regulars to do their fighting are the British
and the American. This is the vital point of similarity which is the
practical manifestation of our military ideas. We have been the earth's
spoiled children, thanks to the salt seas between us and other
powerful military nations. Before any other Power could reach the
United States it must overwhelm the British navy, and then it must
overwhelm ours and bring its forces in transports. Sea-power, you
say. That is the facile word, so ready to the lips that we do not realize
the wonder of it any more than of the sun rising and setting.

When we want soldiers our plan still is to advertise for them. The
ways of our ancestors remain ours. We think that the volunteer must
necessarily make the best soldier because he offers his services;
while the conscript--rather a term of opprobrium to us--must be
lukewarm. It hardly occurs to us that some forms of persuasion may
amount to conscription, or that the volunteer, won by oratorical
appeal to his emotions or by social pressure, may suffer a reaction
after enlistment which will make him lukewarm also, particularly as he
sees others, also young and fit, hanging back. Nor does it occur to us
that there may be virtue in that fervour of national patriotism aroused
by the command that all must serve, which, on the continent in this
war, has meant universal exaltation to sacrifice. The life of Jones
means as much to him as the life of Smith does to him; and when the
whole nation is called to arms there ought to be no favourites in life-
giving.

For the last hundred years, if we except the American Civil War, ours
have been comparatively little wars. The British regular army has
policed an empire and sent punitive expeditions against rebellious
tribes with paucity of numbers, in a work which the British so well
understand. Our little regular army took care of the Red Indians as
our frontier advanced from the Alleghenies to the Pacific. To put it
bluntly, we have hired someone to do our fighting for us.

Without ever seriously studying the business of soldiering, the
average Anglo-Saxon thought of himself as a potential soldier, taking
his sense of martial superiority largely from the work of the long-
service, severely drilled regular. Also, we used our fists rather than
daggers or duelling swords in personal encounters and, man to man,
unequipped with fire-arms or blades, the quality which is responsible
for our sturdy pioneering individ