TWO VIEWS ON "PREPAREDNESS"
Two Views on "Preparedness" By the Great Inventor THE Boston Herald of October 16, 1915, in a special dispatch from Chicago quotes Thomas A. Edison on the subject of "preparedness" as...
...We do need an enormous number of trained officers and drill sergeants, however...
...Two Views on "Preparedness" By the Great Inventor THE Boston Herald of October 16, 1915, in a special dispatch from Chicago quotes Thomas A. Edison on the subject of "preparedness" as follows: "The soldier of the future will not be a sabre-bearing, bloodthirsty savage...
...On the other hand, does she not stand today where she may, if she will, guide the world out of the darkness of its folly and agony into the light of a better day...
...I would have everything ready so that within 48 hours I could go ahead turning it out...
...the woman's club and the commercial club, each in its own way, can almost turn the tide alone...
...Then, of a certainty, we should suffer grievously...
...I am down on military establish-mehts...
...Then I would grease the machines up and store them away with a great quantity of steel billets ready to be worked up on short notice...
...America is the greatest machine country in the world and its people are the greatest machinists...
...A machine can be easily as good as 20 men...
...The immediate question will arise, what if America thus inadequately prepared, should actually be attacked...
...But I would keep this in mind in preparing to make stores and ammunition...
...But is that risk as perilous as the other risk which we are urged to undertake...
...The proposition should not be a military one at all...
...It is an experiment, let it be granted...
...We should get up shell machines for making them rapidly and in enormous quantities...
...No one event," he says, "could bring greater prosperity to this community than for these farmer citizens and these townspeople citizens to 'strike' hands in a joint effort to develop, as a unit, the economic and social life of their town and country community...
...I would have built great factories In which twice as much powder as that could be manufactured...
...I would prepare to turn out right along twice as much as is being used now on the whole European front—then not make it...
...It has a moral grandeur, while the timid fear which bids us arm ourselves has none...
...I don't like this military idea at all...
...Now as to actual fighting...
...He should be at least that good if he is American...
...The local paper can always be counted upon to do its full share in any constructive community program...
...Will she not, by her example, strengthen all the reactionary elements of militarism there...
...Then as to shells: 1 think it is a wasteful thing to make shells on lathes as they make them now...
...The risk of faith points forward to the better day which we may help to hasten...
...Is it not possible for America to find in this present time a higher choice than a mere frightened imitation of that panic-stricken spirit which has plunged Europe into her abyss of blood and tears...
...I admit also that there may be occasions in which a nation ought to go to war and may do so with its Christian ideals unimpaired...
...For that reason we can gamble safely on a volunteer army, provided we have a great quantity of officers trained and ready for service in 48 hours to lead and drill the new men...
...he will not shed his blood, but will perspire in the factory of death at the battle line...
...He could learn the use of machinery of war with sufficient despatch for army use...
...A man is only one man, after all...
...They should be kept in touch at stated intervals with the latest things in warfare, so that they should be ready as soon as telegraph and railroad can summon them, to go into active service...
...What Can Be Done For the Home Community ABOUT everyone wonders, at least once in a while, what he can do to help his community...
...It should be done sanely on an economical basis, a business basis...
...We call ourselves a Christian nation...
...Is it not time that this great people shall dare believe that God and not Moloch shall conquer in this war, and that if one great people shall commit its destinies at this moment not to the hands of hatred and jealousy and fear, hut to a faith in human progress which can create the thing it looks for, it shall by the heroism of its great hazard break a way not only for itself but for the world out of its passion Into peace...
...If she, with steady faith, keeps calm amid the clamor, if she dares follow the hazard of the high belief that after this war the world will be ready to be led forward by a nation which has had the courage of its convictions out of armed insanity into a constructive peace, may she not achieve a glorious service, the like of which God has given to no other people to perform...
...He will be a machinist...
...but it is high and it is heroic...
...Outwardly this willingness to put the nation in temporary danger, rather than commit curselves to the militarists' ideals, does seem a terrible risk...
...I would locate and have stored away enough material to make up the powder...
