CONTACT BOMBS IN THE TRENCHES

If Uncle Sam should suddenly go to war with John Bull, the members of the American Legion would be in an awkward situation, but they are not worrying about that possibility. The insignia of the Legion is the coat of arms of George Washington on the Canadian maple leaf, and the Legionaries are confident that no gust of international passion will blow that leaf away, until after the end of the English duel with Germany, at any rate.

But while the Legion does no recruiting in the United States, an American has only to step across the border to be arrested by vivid posters which urge him to join "THE BIGGEST ADVENTURE IN THE WORLD." Stepping off a car at the Canadian Niagara Falls, I saw the following mute challenge on a billboard:

ling a day in the British army, $15 a month in the United States army, and much less than that in the armed camps of Germany, France, Russia, and other countries of the world. Moreover, if a soldier is married, the Government sends his wife while he is away a monthly stipend of $20, called a separation allowance, and $5 a month additional for each child. Moreover, in the Legion the officers are recruited from the ranks. For instance, among the officers of the 213th Battalion, which I visited at Toronto, only Lieutenant-Colonel Byron J. McCormick had joined as an officer, and even he began as a lieutenant. The only qualifications for officers is that they must be twenty-five years old and of high intelligence and some prcvious military training. Nowhere in the world are chances for " promotion and pay" so high as in the American Legion. In spite of that, pay is the last thing that appeals to the men in the Legion. Indeed, most of them are there at a great financial sacrifice.

Social standing and pull do not count at all in the Legion. Of course every man who joins wants to be an officer, but, as the Legion is not modeled on the Mexican plan, obviously the majority of them must be disappointed. The selection is left entirely to the commanding officer, and in most cases those who are rejected as officers enlist as privates. Recently Colonel McCormick refused a com

mission to a millionaire who brought a letter of introduction from former President Taft. On the other hand, a good many of the privates in the Legion have their own automobiles in camp with them, and these men are the best of pals with other privates whose entire property can be carried in a knapsack.

They are interesting fellows, these men who have embarked on this "biggest adventure." There are all conceivable types among them except the coward. And, with all their differences, they have two common traits: their unquenchable love of romance and their underlying conviction that they are fighting for a cause. Modern knights-errant are they all.

There are many college men among the Legionaries, including some West Pointers, and there are also frontiersmen from the beaches of Alaska and the hills of Mexico who "ain't had no chanst at learnin'," as one of them said to me. These are men who have been fighting all their lives, the harder fight with nature mainly,, to whom a duel with their fellow-man is a vacation and an entertainment. But most of them have campaigned beforein fact, more than sixty per cent have learned to carry arms in former wars.

I expected to find a band of callow youths -dime-novel readers-when I entered the Exhibition Camp at Toronto. This expectation was strengthened when, in response to a question as to the whereabouts of the American Legion, a sentry at the gate of the grounds where the annual Canadian International Exposition is held said, “Stable 24.” Their assignment to this shelter proved to be no reflection on my fellow-countrymen, however, as I soon learned on seeing that most of the units in camp were quar tered in buildings occupied by quadrupeds in fair time. A floor of wood had been built over the one of cement in Stable 24, the ceiling had been whitewashed, a fireplace built, and the interior partitioned off for the sleeping-quarters of the officers of the 213th Battalion. Inside the first of the rooms-as snug and clean as a stateroom on a lineran American flag covering one wall caught my eye. Stopping to peer in, I interrupted the tenant of the room reading his diary.

This diary was not in buckram bound, nor was it even on paper. It consisted of a series of medals, each one referring to some notable exploit in their owner's long military career. This was explained to me by the owner, the Captain John V. Frazier already mentioned, who blushed like a boy with his

sweetheart's picture when he caught me watching him.

"I don't like writing, and journals are too bulky to take around," said he. "This string of junk is the only property I take with me in the field. It serves as a journal,

for looking on these foolish trinkets I live over the whole past."

The first medal recalled the Northwest Rebellion. Captain Frazier had been born in Canada, and served the Dominion with distinction before he went to the United States. The second medal told that the private in the Canadian service had become a captain in the Thirty-second Michigan Volunteers during the Spanish War; the third mentioned the bravery of a major in the medical branch of the Michigan National Guard during an epidemic in that State. Crowded on the small surface of a fourth disc was a brief account of the possessor's part in the HoughtonHancock-Calumet Copper Mine strike of 1913-14. From this center of industrial cyclones Major Frazier was detailed for service on the Mexican border as an observer with the regular army on behalf of the National Guard of Michigan, and was attached at various times to the Third Field Hospital, the Eleventh Cavalry, and the Fifteenth Infantry.

