Our Military Fever (Classic Reprint)

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Excerpt from Our Military Fever To the Editor of the Transcript: It is not a pleasant task to protest against public opinion, neither is it easy to elbow your way through a crowd going in the opposite direction. Nothing but a sense of duty, therefore, can compel me to raise my voice against the growing military fever of the American people. Let me confess at once to a deep interest in military matters. In my travels, I have become familiar with the armies of Germany, France, Italy, Austria, and especially of Switzerland. Everywhere the tread of soldiery, the drums, the crack of musketry have attracted me. It has been part of my work in historical research, to visit and examine battlefields, to learn something about tactics and strategy. At one time, I imagined that a great military establishment was just what was needed in the United States to weld public spirit into a more vigorous form, to divert the attention of our men from the present all devouring commercialism, and to give our male population a much needed set-up. That is what I thought until I began to study social and economic questions, and to realize that militarism is a part of the old order of things which the world is outgrowing. Whatever the glories of its past may be, the regular army of the United States is to-day an antiquated survival - as out of place in this progressive nation of sixty-five millions as would be a coat of mail upon a modern battlefield, or a wooden ship in the next naval encounter. No army of mercenaries deserves popular support, and in truth, even to raise the relatively insignificant force of twenty-six thousand men, great difficulty is experienced. About one-third of the accepted recruits are foreigners, and not a few illiterate. Almost ten per cent. of the army deserts each year. Courts-martial are alarmingly frequent and our military prisons are kept well filled. The regular army is as much a last resort for American-born men, as domestic service is for women. About the Publisher Forgotten Books publishes hundreds of thousands of rare and classic books. Find more at www.forgottenbooks.com This book is a reproduction of an important historical work. Forgotten Books uses state-of-the-art technology to digitally reconstruct the work, preserving the original format whilst repairing imperfections present in the aged copy. In rare cases, an imperfection in the original, such as a blemish or missing page, may be replicated in our edition. We do, however, repair the vast majority of imperfections successfully, any imperfections that remain are intentionally left to preserve the state of such historical works.