500 COLONEL ROOSEVELT IN GERMANY. 



The '' fighting edge " — a phrase Hkely to live — the mass be- 

 Heves in as much as it cherishes the daily duties. The instinctive 

 difference between modern civilization and old is that the old was 

 not aware of its peril and the new civilization is awake to it. Rome 

 felt secure until Alaric was at the gates. Modern civilization is 

 astir with alarm. 



When Theodore Roosevelt urges and exhorts to the life of 

 active readiness for conflict he would be but a voice poured on the 

 free winds far, were it not that this doctrine is in all the air. Look 

 at the prodigious pains and effort in the past thirty years to main- 

 tain physical stamina. Playgrounds and gymnasiums, the sports 

 which fill newspapers by the page, college athletics and personal 

 exercise, attention to hygiene and struggles with disease, universal 

 interest in physical records, games, drills, new appliances and ap- 

 paratus, the world-wide attention to matches and competitive events, 

 all bespeak the same anxious desire to keep up the " fighting edge." 



COMPULSORY MILITARY SERVICE APPROVED. 



Armies are being remodeled. Navies are rebuilt. The train- 

 ing of soldiers and sailors is more severe than ever before. Lands 

 like Australia are drilling every school boy. Compulsory military 

 service, once condemned, is approved. The national army is lauded 

 in England as a national school, and in this country there never was 

 so much effort to maintain a high physical type. 



This is universal. It exists everywhere. When Colonel 

 Roosevelt urges it he but sums the universal practice. The civilized 

 world grows physically stronger every decade. The one need is 

 that all this shall bring a moral ardor in the attack on wrong and 

 misdoing. Grave danger exists in every civilization and every city 

 that men will accept evil and condone wrong, let thieving continue 

 and corrupt profits swell while the vast mass acquiesces. 



The tendency of the past and present in law and government is 

 towards centralization. The homos^eneousness of nations has been 

 more firmly established, the law codes of different countries more 

 closely assimilated, the methods of war and peace in all nations are 



