wholesome environment. I am proud to say that it was necessary in only a very few instances to bring forward this aspect of the situation, but when it was necessary the Department spoke in no uncertain tone.

As a result of this general policy, in which the Navy shared, many a wide-open town received a thorough house cleaning for the first time in its career; in all between 120 and 140 red light districts were closed and kept closed; and the underlying sordidness of many a smug self-satisfied village was brought to light and remedied.

The men who came to the camps tainted with venereal disease or broken by drink or morphine—and the number of these was great enough to shock our national complacency (and incidentally to explode the national assumption that the country is primarily the abode of virtue as the city is of vice)—these men were salvaged by the tens of thousands and turned into useful self-respecting soldiers and citizens.

The lesson of clean living was taught by the spoken word, by the moving picture, by the printed page, by the doctor with a scientific thoroughness and by the layman with a frankness and sometimes a colloquialism which would for once have rendered Mrs. Grundy speechless. As an instrument of virtue, the tract is, of course, of time-honored usage, but the name of George Ade in the list of tract writers is a new and significant one.

More important than all this, however, in my judgment, was the realization by the Army of the great truth that the soldier—or any one else for that matter—goes astray in only the rarest instances from innate depravity. What he seeks primarily is relaxation and amusement. And so wholesome relaxation and amusement were placed at his disposal to take the place of the unwholesome. The whole nation rose to help in this work of substituting the clean for the unclean. It poured its money by the hundreds of millions into the coffers of the great welfare societies, the Red Cross, The Young Men's Christian Association, Knights of Columbus, Jewish Welfare Board, and later in recognition of its work abroad, the Salvation Army. All of these vied with one another in a rivalry which was sometimes embarrassing in its intensity. The American Library Association supplied books and other reading matter, and the War Camp Community Service made sure that, to the towns and villages surrounding it, a cantonment presented an opportunity for service rather than for exploitation. Not the least important factor in the superb showing which our troops made in France was the spirit with which the men and women of these same towns inspired the men from the training camps whom they took into their homes and their hearts.

Within the fabric of the Army the chaplains were doing their share, as were the athletic leaders and song leaders and dramatic coaches. They were seconded by the officers of the line, most of whom, it should be said, saw the military usefulness of the whole program from the first, many of the experienced regulars having always done what they could with the limited means at their command along the same lines. Other officers, however, had to be shown—and were shown—the military importance of the truth that the merry heart goes all the day, and the sad one tires in a mile.

The work of planning and coördination was in the hands of the civilian Commission on Training Camp Activities, of which Mr. Fosdick has been from the first the Chairman. The work of this Commission has been characterized from the outset by a courage and resourcefulness for which no praise can be too high. The theatre for example has not always been looked upon by the American people as a moral agency, but the Commission saw its place in the scheme of things and no fewer than thirty-seven great playhouses have been erected at the camps and the audiences have run literally into the millions. Boxing likewise was encouraged, even though some of the contests which resulted were not of the most gentle. Cantonment towns were persuaded to open the "Movies" on Sunday, the only day on which most soldiers could leave the Camp—the outcries of the unco guid to the contrary notwithstanding.

For more than a year the Commission and the welfare organizations were the only organized forces in this general field, but since last summer their work has been supplemented by the establishment within the Army itself of a Morale Branch of the General Staff, in the formation of which the Department was not too proud to take a leaf—perhaps one should say a Blatt—from the Germans, who had already developed this type of organization to a high degree, under the direct supervision of General Ludendorff.

I have spoken of the work of prevention, of the more important work of substitution, and I now come to the most important of all—the spirit of confidence which extended from top to bottom of the huge organization that the great mass of our men would go straight for the sake of going straight. We all instinctively couple the two words, "officer" and "gentleman." In the great Army which is now being disbanded, its work having been so gloriously done, we find a new and enlarged conception, that of the soldier and gentleman. It was, I am certain, the preliminary assumption that an American soldier was also an American gentleman in all the fundamentals of that much-abused term, which was the great factor in keeping down the number of those who proved the contrary to so negligibly small a total.

A few figures from the official records will show what the result of this all has been. In 1909, for instance, there were in the Army, in round numbers, 5500 court-martial convictions of enlisted men, out of a total of 75,000. For the fifteen months ending July 1, 1918, there were 11,500 convictions out of a total of 2,200,000 enlisted men, the percentage in the twelve months of peace being 7.3 and in the fifteen months of war, .53, about one-fourteenth as great. The significance of these later figures cannot be appreciated without some knowledge of the underlying circumstances. One case I remember was that of a man who got drunk, spent his money and that of some fellow soldiers, and stayed absent without leave to earn money enough to repay his fellow soldiers and then returned to camp to take his medicine. What on the surface appears to be the cowardly crime of desertion was, in several instances of which I have personal knowledge, a misguided effort to get to the front, through enlistment under another name in some branch of the service which seemed to have an earlier prospect of getting over. In France there were many cases of desertion, but nearly all were from the rear to the front. The progressive success of the policy of keeping the soldier from strong drink, by the way, stands out in the figures, which show that early in the war one out of every twelve offenses charged included drunkenness, but that this proportion dropped until the final figures were less than one in each thirty offenses, this including soldiers in France, where the soldier had to stand on his own feet unprotected by prohibition laws.

The welfare program was, from the nature of the case, most effective among the men of the National Army, where it was possible to take the soldiers in hand from the first. If we analyze the court-martial records, we find that the proportion of court-martials was distinctly lowest in this group. The records as of June 30, 1918, show that the number of court-martials among the Regular Army was a little less than one per cent, to be accurate 8/10 of one per cent; in the National Guard the proportion was about 9/10 of one per cent; and in the National Army it was less than 2/10 of one per cent, the exact