The Democracy of Universal Military Service

This topic is resolvable into propositions of the indispensable science of guess work.There is no way of knowing what the effect of a large military and naval establishment on our domestic insti- tutions and policy will be.The factors of causation are many, and the contingencies are uncertain.Nevertheless, we must guess as well as we can.Marvellous as the achievements of experimental science have been, and great as the accumulations of verified knowl- edge are, mankind yet goes on its daily way, in matters social and political, by guessing.It becomes important, therefore, to guess well.For practical purposes the difference between good guessing and bad guessing is incalculable.The social and political sciences are attempts to establish principles and methods of good guessing, in these domains.Encouraging progress has been made since this Academy was founded twenty years ago.It is this progress that we celebrate today.The fundamental principles of good guessing are no other than those of scientific method in general and perhaps this fact offers as good a reason as any that could be found in justification of our temerity in speaking of social and political sciences.A careful discrimination of facts, qualities, and kinds of things, one from another, is the first requirement.Painstaking measurement, or estimate, of quantities is the second requirement.In attempting to guess what the effect of a large military and naval establishment upon our domestic institutions and policy will be, we shall plunge wildly unless we keep these requisites of method continually in mind.What, then, are we to understand by the phrase, &dquo;A Large Military and Naval Establishment&dquo;? ?We are a nation of more than one hundred million souls.An army of one million men would have been impossibly large for the United States one hundred years ago, when our total population did not exceed five million persons, men, women, and children all told.It would have in

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• Education and intimate war of position

  Open Access•Kolson Schlosser•Political Geography•2017

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