things to us in paid space. But the paying advertiser is greatly handicapped by the high cost of the space he buys. He cannot do things on the Tex Rickard scale.

Given enough advertising, the public can be interested in anything — especially the American public, already so standardized, so herd-minded, that it is timid about doing or wearing or liking anything that is not endorsed by the crowd. How many of the 60,000 at the World Series, or the 150,000 at Tex Rickard's show, or the hordes that are packing the college stadia, care that much for baseball, or prize fights, or football, and how many go only because they learn from the news

papers that they are supposed or expected to care? It is a hundred years since Edmund Burke christened the newspapers the 'Fourth Estate,' and Napoleon said that four hostile newspapers were more to be dreaded than an army. The power of the press was puny then compared with the mighty engine of publicity we have to-day, an engine which is apparently getting out of control. Like the fisherman in the Arab tale, Arab tale, the newspapers have opened the bottle; they are appalled by the djinni that has come out, the djinni of publicity, with vast powers for good or evil; they do not know how to control it, what to do with it, or even how to coax it back into the bottle.

IT has become a commonplace to say that no very sharp distinction can any longer exist between military and civilian populations in war. Whereas wars were formerly fought out between armies in well-defined local campaigns, and the civilian population went unmolested about its usual business, except as a city might be beleaguered or a district ravaged, the present age has seen a transformation in the practice of war which has done away with most of the difference between the combatant and what used to be called the noncombatant. A nation now

goes to battle entire, from president to shopgirl. Indeed the shopgirl is a valuable recruit. In off hours it is her function to fold bandages or to peddle government bonds. The factory worker is even more essential. From him proceeds the supply of munitions and clothing to the armies. And not alone the laboring, but the professional classes, the men and women of wealth, even the boys and girls, throw themselves into the contest. They provide food for the soldiers in the lines by raising community gardens; they nurse or entertain the wounded at home, in

hospitals, or abroad; they heap up stores of projectiles and explosives for the troops at the front. "The dividing line between soldiers and civilians,' declares a recent writer, 'which wore perilously thin in the last war, will vanish altogether in the next great war; because from the military standpoint there is no great difference between the soldier who wields the weapon and the woman who makes it. Killing or wounding either is a handicap to the enemy; and to handicap the enemy is one of the immediate ends of war.'

To strike thus at an enemy in his most vital organs, the centres of industry that produce his military supplies, or to break down his resistance by terrorizing helpless cities, will certainly be one of the most ardently pursued objects of future attack. For it will be possible, as military writers have taken pains to inform us, to carry battle far behind and beyond the formal lines. Railroads, ammunition dumps, or densely populated cities may be bombed with high explosives or lethal gases. Where bombing is considered uncertain of success, or after it has prepared the way, the vast flotillas of airplanes which the science of a few more years will put at the service of progressive military states will be able to land at crucial points bodies of troops sufficient to destroy the productiveness of essential industrial

The effect of such methods of attack upon what has hitherto been the unarmed population of our cities must be obvious. Major General Sir George Aston, writing in the Nineteenth Century and After several years ago, made the following declaration of faith:

'I believe that any great industrial nation acting upon the principles of Clausewitz and the German War Book would be able, within a few hours of

the order being given, to devastate whole cities with poison gas and explosives in any foreign country within petrol radius of aircraft. I believe further that there would be no adequate "defense" against such danger. Anti-aircraft guns could not give sufficient protection, and defending aircraft could not always be in the right place.'

In this plight, General Aston can offer the noncombatant small comfort. "The whole civilian population,' he declares, 'is exposed to immediate and direct attack by nations which place no limit upon violence in conducting war.'

In the light of such sentences may we not revise the commonplace with which we began that in future wars there will be little or no distinction between combatant and noncombatant - and supplant it with a statement more significant? We may say that armed forces, in large or small numbers, and armed, indeed, with the most efficient and destructive weapons of modern warfare, will be brought directly against people ordinarily without arms and without military training. When bombs fall in city streets we must be prepared not to inquire too closely what has become of our children, if they chance to be missed-unless, indeed, we are singularly free from that anxiety for their preservation which parents are supposed to feel; or unless — and here we strike the note of genuine importance a system of training can be devised which will make such abrupt losses less injurious to the normal emotional balance. It is a system of training which, it is believed, would include this among its other effects that it is the business of this treatise to urge upon the country.

