the citizen is the soldier of the future, and his life must be protected. Fighting only on the defense, and inspired by the pride of his profession, which would remove any temptation for the officer to make the citizen's work easy, and so to expire before he had served his country to the utmost, we might reasonably expect that one officer would last out as many as twenty short bouts with men, and a good many more with women and children, before becoming useless for further practice. In this way we could hope that there would be enough officers to supply most of the population other than the bedridden and the males eligible for service at the front. It may shock some readers that I should think of including women in this exercise. But I do not see that they should be deprived of any legitimate means of learning to protect themselves, such as this experience would provide. Indeed, it is the problem of the unarmed population, of whom women form the part most in need of military instruction, which we have all along been endeavoring to study. Consider the value of a few such contests as I have described to a woman who wished to defend herself against the attentions which might be offered her by some visiting member of the enemy's troops. There are always some women to whom the proximity of soldiers offers professional opportunities, whether they wear the uniforms of the enemy or of the native cause. Others, of greater social restraint, but perhaps of similar inclinations, may ask, as I did the Turkish ladies in the battle described by Lord Byron, Wherefore the ravishing did not begin! But still others would prefer death to such thoughts, and suffer a thousand torments rather than contemplate such acts. These are the women whom, I imagine, most of the masculine sex would consider examples of the first principle of feminine virtue. Why then deny them the right to defend for themselves their title to the respect of society and the approbation of its male members? They are likely to need all possible powers of self-protection if the predictions of experts about the warfare of the future have any meaning. If I were asked to argue in support of my proposal, its merits would seem so obvious to me that I should stammer out the least evident and the least commendable first. Yet it is a real merit. Since all officers who reached the retiring age would automatically be destroyed, it would not be possible to reward their services with pensions. Most of them would be unlikely to have dependents at the age to which they would have attained; any surviving widows could not be expected to survive long. Thus a small but ponderable item of the vast bill of expense which is one of the chief inconveniences of war would be canceled outright. For the rest, the officers would be glad, I am sure, to lay upon the altars of their country this last holy sacrifice of their lives, which they stand always ready to give in war, and which there is no reason to suppose they would withhold in peace. And I am not sure that the occasions on which the lives of so many brave men were consummated would be wholly unconnected with the more tender feelings. Fancy can picture some of the appropriate ceremony which the emotions of the people would suggest to close the scene. When the lust of battle had subsided, and the sacred thought that what they had done was for the country's good had found its way into the minds of the citizens, they would feel the solemn responsibility which their acts entailed. An hour of grief and consecration like that after a great war would ensue. Reverently and gently the bleeding remains would be gathered together (here our stretcher-bearers and fieldhospital units might obtain useful practice) and laid upon catafalques draped with the country's flags. To the flags would be pinned the medals and decorations for valor which any of the dead officers had received. As the sobbing concourse of people marched behind, a low, keening thrill of military music would usher the faithful soldiers to their last bivouac. The catafalques would move forward to a stadium or open-air theatre near which ground would be dedicated to serve as the last resting place of the dispatched heroes. But before the rows of open graves with their barrows of loose earth were leveled above the dead, the people would take their places on the seats of the stadium to become spectators of the final sacred rites of commemoration and respect. On the stage or field in view of the vast and solemn audience, the next of kin to the dead officers would form a queue, and marching forward in triumphant line, each would receive a pin or decoration recognizing for the country their loss and their loyalty. If the mother of any officer were still alive, how tenderly the hands of willing supporters would guide her to the place where the President of the Republic, the Chief of Staff, or some other notable official stood, that she might hear his words of comfort with a trembling smile, bravely fighting back her tears and shining with a more than earthly pride. Surely some badge of especial distinction would be reserved for such an one! At last the national anthem would be solemnly sung by all the multitude with bared heads, and some venerable minister of the Gospel, raising his hands in trembling benediction, would offer thanks to God in the name of the people of the country for the lives and examples of the brave men ranged on their biers beneath his outstretched palms. 