the culls of whatever age, the men exempted because they are below standard, are living out their lives and fathering children.
In our own draft, we proceeded on the European plan, calling to arms the men between twenty-one and thirty, and generally exempting the married. That age was set largely to get the men of best fighting age—“athletic age.” But we were moved by another consideration, which showed itself in the exemption of married men. We wished to minimize human grief and human hardship. If an unmarried boy of twenty is killed there are only his immediate blood-family to mourn him. A married man of thirty-five has in addition a wife and children. Moreover, if he goes to the war in the ranks, he must leave his wife and children virtually to shift for themselves. Great Britain recognized the same principles when, in her advance to universal conscription, she took the young before the old, the unmarried before the married.
Humane and beautiful as well as expedient, all this; yet from the racial point of view, unscientific even to immorality. Better, far better, would it be to begin at the other end of the scale, mobilizing for first-line troops the men between seventy and sixty, for the second-line those between sixty and fifty, for Territorials those between fifty and forty-five. With these old men the race, as such, has little concern. They have mostly fathered their children, done their duty to the strain.
