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of teaching teachers how to use the newspapers and magazines in promoting the study of civics and current events in the public schools.

There is just one salient criticism which one might make of the spirit of this Convention. The Convention was admirable in that there were no long-winded discussions of salaries and pensions, and that there were no petty quarrels; but in emphasizing the importance of teaching those subjects in the schools and colleges which fit youths and children directly for practical service to society at times there was undoubtedly a tendency to go too far.

"Learning by doing" is a good thing; but the three R's of education are still funda

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mental, and the education of the head must not be abandoned entirely for the education of the hand. One or two speakers before the teachers' meetings seemed to enjoy attacking anything that savored of serious scholarship. Vocational education, industrial education, and all the other manifestations of the present-day practical spirit in the school-room have come to stay. They have their proper place, and in it they are highly desirable; but they must not be permitted to crowd out all attention to intellectual training. The goal of service to society is a high aim for our teachers to take; but society wants the service of the thinker as well as the service of the doer. GREGORY MASON.

I

T happened that my journey to Plattsburg took me into the region from which Benedict Arnold launched his expedition against Quebec, and then through the city of Montreal. The faint echo of old wars that made memorable a quiet river valley of Maine and the sound of marching troops drilling under the shadow of historic Mount Royal supplied a sobering background for the tented city of the Plattsburg Encampment.

It was a gray day that first welcomed us to our canvas homes. The long lines of men waiting for a chance to deposit the money which their gracious Government was willing to permit them to pay in order that they might learn something of the most elemental duty of citizenship; the lines of men filing into the orderly tents to satisfy the necessary formalities which preceded the issue of equip ment; the scurrying figures bearing home to their new quarters the unfamiliar burdens of rifle, canvas cot, duffle bag, and bayonet, were all impartially treated to water from the heavens above and mud from the ground below. And this same mud was not easily forgotten. For it oozed in under the walls of our tents; it supplied a generously adhesive pavement for our company streets; and clung closer than a brother to our struggling feet, mired quite deep enough as it was, in the intricacies of our first drills. It even stuck to our camp songs-witness one rolling chorus which blared forth the triumphant fact that

"We are as happy as we can be,

For we are members of the duck family." But that was part of the later history of the camp which has just now come to a close.

A little less than a year before it had been my privilege to watch the first Plattsburg training regiment undergoing the labors that were now in store for me and the rest of my fellow-rookies. On the former occasion I had come "for to admire and for to see" the rapid progress of the men who were then engaged in learning the A B C's of soldiering. I was told by the officers of the regular army of the phenomenally rapid progress which those civilian recruits were making in the practice of their new activity, and I came away from that first camp duly impressed with the thought that I had acquired an adequate idea of both what that advance guard of Plattsburg men had accomplished and of what was still left for them to accomplish before they could measure up to the full stature of trained soldiers.

Tested out by practical experience, I confess that during the first two weeks of the encampment my preconceived ideas underwent rapid and repeated revision. It was not that I had misunderstood the character of the work to be done or underestimated the distance which separates a Plattsburg recruit of one month's training from the finished soldier, but that I had failed to take into ac count the heavy handicap of the purely civil

Since we came as volunteers, the great bulk of us earnest and anxious to succeed, it was a painful experience for many of us to find that our success during the first weeks seemed to be in inverse ratio to our endeavor. To make my story less personal, let me try to express what seemed to be the typical experience of the men in the camp.

This experience was summed up by one prosperous rookie who in civilian life was not without a reputation for intelligence. Said he: "I know now how a man feels who is learning to write long after he has cast his first vote. It looks so simple; it is simple. Why can't I do it well?" The answer to this, as to most of the difficulties which confronted us, lay in those same civilian habits of mind and muscle to which I have already referred—those habits of inattention, that lack of mental and physical discipline, that are the heritage of the great majority of Americans. The mind and body which have always resented the necessity of accepting orders and discipline find it hard to accept orders and discipline even when they will to do so. In the all-too-brief month at their disposal, for the rookies of the Plattsburg camp it was not a question of turning mind and body into a machine that would respond automatically to certain prearranged signals; it was merely the question of acquiring enough self-control to permit mind and body to perform efficiently and intelligently the work that had to be done.