...They can, moreover, invent machinery faster and have it more efficient than any other two countries...
...We should have to depend upon the latent resources of the country to rise to the occasion under an outward handicap that would be great...
...Specifically, again, it is that the ideals of the people shall veto the present national policy for enormously increasing preparedness...
...C. J. Galpin, secretary of the Wisconsin Country Life conference, has an answer for this question for towns of high school size...
...The central thing in our Christianity is the cross...
...every town resident by an application of community sense and a generous use of just plain human treatment in any transaction with their farmer citizens can help the community find its larger life and prosperity...
...If America commits herself to the former theory, if she adopts that national atheism which believes this war shall enthrone fear and hate more firmly in the world, if she by her example shows to the nations of Europe that she believes in the sovereign power of brutal forces, will she not make it impossible for the ideal counsel to triumph in Europe at this war's end...
...The war of the future, that is, if the United States engages in it, will be a war in which machines, not soldiers, fight...
...In a bulletin issued by the College of Agriculture, he points out that every high school town in Wisconsin is a trading and banking center for a practically fixed group of farmers, who to all intents and purposes are suburban citizens of that community...
...That also to the eyes of the world was folly, yet the only power of human redemption is centered there...
...I would rather use machines than men...
...Building these powder factories and these machines and ammunition factories would not cost much...
...He says: "Does an adequate army and navy mean that we must have enough men and enough ships to defend America against any and all armed forces...
...I know that to many this may seem moon-struck folly...
...the town librarian is in a most effective position to recognize and assist farm readers...
...Then I would not make it...
...the pastors of the town churches might especially foster better relations between farmer and townsman...
...Let that be admitted...
...W. Russell Bowie of Virginia...
...What are the nations to gain out of this war...
...I admit the possibility of this...
...This latter risk threatens to engulf us in the kind of madness into which Europe has been plunged...
...We should endure bitter losses at the outset of the struggle...
...its battle preparation should be with machinery...
...It might be possible for the high school principal and teachers to make social alliances for every district school, teacher and all, in the trade area of their town...
...In short, the new soldier will not be a soldier but a machinist...
...By A Minister POSSIBLE dangers to the Republic involved in the outcry for "preparedness" are impressively set forth by Rev...
...I do not speak from the point of view of those who are called advocates of 'peace at any price.' Let us assume, as is conceivable, that war might come...
...Let us turn to the other side of the matter...
...What specifically, therefor, I plead for is that America today shall resolutely refuse to enlarge her army or her navy further than these would have been enlarged had this war never taken place...
...Consider the great amount of powder being shot off on the European battle front every day...
...Is it not time that one great people on God's earth should dare to take the cross seriously...
...In fact I would make my preparation potential, and I would do it right away...
...A standing army is not worth anything unless it is on a war footing, which is absurd...
...Then one man using it, is as good as 20 men...
...Whatever else an adequate army and navy means, it will certainly work out in a demand today for larger forces than we had yesterday: a demand tomorrow for larger ones than we have today...
...It is a risk which has a magnificent hope in it, while the policy of preparedness is a risk with no real nobility of hope at all...
...We can gamble on a volunteer army because the American is the quickest minded human being in things mechanical...
...These should be trained right along, even more than apparently would be needed, then turned back into industry...
...One of two possible things: either a world committed still further to the frightful obsession that all peoples must keep themselves ready to fly at each other's throats, or else a world so chastened and purified by the bitter travail of these days that it shall come back to sanity again...
...Once let America sanction the belief that she, too, like the peoples of Europe, must find her safety in her bristling guns, then where, save in exhaustion, is the end to this madness...
...But it would not be alone Upon the visible resources of this country that we should have to depend...
...It goes without saying that nothing would better please editor, merchant, banker, lumberman, auto dealer, and in fact, every live resident of the town, than to wake up some morning and find such an era of good feeling working as a fact in his community...
...It is a machine nation...
...We could depend Upon the awful strength of that divine righteousness, which, unless our politics have descended into atheism, we must believe should fight on the side of the nation that had dared to hazard greatly for the sake of its ideals...
Vol. 7 • November 1915 • No. 11