'O God, the Father of all mercies,' he might proclaim, 'we thank thee for thine everlasting beneficence. It has pleased thee to set us in a world where he that comes with a sword comes often in thy name; but, placing us amid war and peril, thou hast given us such men as lie here, who counted death in thy cause better than life in any other. They died lest one of thy little ones or the mothers of thy lambs should be lacking in the preparation meet and necessary for war. They have laid upon their countrymen the obligation of being ready to follow in their footsteps, as all followers of thy son Jesus Christ should not shrink if thy call leads them to the crown of martyrdom. Grant that the lives of these men shall not be wasted. Grant that we may learn the lessons they strove to teach. Continue to bless our glorious land. May our people obey thy laws and carry thy message to all the earth. May they prosper and enjoy thy favor for as long as nations shall endure or peoples bow beneath thy throne. Cease not to bless us with men of such courage and ideals. Comfort the hearts that have sacrificed them to thy glory and their country's might by the mysterious workings of thy peace. Amen.' MY AMERICAN WIFE A SAGA OF TO-DAY BY CARL CHRISTIAN JENSEN - BEFORE Our college days Margaret brought me up along with the children. I have before me a picture of our oldest, among twenty-one other American boys and girls strains of fifteen nations and a dozen creeds and races in a Manhattan schoolroom. Indian, Negro, and Turkish offspring happen to be in the group; likewise remnants of four ancient cultures: Hindu, Jewish, Christian, Moslem. For years these twenty-two American children have been moulded there. Their social growth has been so gradual that they are unaware of ever having been brought up. And, despite their vastly varied background, they have melted into a national type unknowingly. But I was aware though there was no tempest in the melting pot - when that boy of mine was being brought up; and more so, even, when I myself was. For I was of age when my social growth suddenly started. For twenty years I had been alone, a self-sufficient child and youth, hiding myself among mature men, never confiding in anybody, and, therefore, never getting quite hatched, socially. I was mulish when others led me. For I was a leader not of others, but of myself. The warm contacts of childhood and adolescence I never knew. My years at child labor in Denmark were secluded, though not at all tedious. I was I always capable of entertaining myself: by watching my fingers make and break things; by letting my senses they were animal in purity -snatch whiffs of beauty out of mother earth; by talking to myself. My years at sea I also lived alone: in the stokehold, fighting the fires; in the forecastle, reading the Bible and a thousand novels; on shore leave, sightseeing. I liked my own company immensely, and lived aloof. Yet I was not a snob or a sissy. In tropical gales I was sensuous, or when I watched the galloping paws of the engine. My mates had other tastes. Twice they joshed me; and on these two occasions I was 'sociable' in the manner of a sailor. For both times I made a wager — and both times I won that I could drink any of them under the table. After the first spree that took place at a coal pier in Baltimore before I was seventeen - I even leaped overboard for a swim. Baltimore beer was the first medium, and Jamaica rum the second. To be frank, I lost my dignity after the second spree by poking my head through too small a porthole- 'to watch a shark,' I told the stokers later - and finding myself thoroughly trapped. The 'sociable' ones of the crew did their best, hauling at my legs, before the Chief came to my rescue with chisel and hacksaw. My child life in the new world was dizzy with wonders - a full and fast and friendless life. I learned to speak American, and I learned to earn a living. But no kin shared my hopes; no friends could I confide in; no homes sheltered me; nobody recognized me. I was alone like Adam and Crusoe on an isle of three million people. But I was not lonesome. I loved myself too well for that, though my point of view was not toward my own image - that came later as one of the means of finding myself. I cannot remember many Narcissus delights. But how I did love a chat with myself! My tongue and eyes were my pals. They entertained me. branches. At Cooper Union applied as well as pure science allured me. And art also. When I beheld an artist make dry-point etchings, my fingers itched to dig their own story into copper. My fingers also itched to revive dead dynamos, and likewise to juggle symbols of electrical theorem. Yet a prime problem always faced me to keep myself alive. I climbed alone, a blank asocial animal-man, willing to eat and to love in such a manner that neither I myself nor my neighbor objected. That is to say, willing to curb an eternal hunger spark within, so that it devoured neither my neighbor nor myself. I must eat or die; I must love or die but socially. First, food became the medium between myself and society; later, love. I spent all I earned, but no