Evening star., 1898-08-29
The Nations Profitable Investment.

There should be disposition in any
quarter to regard the time, money and
energy expended in the concentration of
volunteers who have never gone out of
their camps in this country as in the
slightest degree in any sense wasted.
Indeed, no better investment could we'll
have been made by the nation than the
furnishing of measure of military expert
ence to the hundred thousand men or more
who Were called from their homes to go
into the ranks and who We're not required
in the active campaigning. Some of them
have suffered severely. They have been
exposed to hardships, to the lack of nour-
ishing food, to the perils of disease, to the
debilitating effects of lite under strange
and unfavorabie conditions. But they have
gained heavily in experience. They have
learned what the soldiers life is like, what
are his duties, his responsibilities, his de-
privations. The military spirit has been
fostered, and the perhaps hitherto vague
sense of duty to country has been given
meaning which could not have been gener-
ated but for the direct personal participa-
tion in the trials of military experience.
On the other hand the country has Sc
cured material value in return for the
money thus expended. First of all, and
most important, is the prestige with the
world powers obtained through the spec
tacle of the speedy mobilization of a large
army out of the rawest of materials. The
immediate military necessities of the cam
paign were relatively slight. The decisive
fighting work was virtually all done by less
than twenty-five thousand men, whereas
there were available when Santiago fell
upwards of 800 900 men, both regulars and
volunteers, the great majority of them fit
for service and all eager for duty. Thus
fully hve-sixths of the assembled force
were virtually idle so far as the immediate
results of the field work were concerned.
To be sure the armies sent to Porto Rico
and Manila were powerful moral factors in
forcing Spain to sue for peace, and these
must be taken into account in estimating
the relatively surplus land force. But how
ever large this percentage of surplus, how
ever many of the volunteers We're, as direct
mintary results stand, useiessly enlisted,
every dollar spent in the mobilization and
every day lost by the men themselves were
splendid investments for both the present
ard the future
The official mistakes made in the process
of concentrating, equipping, transporting
and training these surplus forces whatever
may have been the gross amount of suffer-
ing entailed, are in themselves valuable to
the government in that they point to dan
gers and afford lessons such as could never
have been learned by other means. These
experiences have discounted and corrected
many theories and established new bases
for the handling of large bodies of men
under modern conditions. The men them
selves have taken to their homes a military
training which will never be lost and SO the
government has virtually organized an
army of citizen soldiers, ready for service
in the future should occasion demand that
the nation go again to war, and certain to
be far more speedily useful for the military
purposes of the government than they We're
when they went first into camp this year.
These men are thus in a certain sense
veterans, a reserve force of ines stimable
value, and their mastering out in restoring
their civilian status, and replacing them
i'll the ranks of the producers and the
Wage-earners, carries with it no sense of
financial or economic loss to the country
at large.