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Show A LIABILITY OR AN ASSET? We don't need to be told that war is wasteful. We have already surmised sur-mised it. If generals of all ages from Sennacherib to Napoleon, can watch us from their present habitation, they will take on an increase of cynicism. They were probably cynical enough before they diet'.. They learned the futility of trying to create something by a policy of distruction, and must feel some disappointment dis-appointment at this epoch. We have learned nothing from their mistakes. We build cathedrals, and shoot them to bits with canon. We raise and educate a generation to make hecatombs of it. Most of us have at least the excuse that we are fighting to destroy something some-thing that hoped for aggrandizement, out of conquest. But it is absurd that such a policy should have survived sur-vived Sennacherib. Angels weep, the poets tell us, but at times they must feel tempted to laugh. And yet, for us in progressive America, the process in not one of waste. Our young men will return from France with a developed efficiency effici-ency heretofore undreamed of. Have you ever read figures giving' details of the system of piping that carries water to the battle-front? As the front changes the system changes, and the new formations can never be foreseen. Here are problems prob-lems which our young engineers learn to solve with a speed and precision never developed in time of peace, because be-cause they were unnecessary. Do you know that armored tanks charge into battle with telephone wires laid out to keep them in touch with the main command? Field batteries also manoeuvre without failing to get answers to "Hello, Central." Do you know that by teamwork forty American soldiers erected a steel bridges over a hundred feet long in five minutes? We didn't need to do these things in time of peace; so we didn't learn how. In scores of other ways young Americans in France daily achieve the impossible. The fruits of their experience will be reaped in America here in Sanpete when peace is declared. Many peaceful trades are dangerous. danger-ous. The half-built skyscraper, the railroad, the machine-shop daily make work for the surgeon; but in half a century surgery would never have made the strides that it has made in four years of war. Even the telephone wire is now used to locate an internal wound, and this is only one of thousands of expedients lately devised for relieving human pain. War is wasteful; but for that very reason it teaches conservation and inventiveness. We shall realize this when 5,000 young American magicians magi-cians return from Europe. |