more. Here is my weekly budget: Seven breakfasts I was so self-sufficient that my love of life even made me shun sleep. Sleep was dank death; for I never dreamed. That also came later. I lay awake, purposely, far into the night, for the sublime joy of living an extra hour. In the dark I saw too much and too little. My eyes stroked the inner walls of their lids and sockets with various speeds and curves and pressures, etching a hieroglyphic shorthand - my private Tutoring in mathematics history into the tissue. My tongue was like a revivalist, stretching a sleek body forward and recoiling; stamping on the floor, and hammering on the pulpit; running from wall to wall, and from platform to door; leaping clear to the roof in ecstatic frenzy. It was a revival that lifted me out of languorous sleep and back to things my eyes etched into their lids and sockets-almost as in my first bed in the room above the maker of wooden shoes. I dozed off to death when I kept those eyes of mine steady, and also when I opened the lids in the dark. For then the world vanished. My eyes could no longer 'feel.' Where, then, was I? Alone, a society of one, I climbed the tree of knowledge, straddling on its Six lunches-doughnuts, lemonade raw eggs, bread, $ .70 .36 .20 .70 1.50 .60 1.00 $5.06 The remaining ninety-four cents I saved, until I could buy myself a sixdollar suit, a thirty-nine-cent shirt, a pair of heelless sneakers, and my first straw hat. I had always money to spare for a weekly beer and a solid free lunch, and sometimes even a nickel for church. I darned my own socks, soled my own shoes, cut my own hair, and did my own laundry. But, though I looked quite sociable, I was alone. Then I found Margaret. Never before had I known of such ideal companionship, nor what vast horizons love could reach. I found another world, the world of love. Men and women became new species. I myself did. Herd habits took root in my primitive heart and sprouted vigorously. They took me by surprise, first as a vague encroachment, then as a blurring fungus growth, on my sharply focused senses, then as a merging of my tongue and eyes with the rest of myself, and finally as a merging of myself with society. There was no longer a cleavage. I lost my tongue and eyes. My own private language is almost dead. The whole of me began to talk and not only to myself, but to others. I metamorphosed with blinding speed, so that momentum threw me beyond the line. Perhaps it oversocialized me. Compassion almost hurled me out on a tangent. a I climbed down to the ground to live my love life. A desirable fall it was fall to social comfort like that of all ancestral apes. On the ground the world was less branched, my curiosity less divided, and my quest more intense. There I grew in a world of two, and later in a larger world of love, until my ego merged with the national ego. II we She had learned to speak her native language well while she worked as housemaid at the age of fourteen. It was her cultured tongue that I loved first. Later, at college, -as romped through the fields and forests of Minnesota, I often marveled at her ease among learned professors. Even our 'Prexy,' and his hospitable wife, on two memorable Christmas Eves, delighted in conversing with her. And she chummed with the wives of two deans. How I admired these quiet, kind, cultured Americans! But I also fell in love with her teeth, and with her tiny hands, and with her fleet foot. She still wins the picnic races. Children worshiped her at first sight. She was faunlike something of a Minnehaha in form and spirit. Her laughter had a rare, joyous quality. Her eyes were sympathetic, with a tinge of sadness in them. The loss of 'the dearest of fathers,' more even than the burden put on her young shoulders thereby, gave her an understanding heart, and made her eyes and voice soothing. She brightened the boarding house from basement to garret. And her charm lasted. When I began to earn my living here in the new world, I first lived among sailors in cheap rooming houses above the saloons near the Red Hook water front, where whispers about boys being 'shanghaied' often reached my ear, and where my eyes beheld the stokers on incoming steamers being plundered by runners. Later I invaded the streets that skirted Columbia Heights, and shared a parlor with many a lodger, once with a child of a crowded Polish family. These were the castaway homes of wealthy Americans - brownstone, parlor-and-basement houses with high frescoed ceilings, Baltimore heaters, and porcelain lavatories. In one of these I rented a garret from Margaret's mother. And it was a garret worth describing in detail, for there I first beheld my wife-to-be. Words fail to picture its charm. A long table straddled across the trapdoor above the garret stairs. I had to crawl to get into my garret. At the rear gable two chimneys, warm and blushing, met at the roof-just the nook for my parrots, which an old stoker mate had brought from Brazil. There they lived between the chimneys, climbing a heavy wire mesh which I nailed up in front, Adam praying Spanish and Eve swearing Danish, and both singing ‘In the shade of the old chim-mi-ney.' On the floor, on a burlap carpet, the two best books in the world-my illustrated Bible and its mate, Webster's unabridged dictionary - leaned |