Compulsory Military Training (Volume 160)

This historic book may have numerous typos and missing text. Purchasers can download a free scanned copy of the original book (without typos) from the publisher. Not indexed. Not illustrated.1918 Excerpt: ... Military training teaches the young man how to stand and walk and hold himself; it gives him vigorous out-of-door exercise so that gradually his chest expands and his muscles grow firm; it inures him to physical hardships; it disciplines him on orderliness, punctuality, accuracy, and alertness; it endows the senses and the intellect with quickness, precision, and the habit of concentrated attention; it develops self-control as well as obedience to proper authority and resistance to improper; it accustoms the individual to cooperation and team-work, while fostering comradeship, thus facilitating community life and lubricating social intercourse; and it prepares youth for better citizenship by constantly emphasizing the conceptions of duty and service. // wars were banished from our planet I would retain military training side by side with athletics as an instrument of physical education in our universities; and not only for its physical advantages, great as they are, but also for its moral, mental, social, and civic effects and reactions. But war is still a part of any human life we see or can reasonably expect. The millenium of peace is a dream we do well to cherish; it is an ideal toward which civilization is conducting our race. But it would be foolish to treat it as a reality or a probable attainment within the short space of our own or our children's generation.... SHALL WE ADOPT UNIVERSAL MILITARY SERVICE? Charles W. Eliot, in World's Work, Vol. 33; pp. 1624.... Why should the American people make this formidable change in their national habits and their international policy? First, because the industrial and commercial interests of the nation have completely changed since the Civil War, and can no longer be preserved and promoted in isolation. The cou...