When a civilian is told to do a certain piece of work, he generally asks first to have the command repeated. He seems to feel offended if it is inferred that he should have understood an order the first time it was given. Having understood the order correctly, he then feels it his inalienable right to inquire why the order was given. After satisfying himself on this point, he sets himself to figure out an easier method of performing the work than the one which has been prescribed. In the military world there is no such large liberty of thought and action. Because each man in an army is responsible for the performance of certain definite duties, he must be able to command the obedience of the men under him just as he commands and is responsible for the work of his own hands.

To many civilians who are unfamiliar with military work the words "military discipline" mean all that is arbitrary and unreasonable.

sanest and most intelligible side of a soldier's life. It is the only road which a soldier can take towards safety, success, and such comfort as he can find in the midst of his arduous duties.

The prescriptions of our life at Plattsburg began to make themselves felt within a very few hours after we arrived. It was not long before we learned that the day could be divided into a more varied assortment of duties than we had ever imagined. Our time, we found, was no longer to be classed among the possessions guaranteed to us under the Constitution, but was to be portioned out to us in accordance with the desires of the powers that were. We learned from the General Orders on our company bulletin-board that life had now resolved itself into a procession of bugle calls. Aside from responding to the following list, however, we were at liberty unless otherwise ordered:

With reveille of our first day in camp began the work of making of the one hundred and more men in each of the companies of our regiment a military team capable of acting as a unit. It was indeed a task which required nothing less than the best efforts of the splendid officers under whom we were enrolled. For a single officer to lick one hundred men into shape within a single month so that they can move about the country on their own feet, can be maneuvered in line of battle without endangering their own comrades from the fire of their rifles, and can return to camp in rain or shine with enough reserve

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strength to care for themselves and their equipment in soldierly fashion-the size of such a task can only be realized by those who have gone through the mill.

The work began, as all such work must, at the very bottom. First the movement of the soldier, then the squad, then the company, then the battalion, and, last of all, the regiment in marching array. And when our month was through most of us had acquired a very full realization of the fact that we had been introduced merely to the elementary mechanics of the work which we were trying our best to perform. Indeed, it was not until the last week of the camp, during the progress of our hike towards the Canadian border, that even these elemental mechanics of soldiering began to find an easy and ordered place in the scheme of our endeavor.

If there were some of us who did not even begin to grasp the scheme of things entire until the last week of our training, there was at least one fact brought home to us all within the first few days of the camp. This was the value and the significance of the uniform we were privileged to wear. Taken by itself, the modern military uniform is not a particularly attractive object. As a symbol of service, common purpose, and comradeship, it is as impressive as any combination of flaring colors and gold braid that ever bedecked the annals of military history.

To put a man in uniform is to supply him with the common denominator above which there stands out in black and white the numerator of his own ability. In civil life we all have denominators based on the hazards of fortune. Even in a democracy we cannot help judging men and women to a certain extent by the purely accidental denominators of the circumstances which surround them. Once in uniform, practically all that is artificial in our relations with each other disappears. Either a man is a good soldier or a bad soldier, a good comrade or a bad comrade. Against that olive-drab uniform which melts so swiftly into a protective background the personal qualities of courage, perseverance, and power stand out like trees lifted against the open sky.

To offer a discussion of the effect and value of a uniform as a vital part of a descriptive article on camp life may seem to be dodging the question; but in the social and political aspects of the Plattsburg Training Camp can be found a much truer picture of its life than in any tale of muddy roads, heavy packs,

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hot days on the drill ground, or cool nights in the open fields.

It is true that we drilled, we marched, we ate, we slept. We learned how to carry an Irish stew, two potatoes, bread, butter, and a lump of jam in a single dish while still preserving their separate entities. We learned how to sleep like a log under a pocket-handkerchief of a tent pitched in a stubble field. We learned, some of us, to put a bullet from our rifle in a twenty-inch circle at six hundred yards, and we learned how to keep that rifle a great deal cleaner than fate permitted us to keep ourselves. Between a bath and a clean rifle there is but one choice for a soldier. We learned from confidential inquiry that every company in camp was commanded by the best captain in the United States army. This sounds a bit incredible, but you can verify the statement by inquiry from any man who attended Plattsburg in the muddy month of June. We learned that three blankets can be folded to make a sleeping-bag fit for a king, or even a first sergeant. We learned (but this was extra-curriculum information) that fifty wildstrawberry shortcakes covered with whipped cream, sold by three girls to a regiment of more than one thousand men, will go into that regiment a great deal less than once and nothing over. This fact was mathematically demonstrated during our hike.

