong remedy.

Assuming, on the other hand, that our present difficulties iron themselves out, but that what we have to dread is some future aggression and future hostilities, a realistic survey of Russian methods of procedure would still not point to universal military training as a wise remedy to apply. Let us not forget that in 1918 and '19, under universal service, we armed New York's and Chicago's gangsters with the submachine gun and an intensive course in methods of killing, with disastrous results. Russia, when not pushed by an outside foe, has preferred infiltration and revolution from within to open and honest warfare. In establishing universal military training, how do we know that we may not be arming potential foes of the Republic?

There is also the question, as has been suggested by another witness, of the effect this dislocation may have on our national economy. come from a rural section of New York and am familiar with many of the problems of the farmer. Unable as he is to compete with the higher prices being paid for labor by industry, and even by the county, State, and Nation for labor on the roads and highways that run past his door, he must count to a considerable extent on the help of his teen-age sons to enable him to produce the food of the country and to provide his own family with the means of livelihood.

It seems to me, and I say it with full recognition of my own ignorance, that the question is not a simple one, that it requires considerable further study when your committee might be at leisure to go about the country and investigate for yourselves as well as invite people who may have written articles or expressed themselves on the subject or otherwise manifested interest, to come here and testify.

There is the consideration which has been urged by other witnesses of the dislocation of youth itself at the most formative stage of its existence from the normal channels of education. Unfortunately, few of us in our teens have so strong an urge to acquire an education that it cannot be somewhat easily upset by the opportunity to do something that seems at the moment more interesting and rewarding. When education is arbitrarily interrupted the urge to go back again might not be strong enough to overcome that tendency. As a democracy depends more than any other nation on the cultivated intelligence of its citizens, the loss to our country both for peacetime economy and for the higher skills needed in wartime, as our weapons become more highly mechanized, may more than counterbalance the gain in training every teen-age youth to function as a private.

Science, scientific skills, both in industry and in our armed forces, have had as much to do with winning this war as any of the other factors. But the women of my organization are particularly concerned with another phase of the question. We have seen teen-age boys taken from our homes and exposed, with the sanction of the Army, to temptations which we regard as extremely dangerous, and we submit that the test of actual experience bears us out in our alarms. Those boys, who have been taught in our homes to avoid beverage alcohol as a narcotic drug, which at least three of our outstanding psychiatrists-Drs. Merrill Moore, Abraham Alexander, and Lee Meyerson said ought to bear the label "Poison" on every bottle, have had beer put before them in the post exchanges along with soft drinks as an apparently harmless beverage. At least, in the early days of the actual operation of the Selective Service Act, the brewers were sending about trucks and staging beer parties in the camps. with the apparent sanction of the commanding officers. The Army is now reported in the public press to have gone into the brewing business in Italy and France.

In spite of our appeals, Congress has not seen fit to extend the protection of the law of 1917 to the camps of this war by removing vicious influences from their immediate vicinity. Only zones to deal with prostitution have been authorized; and these, by themselves, have been insufficient even to protect our men in camp against venereal disease. The unremoved taverns have proved bases of operations for promiscuous women; sources of exploitation of teen-age, bobby-sox school girls; and fertile disseminators of venereal disease.

My organization this year has taken as one of its projects the investigation of prison conditions under which these unfortunate children-who have become a menace to themselves, to the Army, and to the general public-are being held. So difficult had the problem become for many of the States that houses large military or naval camps that a bili was introduced in the last Congress, at the request of juvenile court officials in some of these States, to provide Federal funds to transport these young girls back to their homes. It has been reintroduced in this Congress.

We appreciate the difficulties under which camp commanding officers have been laboring and the heroic efforts which have been made by many of them to struggle against an impossible handicap. We resent the clever methods by which the alcoholic beverage industry has endeavored and frequently managed to shift public disapproval from itse'f to the men and women in uniform, who are victims of a system which permits an industry which General Marshall described as “a sordid business for the accumulation of money," to accumulate money at their expense, and even pursue them into the camps to do it, rather than culprits in their own right. We believe that the court-martial proceedings against young Americans who are reported to have sold cigarettes on the black market in France might more justly have been taken against those who were responsible in the first instance for teaching the American people to evade the law in order that their profits might be continued even after the judgment of America had gone against them, and who are continuing the same method whenever you gentlemen even so far interfere with them as to raise their taxes. There is nothing in the present picture, however, which gives us

any encouragement to believe that any adequate protection against this exploitation of the young men whom you place in your military training camps will be given. May we remind you that of the 50 percent draft rejection, very few of those rejected came from our homes and churches. If it is necessary to keep American youth physically fit, and we believe it is, whether for war or peace, and especially in our present position, a far better showing will be made and the objective will be more nearly attained by leaving them under our care and protection and that of our regular educational institutions, than by isolating them from the normal restraints of home and church and school and placing them under condtions where homesickness, monotony, and enforced idleness render them peculiarly susceptible to the clever and unscrupulous selling devices of those who profit from vice and the sale of alcoholic beverage.

We are absolutely opposed to a program of enforced military training in camps under Army auspices. Let us call to your attention that militarization can be a deadly weapon against freedom and the American way of life. We have too recently witnessed the appalling effects of regimentation upon a supposedly civilized and enlightened people to be unaware of its possible effects upon ourselves. The very reason for our distrust of Russia is that her people are regimented and incapable of making themselves felt as individuals. In the final showdown, it was the unregimented people of the world who showed themselves capable of meeting our world's present emergencies and of successfully defending their liberties. Without, in any way, detracting from the credit due the personal bravery of the Russian people, I think we need to remember that it was utterly ineffective until the American people armed them with the weapons of modern warfare and that the guns and tanks and planes which crushed Berlin were made in the U. S. A. American civilian education has made better and more effective soldiers than German militarization.

The military mind functions a trifle stiffly and does not adapt itself readily to new ideas. It was the Army which rejected Gen. Billy Mitchell's suggestions that this present war was going to be fought in the air. I do not believe that Congress would really feel the German Junker tradition would be something it is desirable to cultivate in American life. But complete Army domination of 1 year out of every young man's life with the right to call him out of his ordinary affairs every year or every 2 or 3 years tends to produce a Junker caste.

The training which it is felt so essential he shall have consists largely in teaching him to avoid the risks of mines, booby traps, proceeding incautiously in the face of fire, and so forth, in the use of weapons and learning to coordinate his movements and move automatically in mass evolutions. There is nothing so mysterious about any of these things that he must be segregated in a camp kicking his heels during the larger part.of a day to learn them. Excellent films have been developed by the Army to show traps to be avoided and how to handle weapons. Drill can be given anywhere, where there is a competent instructor. Physical coordination can be taught in the gymnasium and on the playing fields of Eaton as well as on the drill ground.

Should your committee, in opposition to all our pleas and wishes, decide, however, to report favorably on any plan by which teen-age youth is to be taken from their homes and placed in camps, we believe