denote: Ability of Provost Marshal General.]

[Sidenote: This mode of selection made necessary by conditions of modern
war.]

[Sidenote: The democratic fairness of the plan.]

The success of this great undertaking is, of course, primarily due to
the painstaking forethought and the statesmanlike breadth of view with
which the Provost Marshal General and his associates organized the
machinery for its execution. But other elements have contributed to its
success, and first among these was the determination to rely upon the
cooperation of the governors of States and State agencies in the
assembling of the registration and exemption boards. By reason of this
association of State and local agencies with the National Government the
law came as no outside mandate enforced by soldiers, but as a working
of the home institutions in the hands of neighbors and acquaintances
pursuing a clear process of selection, and resulting in a gift by the
States to the Nation of a body of men to be trained. The press of the
country cooperated in a most helpful way, drawing the obvious
distinctions between this mode of selection and those punitive drafts
which have sometimes been resorted to after the failure of volunteering,
and pointing out the young men of the country that the changed
conditions of warfare made necessary a mode of selection which would
preserve the industrial life of the Nation as a foundation for
successful military operations. Indeed, the country seemed generally to
have caught enough of the lessons of the European war to have realized
the necessity of this procedure, and from the very beginning criticism
was silenced and doubt answered by the obvious wisdom of the law.
Moreover, the unquestioned fairness of the arrangements, the absence of
all power of substitution, the fact that the processes of the law were
worked out publicly, all cooperated to surround the draft with
assurances of fairness and equality, so that throughout the whole
country the attitude of the people toward the law was one of approval
and confidence, and I feel very sure that those who at the beginning had
any doubts would now with one accord agree that the selective service
act provides not only a necessary mode of selecting the great armies
needed under modern conditions, but that it provides a better and more
democratic and a fairer method of distributing the burden of national
defense than any other system as yet suggested.

[Sidenote: Fundamenta