service all but unbearable to him when the time and occasion arrive for the performance of such duty.

We may pass rapidly over the remedial effects of military training. This work is not designed to correct physical defects.

The educative value offers more opportunity for discussion. Training of the neuromuscular glandular system is an essential part of the aim of military training. The soldier must acquire complete control over his whole body in order to execute commands promptly and efficiently. He must possess alertness, quickness, accuracy, skill, strength and endurance qualities, the development of which depends upon the training of the muscles, glands and nerves. This training is most abundantly provided by our gymnastics, games and athletics, and when received from such activities is very certain of remaining a part of the individual. The school time that might reasonably be devoted to military training is so short that the amount of educative results possible would be negligible. Why to gain so little should we lose so much? Why crowd out superior means of building soldiers, if they are our need, for the sake of having military training in high schools?

We hear a great deal in favor of the discipline. The fact is that this very discipline which is so highly lauded is not general enough to be of great value. It simply requires that a man respond automatically when under the direction of another. It affords little training in the use of one's own judgment. It does not require that a person preserve the same rigidity in all conduct. Too often we see a soldier who under supervision has perfect order, but who when thrown upon his own responsibility relaxes all discipline and breaks all rules of conduct. Being under command of another day after day tends to destroy the initiative at a time when a high school boy is at the most favorable stage for cultivating it. While in training he has no opportunity to work out his own plans. He soon loses even the desire to form them; consequently he fails to develop the power of self-direction, one of the things for which educators so earnestly strive. Talent,

genius, and natural gifts are ignored. Boys make good soldiers only in so far as they doff their personal peculiarities and fit into a great machine like a cog in a wheel. Standardization is the guiding star of the successful military officer. When a man has reached maturity it is time enough to have individualities planed off. Young people should not all try to fit into a common mold where everyone is capable of doing only what everyone else can do. That was the Spartan method. Modern education helps a person to provide himself with the kind of environment in which he can best develop his own peculiar powers.

The social value of military training for boys is a minus quantity. We can not expect by developing a military spirit to keep from becoming infected with the germs of war. Classes of society will war with one another. Individuals will revert to the stage when might made right. Law and justice will suffer a severe blow. Under such conditions there can be little hope for unity and loyalty.

It is argued that military work would have a valuable harmonizing influence upon the school. The boys, having a common object in view, would be spurred on by the acts of their comrades. Working in a group tends to socialize human beings. All of these things are true and commendable, surely, but even this spirit of cooperation can be developed in a much more effective way. Do not the players on a team work in groups? Are they not incited not only by the achievements of their teammates, but also by the successes of their opponents?-Military drill furnishes no real, live opposition. Furthermore, do we not in education really have a great common aim-true preparation for complete living? Let us not deceive ourselves into thinking that the defense of our country lies wholly in the force of arms. Granting that to bear arms in battle for one's country, giving up home, friends, possibly life itself, is one of the noblest forms of service anyone can render, we must still concede that the bulwark formed by an enlightened citizenship is mightier than the power of armies of soldiers. The school aims to give such preparation for life as will raise humanity to the standard

where its disputes may be settled without war. When it succeeds in effecting this purpose preparedness will lie not in ships and armies of men, but in the physical, mental and moral make-up of the nation.

Military training interferes with the aims of the school, robbing the institution of its broadest influence and substituting nothing of a constructive character. Even those people who by long training have achieved a diabolical efficiency in the art of war, have not permitted military training to be taught in the high schools. They have pursued the most thoro educational methods. Twenty years is a low age at which to begin training, eighteen should be the minimum, and then the drilling should be done in institutions established especially for the purpose of building soldiers.

Now, what ethical qualities are developed by military training? The war of 1914, the greatest world-tragedy, began because a nation lost its self-control, its power of selfdirection. When we consider how a mighty people, prominent in various fields of endeavor, has resorted to the most barbarous measures to destroy the life of fellow-beings, and has trespast unhesitatingly upon the rights of neutrals, we conclude that because military training has engaged so much of the time and attention of that nation, comparatively little consideration has been given to the development of those finer ethical qualities which of themselves would have made such a wicked war impossible. It was the constant thought of war that finally precipitated war, involving many besides the aggressors.

Training in the art of war has no great spiritualizing influence and so it is a failure when compared in results with the teachings of justice, friendship and righteousness. War is a remnant of a lower stage of evolution, another sad commentary upon our boasted civilization. Do not understand me to say that there never comes a time to fight. War is sometimes necessary. Might is a force we must use, the only effective one we can use, when dealing with a people that ruthlessly disregards the rights of humankind. In 1917, the time was due, if not past due, for the United States to engage

in the bloodiest war of all time. No nation can afford to permit itself to be dishonored by ignoring insult after insult.

Engaging in war involves preparation for war. We must prepare in the most effective way. That brings us back to our original question, Shall we introduce military trainingin to our high schools? The answer is unalterably the same —No! We understand that if the war continues for some time, the schoolboys of today will be the soldiers of tomorrow, and that it behooves them to prepare for military service. We trust that they may not fail in their duty; furthermore, that they may not choose the wrong method in which to make this preparation. It can not be done by simply acquiring skill in the "old order of things." It can be done by developing body, mind, and soul to the limit of their capacity. The best place for such development is the school, that school in particular which gives physical education a prominent place on its program, for have we not found that physical training builds men better than does military training?

Furthermore, modern warfare involves something besides physical force. The present war is waged largely by technicians. Future wars, if such there be, will be fought almost entirely by men who know chemistry, physics, electricity, engineering, topography, metallurgy, and like subjects, the principles of which are taught in our schools. Any untrained person who takes part will have the pleasure of doing the drudgery, and he will not require much drilling for that. The value of the above-named subjects does not cease to exist when war ends, for they are related to the arts of peace.

We must not be so absorbed in the business of war that we forget to prepare for peace. After the war, when the men are mustered out, they will be called upon to render a different form of service from that in which they have just been engaged. If they have been properly trained they will take their places in the business and professional worlds as efficiently as they did upon the battlefield. They will have had not only preparation for war and death, but also preparation for peace, for life.

HARVEY, ILL.

EDITH L. HILDERBRANT

VI

HASTE AND WASTE IN TRANSLATING LATIN

There still lingers among us a more or less general idea that translation, if properly conducted, is a process almost wholly objective, a routine substitution of values, Latin or French x and y, for example, becoming English a and b. To be sure, no one would quite accept that picturesque legend of the Seventy, imprisoned in as many separate cells by Ptolemy Philadelphus, that they might produce independent translations of the books of the Old Testament, with the astonishing result that one identical version from beginning to end was handed in by all the scholars. And yet many continue to imagine that the perfect translation of the Phaedo, or St. John's Gospel, or the Fourth Eclogue, would all but eliminate subjective interpretation, and give the precise equivalent of the original, with almost mathematical accuracy. But this coldly mechanical, objective, unbiased translation is the purest fiction of the imagination. Practical experience long ago proved that virtually nothing can be translated except by a logical process of reasoning, an analysis of the probable meaning in case there is the least uncertainty. For ideas exprest in one language can not be run into the mold of another tongue without first going into the melting-pot of the translator's mind. Something may be lost in this highly subjective process, but the one radical remedy possible is purely personal-another translator. And the next to try his hand can make no revolutionary change of method. He too must do his best to grasp the whole thought of his author, before he attempts to set down a syllable. If this is so clearly the case of the seasoned scholar, what are we to say of the rapid-fire methods of the school-boy or student, who tries the impossible with naïve assurance, reducing the process by elimination of the first and all-essential step?