OCR Text |
Show PROSECUTING EVADERS. The next big internal governmental step is likely to be the beginning of wholesale prosecutions of draft evaders. It is estimated that between 275,000 and 300,000 persons come under this head. T.hey are not all draft delinquents, delin-quents, however, for there are thousands thou-sands who enlisted voluntarily before they received questionnaires, and these were noted by local boards as evaders. There are other thousands' who were inducted into the service in places other than in the districts where their local boards held sessions. These, too, were marked down as evaders by the district boards. Many men have been chocked as delinquents who wTere dead and in their graves at the time the mark was made. It is to be remembered that the pandemic of influenza swept the country coun-try coincidentally with the second draft calls and that it carried off thousands who had been listed for military duty. Both tho war department and the department de-partment of justice deny in vigorous terms the truth of a report that delay in prosecuting draft evaders was due to the probability of a general amnesty soon to be granted. Both organizations assert that even now the machinery is in motion preparatory to bringing the law to bear upon the guilty. Tho chief difficulty is tho absence of a proper file of records. Some statistician of the war department lias figured it out that the draft records would cover an area of more than fifteen square miles if spread out. They represent the individual in-dividual records of approximately 23,-000,000 23,-000,000 registrants. The documents now arc packed in boxes and for the time being are inaccessible for classification classi-fication and filing. In due time, how-ever, tho hour of reckoning will come for the slacker. Indications are that the prosecutions will be conducted by the war department depart-ment and that the department of justice jus-tice will render only indirect assistance. This decision, if it has been reached, would tend to tho belief that the punishment, pun-ishment, in case of conviction, will be in accordance with a military view of justice, rather than according to a civil one. Since it is to be expected that the military idea of adequate penalty pen-alty is the more severe, the draft evader looks upon a future anything but rosy. In fairness to the men who entered the service or who w-ere ready upon call to enter it, there must be a bringing to account of every slacker in the United Unit-ed States; and the sooner the government govern-ment takes up tho case tho sooner will the dcm;:nd.; of iustico be met. |