get to the
front, through enlistment under another name in some branch of the
service which seemed to have an earlier prospect of getting over. In
France there were many cases of desertion, but nearly all were from the
rear to the front. The progressive success of the policy of keeping the
soldier from strong drink, by the way, stands out in the figures, which
show that early in the war one out of every twelve offenses charged
included drunkenness, but that this proportion dropped until the final
figures were less than one in each thirty offenses, this including
soldiers in France, where the soldier had to stand on his own feet
unprotected by prohibition laws.

The welfare program was, from the nature of the case, most effective
among the men of the National Army, where it was possible to take the
soldiers in hand from the first. If we analyze the court-martial
records, we find that the proportion of court-martials was distinctly
lowest in this group. The records as of June 30, 1918, show that the
number of court-martials among the Regular Army was a little less than
one per cent, to be accurate 8/10 of one per cent; in the National Guard
the proportion was about 9/10 of one per cent; and in the National Army
it was less than 2/10 of one per cent, the exact figure being .143 per
cent, one-fiftieth of the percentage ten years ago.

Another check on the efficiency of the program is found in the records
as to venereal disease in the Surgeon General's Office. It is hard to
get comparative figures because of constantly changing conditions, but
it has been shown beyond all doubt that the health conditions in the
Army have been far, far better than in the community at large. While the
latter are not so bad as the alarmists have implied, they are serious
enough in all conscience, when in no fewer than seventeen of the states,
sixty or more of every thousand men who appeared at the mobilization
camps were found to be infected. Taking a typical month before the
signing of the armistice, we find that the proportion of cases coming to
the camps from the civil community was fifteen times as great as the
proportion among our soldiers in France, even including the soldiers in
the port towns, where most of our difficulties there were found. The
comparison with the records of the cantonments in this country is even
more striking.

* * * * *

As to the purely religious appeal and its influence on the m