shment
under modern conditions adequate for the tremendous emergency facing the
Nation. Our own history and experience with the volunteer system
afforded little precedent because of the new conditions, and the
experience of European nations was neither uniform nor wholly adequate.
Our adversary, the German Empire, had for many years followed the
practice of universal compulsory military training and service, so that
it was a nation of trained soldiers. In France the same situation had
existed. In England, on the other hand, the volunteer system had
continued, and the British army was relatively a small body. The
urgency, however, of the British need at the outbreak of the war, and
the unbroken traditions of England, were against even the delay
necessary to consider the principle upon which action might best be
taken, so that England's first effort was reduced to that volunteer
system, and her subsequent resort to the draft was made after a long
experience in raising vast numbers of men by volunteer enlistment as a
result of campaigns of agitation and patriotic appeal. The war in
Europe, however, had lasted long enough to make quite clear the
character of the contest. It was obviously no such war as had ever
before occurred, both in the vast numbers of men necessary to be engaged
in strictly military occupations and in the elaborate and far-reaching
organization of industrial and civil society of the Nation back of the
Army.

Our military legislation was drafted after very earnest consideration,
to accomplish the following objects:

1. To provide in successive bodies adequate numbers of men to be trained
and used as combatant forces.

2. To select for these armies men of suitable age and strength.

[Sidenote: Universal obligation to service.]

3. To distribute the burden of the military defense of the Nation in the
most equitable and democratic manner, and to that end to recognize the
universality of the obligation of service.

[Sidenote: Necessary men to be kept in industry.]

4. To reserve to the public authorities power so to control the
selection of soldiers as to prevent the absorption of men indispensable
to agriculture and industry, and to prevent the loss of national
strength involved by the acceptance into military service of men whose
greatest usefulness is in scientific pursuits or in production.

5. To select, so far as may be, those men for military service whose
families and domestic obligations c