I do not know whether General Aston is right in thinking that no

defense can be adequate against attacks from the air as they will be conducted in the future. It would seem at least that the military protection of our cities in the wars that yet lie upon the lap of fate must be extraordinarily subtle and far-reaching. Perhaps in some not too remote conflict city dwellers, from grandmothers to schoolchildren, will all be provided with gas masks and go about armed with hand grenades, lest they might encounter some division of the enemy newly landed from the air.

But I must leave all discussion of purely military defense to the able and unflinching minds of experts. The consideration which I take for my province will suffer much less at the hands of an amateur, and yet its importance must be instantly evident to all seriously minded men. I strongly feel that a new and universal conception of morale must begin to take root in the public consciousness before we can boast anything like intelligent preparation for modern war. It is upon this notion of morale, and the means of arriving at it, that I wish to throw some light. Its high importance, on military grounds alone, not to mention any other, may be derived from good military authority. Let me quote the words of Major General Sir Frederick Maurice, sometime Chief of Field Operations of the Imperial General Staff of Great Britain:

'In future wars the prime object of the contending nations will not be the destruction of the opposing forces, but what the Germans call the will to victory of the opposing peoples. The immense extent of the increase of the zone of danger due to the introduction of aircraft has, it is generally admitted, brought the civilian population into a jeopardy almost, if not quite, as great as that which confronts those who bear arms. The morale of the nation is

therefore likely to be as important a factor in war as the morale of armies has always been. The defeat of the enemy's main forces, hitherto held to be the first aim of strategy, becomes only a means to an end which may be obtained without those means. For a people may find the continuance of war to be intolerable.'

General Maurice's last sentence would of course be obviated by a right system of training, for training and habit are sufficient to inure men to any condition, and even to bring a degree of satisfaction in it. During the years since the World War some, if insufficient, attention has been given to preparing the nation for the struggles of the future by revising and developing its military equipment in the light of the lessons and innovations of recent history. But it is remarkable that neither our own nor any other country seems to have considered how the problem of preparing those who are to fight the next wars has changed with the changing methods and incidence of modern warfare. Indeed the failure to conceive of even the existence of such a problem seems almost complete. Officers of the army, with experience of war and the fresh memory of what must be accomplished to convert a peaceful into a military people, do not spare urging universal service upon us or recommending military camps for students and military courses for colleges throughout the land. But the truth is that universal military training for males of an age to bear arms, even if it were feasible in this country, would not touch the heart of our problem at all. At best it would provide us with a vast body of troops at a time when armies equipped to fight on the battlefield promise to play a subordinate part in military conflicts. And the ablebodied male of an age to bear arms

Our problem is much more serious. It is nothing less than to bring up abreast of the trained military class what has hitherto been the unarmed and unexposed horde of noncombatants. Women, children, workers, old men, and grandmothers - these too must be prepared for the direct acts of combat which will be brought against them in the next war. We cannot, after all, leave them to die in their blood, even if we would. They are necessary to the armies in the field, necessary to the nation's will to victory. If we are to face the problem of preparation for future warfare they must be trained to bear their full part both in morale and in the actual conflict. And if imagination is beggared by the scope of this task, it had best lose itself in the practical effort to accomplish whatever can be accomplished of such a Cyclopean labor. For, if no effort should be made, it might prove, as General Maurice has threatened, that war will become intolerable.

II

Obviously the study of means to prepare an entire industrial, professional, and domestic society for the extreme unction of modern warfare is an infinitely subtle and exhaustive inquiry. Such a study would formulate a programme for the fit training of all trades, all classes, all citizens of whatever age or degree of helplessness. For, since military writers have assured us that all classes must expect direct acts of combat, it will be at evident peril that any group of our people should be left unprepared to meet the tests which even now are incubating in the dark womb of the future.

