he answered, "there are plenty of our boys who are perfectly
sound who will be killed inside of three months. I have the t. b.,
(tuberculosis), but I believe that I can pull through a year. I have
enlisted over one hundred coal miners from Wales and iron-workers from
Cornwall. I am willing to die for the motherland, after a year of t. b.,
since my pals will be dead within three months through bullets. And when
I die I want to die with the consciousness that I have kept my manhood."

I left that poor, wounded, half-dead young soldier with the feeling that
I had been in the presence of a superior being.

Over against these heroes stand the slackers. There are hundreds and
thousands of young men from allied countries who are of draft age, who
find refuge in this land. There are other thousands who have been
exempted, one because he has a flat instep, another because he has had
trouble with his eyes or his teeth; or has tuberculosis, in its initial
form, or is a victim of bronchitis. Most of these men owe it to their
country and themselves to tear up their exemption papers. They earn
their living in this country, working ten hours a day, but they will not
work six or eight hours a day for Old England, thus releasing some young
man to go to the front.

The question is not whether the youth has an exemption paper. The heart
of the question is, Has he any moral right to accept an exemption? This
war is being fought by untold thousands of soldiers who could obtain
half a dozen exemptions. They prefer to run the risk of death in six
months, to looking after their own hides and keeping well away from
danger for the next six years or sixty. No one who has been in the coal
regions or in the great mines of the Rocky Mountains but realizes that
there are an enormous number of allied slackers in this country. They
have left their country to its dire peril at a moment when Old England
is bleeding to death--when every man counts and when the cripples, the
invalids, the old men, the women, everybody who can give four hours or
eight of work a day should enter the great war offices or commissary
departments and do office work, and thus release the stronger men for
their work at the front.

The time has fully come when Americans should ask themselves the
question whether or not they have a moral right to support with money
that could be far better used, in the war stamp purchases or Red Cross
work, all these slackers and cowards, at a ti