"I was on the Mexican border when the war broke out in Europe. I soon got restless. My wife saw this, and said, 'Go.' So I went, and here I am. Like the rest of them "his hand pointed toward the clean lounging-room floored with boards and wallpapered with stiff cardboard where a group of officers were swapping yarns—“ I'm in_it for love."

Another man who is in it for love is Tom Longboat, the Indian professional long-distance runner, who dog-trotted the seventy miles from his home up north to Toronto tɔ enlist. Longboat was assigned to the 213th by virtue of the time he has lived in the "States" and his acquaintance with Americans, but when he learned that the 97th was about to sail for France he smuggled himself into that battalion and got as far as Halifax, when he was arrested for his excessive patriotism.

Colonel Byron J. McCormick, commanding the 213th, offered his services to the Canadian Government on August 8, 1914, four days after the first spiked helmet was sighted on the Belgian border. He went to Europe in a Canadian battalion, was promoted to the rank of major in the regular British army for bravery at Ypres, and was

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then sent back to England to lecture to recruits on some of the peculiar phases of modern warfare, and to explain to them the use of the gas mask. Later he returned to Canada to take command of the 213th, leaving a son in the trenches in Flanders, who will join his father's command when it reaches the front. Before he enlisted Mr. McCormick was Industrial Commissioner of the town of Welland, Ontario, and during his incumbency of that office he boosted the pay-roll of the city's industries from about $50,000 to $2,000,000. Tall and alert, he looks every inch a soldier, and he is one, with sixteen years' service in the Michigan National Guard behind him. His motto, "Never let a fault go unchecked," explains his rapid rise in the army.

When Colonel McCormick left Welland, he took with him Mr. H. L. Hatt, now Captain Hatt, of his staff. Mr. Hatt was President of the Board of Trade of Welland and a member of the City Council. He began his services to the Allies by helping to recruit the Ninety-eighth Battalion in the quick time of two months at Welland. Then he entered the Forty-fourth Canadian Militia, and later joined the Legion. As I have said before, most of the men in the Legion are there at great financial loss to themselves-in fact, most of them in civil life could earn at least three times as much as they earn in khaki. But Captain Hatt's sacrifice was much greater than that. When he stepped out to serve the King, he left a prosperous business in the manufacture of metal bedsteads at Welland.

Nutshell biographies of other men in the Legion are interesting.

Lieutenant R. E. Smith sprang from English parents and has served in the Royal Engineers, but his name is still remembered in western New York as the champion amateur aviator of that section, the man who built and flew the first aeroplane ever seen in Rochester, New York, when he was living in that city.

Two of the most picturesque characters in the entire Legion are Captain Alexander Rasmussen and Lieutenant Tracy Richardson. Rasmussen, offspring of a Danish father and a French mother, won his spurs fighting for the United States in Cuba in 1898. Afterwards he went to the Philippines with the Fourth Cavalry, and still later the roulette wheel of fate threw him into Mexico, where he took out a commission as a captain under Alvaro Obregon, the Carranzista, and fought the Yaquis who had wrecked his min

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ing schemes. He was one of the delegation to the Legion that was sifting the drifted sands of ancient Alaskan beaches for the yellow dust that is the basis of our currency, when the fighting fever got him again.

In the eyes of his companions Tracy Richardson has been uncannily lucky. For Richards on has been hit by fourteen bullets between Mexico and Flanders, and rejoices in the nickname of the "Human Sieve." The doctors sent him home from Europe and got him a pension under the belief that he would be a cripple for life, but he is returning to the firing-line without the pension but with the full use of his limbs and shooting eye. He is a kindred spirit to the English admirals who, Stevenson tells us, "courted war like a mistress."

On the flat greensward of the traininggrounds I saw Americans drilling shoulder to shoulder with Canadians. Then I watched them in the lecture hall elbowing the same Canadians and all drinking in the wisdom emitted by Colonel Lang, director of the school for officers, a typical British colonel, round, ruddy, and risible, hard, hale, and human. His advice was that the two prime desiderata in an officer are 66 guts"-i. e., character and "cleanliness," the latter emphasized by a sweep of the colonel's hand over his round face to indicate the clean-shaven condition below the upper lip, which is the sine qua non of a British soldier. Beards may do for the French and Russians, but a beard on a Briton to a British soldier means mental and moral flabbiness.