To our children, it will be generally

VOL. 139 NO. 1

If it is considered a crime to send into the trenches troops improperly equipped or too briefly instructed and disciplined in the use and understanding of their weapons, is it not a more surpassing crime to pit children, easily bewildered and frightened by so small a mishap as a bloody head, against the effects of high explosives or of lethal gases such as may be employed in attacks from the air? If practical limits did not forbid, training for war ought to begin during gestation, or, at the latest, in the cradle. Otherwise, merely by bringing babes into the world, we shall be opposing the most unarmed and defenseless of all populations against the most destructive and terrifying weapons of war. Quite literally

and a worse military principle cannot be imagined-we shall be throwing into battle our most precious untrained troops, from whom the country's future legions must some day be recruited, without so much as a gas mask or a trench helmet for their protection. Consider how we might mollify the shame of launching our babes into the world unable to use so much as a finger in their own defense, if we could only give them military capacity with their milk, or make their rattles and teething rings an initiation into war! But thought pines in vain after such expedients.

What might be done to start our children on the road to preparation for war from the time when they first put their innocent lips to the breast, I have neither the will nor the space to discuss here. Indeed it will be impossible even to attempt to outline a comprehensive training for what would formerly have been the noncombatant population against the dangers to which the future will expose it. I mean only to suggest one or two measures which seem likely to be of particular importance and

value in cultivating the national morale to meet the changing demands of warfare. These measures, in any complete, coherent scheme, might be the last instead of the first stones in the arch. They would certainly be introduced only after many simpler rudimentary exercises and instructions had been mastered by the citizen. But I hope that they may stand as a thoughtful contribution to progress in the national preparation for war, especially in the vital point of morale.

The first of the measures I have to suggest is a direct attempt to strengthen the emotions of the weaker part of our population against what are called the horrors of war. It is this character of frightfulness in warfare which is, of course, the cause of the strain that is put upon morale the cause, indeed, of the existence of that quality. It is proper, therefore, that frightfulness should be first met in considering the problem of the will to victory.

War differs from sport largely in aiming to produce fatalities as its grand purpose and object. If a cultivated foreigner, who, by some chance, did not know by what means war is carried on among civilized nations, were to watch a battalion of soldiers practising the bayonet exercises or popping at each other with blank cartridges in a sham battle, he might be excused for supposing that some elaborate kind of game was going on, especially if he knew the seriousness with which Americans take what it pleases them to call their relaxation. Of course a military camp where soldiers are being trained for the front simulates as well as it can the actual conditions of the battlefield. Trenches are dug, smoke screens conceal the movements of troops, and gas masks are donned at the appointed signal. This employment of a mise en scène is no doubt of value; but it is a poor substitute for the frank and violent

touch of reality. The skin is there, but the entrails are lacking; and a true battle, it must be confessed, is not a little brazen in its unmasking of the entrails. I have not heard that in a military camp the field is left littered with the dead, blackened by mustard gas, or with those even more disturbing corpses that have not yet yielded up the ghost, but lie kicking and writhing with truncated limbs, and screaming for the touch of mercy. It is granted, of course, that men who pass the tests of admission into the army can be trained to meet these scenes without previous experience of them, although even men so selected are not so ready for the horrors of war as to accept them with the efficiency which complete coolness would make possible. But I am thinking of our enormous civilian population, or to use the obsolete yet convenient word the noncombatants. Surely the same cannot be expected of this vast division of the people, and we must earnestly fear for the effect of future wars upon their morale unless a way can be found in advance of hardening their sensibilities to the scenes they will be called upon to endure.

The problem at first sight appears a difficult one. It is hard to see how familiarity with frightfulness could be provided for the education of the people without also providing the tragedies to which it is due. It would be foolish, of course, however gladly our people would give their lives to their country, to call upon large numbers of them to make the supreme sacrifice at a time when that sacrifice would not be compensated by a corresponding loss to some enemy. Yet, without risk to the citizen's life, how can he be trained to regard philosophically the disconcerting spectacle which is caused by the loss of life in great numbers and by revolting means? Thorny the problem