WASTED MANPOWER AND THE CO'S

...5? Added to all this, there is the complete wastage of more than 4,000 men sentenced to prison for conscientious refusal to comply with Selective Service regulations...

...The Selective Service Act, under which manpower is conscripted for military service, recognizes the right of conscripts who are opposed to war because of their religious convictions to be assigned to "work of national importance under civilian direction...

...Now the question is WHY do we permit such manpower wastage in this time of national emergency...

...Meanwhile many more CPS men are eager to be doing real "work of national importance," as promised them by the Selective Service Act, and yet the Government has denied the requests of more than 100 public and private welfare agencies in this country as well as governmental and other relief agencies in China, France, England, and India which have specifically asked for the services of CPS men...

...thousands of victims of tuberculosis are at large infecting their families and communities because sanatoria lack the attendants to care for them...

...Right now in these United States hookworm, dysentery, and typhoid menace 5,000,000 of our rural homes which need improved water supplies and sanitary facilities...

...That these men have done their work well is attested by their project supervisors, one of whom writes of a group assigned to the Iowa State Agricultural Experiment Station: "I think it may be said quite fairly that this group of men have probably made, through their work during the past year, as great a contribution as any equal number of men in the State of Iowa...

...For more than 4 years the so-called "peace churches" (Brethren, Friends, and Mennonites) have, at the Government's request, been administering Civilian Public Service camps and projects for such conscientious objectors from 120 religious denominations and organizations...

...4? Only a minority of the CPS men have been per-mitted by the Government to leave the CPS camps to do work of real social significance as attendants in mental hospitals, public health workers, research scientists, and the human "guinea pigs" who have voluntarily submitted to typhus, malaria, jaundice, and pneumonia experiments as well as to experiments on extremes of temperature, altitude, starvation, and thirst...

...Our American conscientious objectors have demonstrated that their bothersome consciences, which force them to refuse military service, are equally active in keeping them faithful to jobs which are usually humdrum and of no immediate importance, but to which they have already given 5,000,000 man-days without the incentive of pay and with the constant galling knowledge that they are virtually slaves held in contempt by society—their services to their country recognized legally but not financially and their dependents unjustly forced to suffer along with them...

...Since then, the Government has provided only the camp and working equipment, transportation, and technical direction for the 11,000 men conscripted for this work, while the churches and other voluntary contributors have spent $5,000,000 on the men's maintenance and the conscripts have worked for more than 4 years without pay...

...So they are men of integrity who can be trusted with jobs that need doing...

...But when they are assigned to work in a state school for mentally deficient children and there build up an orchestra and a handcraft department which raise the morale and reveal hitherto neglected abilities of the children, they begin to command the respect of society...

...She has no concentration camps for her conscientious objectors, but lets them work at socially, useful jobs suited to their individual abilities...

...Great Britain has behaved more intelligently in recognizing freedom of conscience for all sincere objectors, even the absolutist who refuses any kind of conscription...

...And Maj...

...2? These unpaid conscripts do not even receive com-pensation for injuries suffered in the course of their work nor do their dependents receive any Government allotments...

...Dingle of the Surgeon-General's Office wrote to each of the men who had submitted to a pneumonia experiment: "Your willingness to serve as a volunteer in the attempt to transmit atypical pneumonia in human beings was a courageous act of the very highest order...

...juvenile delinquency is increasing alarmingly because community welfare organizations lack personnel...

...The facts boil down to this : 1 ? ln 1940 the "peace churches" undertook to finance as well as administer CPS for the Government "pending appropriation of funds by Congress...

...In this and other ways public opinion, which would naturally favor giving conscientious objectors opportunities for serving the country to the full extent of their abilities, is kept uninformed or impotent...

...At the present rate of allowances to dependents of men in the armed services, the wives and children of the men in Friends CPS alone (less than 1/3 of all the men in CPS) would be costing the Government $400,000 a year...

...One can only suspect that these men are wasted in futile jobs because some of our militarists and super-patriots are determined that men whose conscientious convictions run counter to those of the majority shall have no chance to earn credit for patriotic service well done...

...So it can be done without undermining the morale of the nation...

...Recently the American Friends Service Committee circulated to the President, Congress, and Government officials a restrained and factual pamphlet summarizing its experience with Civilian Public Service...

...Recently, when a non-pacifist minister made public mention of just such an accomplishment of CPS men, a powerful "patriotic" organization warned him to stop "glorifying" conscientious objectors and threatened to force the school, which these men were serving so well, to send them back to the futility and obscurity of the CPS camps...

...If the conscientious objectors now in prison serve their sentences in full, this country will waste 12,000 manyears of work while these men are forced to live at the expense of us taxpayers...

...SO much for the American Friends Service Committee's pamphlet...

...But, in spite of this critical situation, thousands of men who are fitted and eager to do these urgent jobs are at this moment pulling weeds, sifting gravel, mending park benches, etc., in remote Government projects which could well wait until after the war...

...For instance, of the 38 per cent of the CPS men in Friends camps who have professional training and experience, only % are doing work which utilizes their superior capabilities and we have a botanist, whose services have been requested by the Smithsonian Institution, running a hospital greenhouse and a trained relief worker, appointed for service with UNRRA, pulling weeds in a nursery...

...Many of these men are conscientiously opposed to conscription and to slave labor and many others have been denied classification as conscientious objectors because their reasons for opposing war were humanitarian rather than religious...

...If these conscripts had been maintained by the government and paid at the rate of Army privates, their work would have cost the Government $15,000,000...

...As long as these men are tending mules in Montana or planting little trees up in New York State, they can be forgotten or lightly condemned as crack pots and slackers...

...3? In spite of the fact that this manpower costs the Government practically nothing, most of the men are being used by Government agencies in unskilled jobs which are far from urgent and which do not efficiently use the abilities of the men...

...And the United States continues to sully its honor with slavery and to waste a valuable segment of its manpower...