All the American officers that I saw in the training school were mature men. One of them, W. H. S. Taylor, of Port Huron, Michigan, a veteran of the Spanish War who saw the surrender of Santiago, was grizzled till he looked perilously near the upper age limit. But the recruiting officers will strain a point for an applicant who carries himself with the unmistakable set" of the knight of many battles.

Like the officers of the Legion were the men. Those of the 213th were quartered in a similar and adjacent building to Stable 24. Dropping in here after mess one evening, I found veterans of every campaign of importance during the last quarter of a century reminiscing over old fights and speculating on future bloodletting. My host was private John P. Heywood, of Indianapolis, Indiana, a Rough Rider in 1898, later for two years in the Illinois Naval Militia, now

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Sa pert paragrapher has remarked, the Federal Rural Credit Bill will get nothing for the man who has got nothing for himself. It is not a wizard's trick of pulling a fat goose out of an empty hat; it is not a miracle-working plan of making wealth out of poverty; it is not a good fairy to give a farm for the wishing. Nor is it, as a smug New York editor has declared,

a crazy Socialistic experiment ;" nor is it, as the New York Chamber of Commerce implies, an exceptional or unwarrantable or dangerous employment of governmental power for the benefit of a class. As in most cases of excited contention, the truth lies midway between these extremes.

I speak particularly of the pending Federal legislation because that is now a matter in the public mind, and because it is, in prospect, a somewhat epochal effort of the National Government to stabilize-and by stabilizing to cheapen-land credit in the United States. At the time of this writing the Senate has passed one bill and the House another. They differ in detail, but they are substantially the same in principle and in policy. They are variations and revisions of the original Hollis-Bulkeley Bill of the last session. They provide for the appointment of a farm loan board of three to five members to establish and supervise twelve district farm loan banks with a capital of $500,000 to $750,000 each, with power to issue farm mortgage bonds or debentures in twenty times the amount of the capital stock, and for the organization of local borrowing associations to be members of the district bank, somewhat after the form of the organization and relation of the Federal Reserve banking system. The capital of the district banks is to be offered to the public, and the Government is to subscribe such part of the capital as the public does not subscribe-precisely as provided for the capitalization of the twelve Federal Reserve banks. Assuming that the public will subscribe none of the capital, the Government will invest twelve times $500,000 or $750.000, but this investment will be made only for the time being, for the bills provide that the local borrowing associations must subscribe to the stock of the district bank in proportion to its loans from the bank, and that the individual

borrower must subscribe to the stock of the local association in proportion to his loans. The bills provide for both limited and unlimited common liability forms of organization of the local association, so that the borrowers of each group may elect whether they will use one or the other.

Thus, in due course of development, if the system succeeds, the Government's stock in the banks will be replaced by the stock of the local borrowing associations, as the stock in the Federal Reserve banks is owned by the member banks. The bills provide also for joint stock land banks without membership in the district banks, and for lending directly to individuals where there are no local associations; but these and other details of accommodation, adaptation, and safety need not be discussed in this brief review of the broad problem which Congress is endeavoring to solve. and of the policy it is pursuing in the employment of Governmental powers. I am careful to add in this connection that it would be almost a miracle of legislative wisdom if the law which is presently to emerge from the two houses of Congress should be perfect in every detail. It is a new subject; it is an experiment; but it is a composite of the conclusions of the ablest economists and of intelligent statesmen who have labored industriously for about three years. I would have written a different bill; so perhaps would every man who has studied the subject; but this is the best that can be obtained; it is a start in the right direction, and a year or two of experience will exhibit its defects for amendment. This has been the way of interState commerce regulation, and of all important measures of economic reform.

As to its paternalism, I challenge a comparison with the Federal Reserve banking system, which puts the Government's credit behind commercial paper and makes the Government a partner with the Reserve bank in the profits of the institution. As to the powers of the farm loan board, they are not larger than the powers of the Federal Reserve Board, and we may fairly assume that the farm loan board will be as discreet as the Federal Reserve Board. As to the invoking of Government stimulation and regulation of land credit, I submit that the