becoming a skilled
machinist or a skilled electrician. Now the system is to be extended
through all branches of the military service, and many additional trades
are to be added to the curricula of the trade schools of the army. The
young man can, therefore, make his own selection and become a trained
artisan at the same time that he serves his time in the army, with all
expenses for such training, as well as maintenance, borne by the
Government. He can thereby leave the service fully equipped for
profitable employment.

This will have the tendency of calling a better class of young men into
the service; it will also do away with the well-founded criticism that
army life and its idleness, or partly-enforced idleness, unfits a man
for useful industrial service after he quits the army. If this same
system is extended through the navy, as it can be, both army and navy
service will meet the American requirement--that neither military nor
naval service take great numbers of men from productive employment, to
be in turn supported by other workers. Instead of so much dead timber,
they are all the time producing while in active service, and are being
trained to be highly efficient as producers, when they leave the
service.

Under this system the Federal Government can build its own ordnance
works and its own munition factories and become its own maker of
whatever may be required in all lines of output. We will then be able to
escape the perverse influence of gain on the part of large munition
industries, and the danger that comes from that portion of a military
party whose motives are actuated by personal gain.

If the occasion arises, or if we permit the occasion to arise, Kruppism
in America will become as dangerous and as sinister in its influences
and its proportions, as it became in Germany.

Another great service that the war has done us, is by way of bringing
home to us the lesson that has been so prominently brought to the front
in connection with the other nations at war, namely, the necessity of
the speedy and thorough mobilisation of all lines of industries and
business; for the thoroughness and the efficiency with which this can be
done may mean success that otherwise would result in failure and
disaster. We are now awake to the tremendous importance of this.

It is at last becoming clearly understood among the peoples and the
nations of the world that, as a nation, we have no desire for conquest,
for territory