We need not only the material and personnel and reserve for adequate field artillery. We must have, also, if we are to make sure that artillery fire is to be most effective, auxiliary arms in adequate proportion.

CHAPTER VIII

THE GREAT AMERICAN BUGABOO

"MILITARISM" is the scare-word thrown into almost every serious discussion of our ability to defend ourselves. Whether or not it is something really to be afraid of, so far as Americans and American institutions and traditions are concerned, it is a most interesting thing when hauled out into the light and examined.

The problem of home defense has been faced since the primitive family squatted around in a circle and figured ways and means to thwart the hostile intentions of old Stone Hatchet and his gang, over across the river, and spent spare moments in fashioning newer and deadlier skull-crushing implements.

In some ways, especially in the science of killing, we have gone a long road since then; but we have not got away from the family idea, and we have only elaborated on the family council. We have learned to deal with each

other by means of words and scraps of paper. We have fought and loved, made peace and broken it, made promises and defiled them, gone cahoots, for a spell, with this family or that all to protect or to enlarge the power of our own particular family, and with never a serious attempt to work out a scheme for one big, world-wide family.

Some families have said that the head of the house is boss; others have said the family is boss. So we have Prussia; so we have the United States of America - each sure that the other is wrong. Yet the American would not laugh at the idea of the Kaiser's "Ich und Gott" were he a Prussian; and the Prussian would not sneer at our little army and our bungling way of doing things military were he an American.

It cannot be expected that a family strictly brought up on the lines of a military autocracy, and one which has brought itself up on the broadest theories of democracy, can have many notions in common as to the ways and means of defending the home, save the great essential to be willing, and ready, to fight.

Recent events across the Atlantic would seem to indicate that the German family, on instant notice, was both. Certain facts and figures set down in the course of previous chapters seem to suggest that the American people, though willing, are not at all ready.

The first is no proof that the Prussian idea is right any more than the second is proof that the American idea is wrong.

There is one fact which the average American finds it difficult to swallow. It is this: Fundadamentally, the German military idea is more democratic than ours. The application of the idea, of course, is diametrically opposed to the principles of democracy. Yet the German fighting force is directly from the citizenship. Democracy has swung away from the professional soldier of a hundred and fifty years ago. The British, ourselves and China of the world's great nations, are the only ones in whose military systems there is a survival of the days of Frederick the Great. With the abhorrence of anything approaching military rule, bred in the bone of the Anglo-Saxon, we

have taken elaborate means of insuring the subordination of the military to the civil authority.

Modern economists very generally agree that the danger of the professional soldier to a democracy, not so safe-guarded, is his eagerness to practice his profession - his hankering to try out new tools placed in his hands. Yet, go to the soldier of long experience, and he will tell you how silly this notion is. He will insist that the experienced soldier dreads war, because he knows what war is; just as a surgeon dreads to be operated upon, because he knows the danger and suffering that an operation entails.

Be that as it may, the fact is that, no matter how much we have subordinated him, we still have the professional soldier, and that in the Prussian system the professional soldier, the man who carries the gun, has been discarded for the citizen fighter. It is true, of course, that most of the officers, particularly the higher officers and the general staff, are all professionals, making a study of war their life-work.

Militarism is not a thing. It is not a form of