We did not learn, for most of us were convinced of the fact before we ever went to Plattsburg, that soldiering is a business that can be learned in a single day, a single month, or a single year.

We did not learn of any short cut to National safety and self-respect other than that which leads through universal obligation in return for universal privilege. We did not learn how to undertake the work of a finished officer, but we learned that even in the A B C's of military training can be found a wealth of health and social discipline which has too long been withheld from the citizens of our Republic. If the Plattsburg Encampment never contributes a soldier or an officer to the United States army, it will have more than justified its existence by the political and social education of those who have lived within its canvas walls. The Plattsburg idea is still young; its opportunities for service in the future are limited only by the courage, vision, and critical understanding of the American people.

HAROLD T. PULSIFER.

Τ

HE rise and fall of a great empire is an awesome thing. When one can view it as a whole in a great book like Gibbon's, one can obtain a sense of its epic grandeur; but, as we live a year at a time, it is harder to view it largely.

We are looking now upon the fall of a mighty empire. It has shrunk and decayed within our time until many of us view it with contempt, and wish that the Sick Man would hasten his slow demise; yet the tragedy is none the less for our impatient view of it.

The Allies' armies are now indirectly threatening Constantinople, and the campaigns in the Near East are drawing a breathless interest from Western observers.

Constantinople is, of course, much more than the capital of Turkey; Roman, Byzantine, Macedonian, it has survived the fall of three empires and will survive the fall of the Ottoman. Constantinople cannot die, but Stamboul, the heart of Turkish conquest, the Sublime Porte, the City of the Sultans, can go the way of ancient Athens and Rome.

There is little doubt in my mind that the impulse to the present war was given in the revolution of 1908 in Turkey; and perhaps the greatest change wrought in Europe by that war will be the change in the ownership of Constantinople and the fall of Turkey.

What is the significance of the fall of Turkey? Is there any justice in it? Let us consider the abstract question of what confers the right on one nation rather than another to rule over a given territory.

The old answer to this question was conquest, might. It was by this right that the Turks entered Europe, and it is by this right that all of the Powers are where they are. There is a school of political scientists to-day who claim that the sword decides rightly all questions of possession. Judged by this right of the sword, the Turks can claim their extensive Empire just so long as they can hold it, and no longer.

A more modern contention is that every nation has a right to its own governmentone that shall consider its nationalism, its religion, and its culture. That is the claim put forth by the Poles, the Finns, the Bul

garians, the Servians, and other small nationalities.

On this basis the Turkish Empire should break up, for Turkey has probably the most heterogeneous and least assimilated population within any one state.

The Ottoman Empire, like the Austrian, consists of a conquering race and successive conquered peoples whom it has taken into the Empire en bloc and whom it has never assimilated. Such peoples are the Greeks or Byzantines who originally ruled in the Bosphorus, the Armenians who occupied a large part of Asia Minor, the Arabs and Syrians to the south, the Slavs in Macedonia and northwards, the Jews in Palestine, and numerous smaller groups. These people represent three great religions-Hebraism, Christianity, and Islamism-with many churches and seats of Christianity, a dozen different languages, and as many cultures; and, unlike Austria and Russia, Turkey has made almost no effort to unify her population.

When Mohammed the Conqueror took Constantinople in 1453, he brought a small population of Turks into a large population of Christians and Jews. Although many Greeks left Constantinople, many more remained and occupied a special quarter known as the Phanar; and the Greek islands and Greece itself remained entirely populated by that people of mixed race, the modern Greek. The Turks themselves are hardly a distinct race, certainly not in our day; but they are very distinct in their culture, and within the Empire are always distinguished by their religion. When Slavic tribes in what is now Bosnia became converts to Islam, they became Turks, usually adopting Turkish names and acquiring all the Turkish privileges and military responsibilities and opportunities, for no real opportunity-military or civil-has ever been open in Turkey to a man who resolutely remained a Christian. But very many of the great generals and officials, even Grand Viziers, have been Christians by birth, and the famous and formidable army of the Janissaries was entirely made up of Christian children who (Continued on page £llowing illustrations)