Other benefits might be named. The principle of selective military service has been established by the precedent set in the World War. As long as that experience is remembered there will be no danger that America would ever return, in any serious emergency, to the unscientific volunteer system that takes the brave and the enterprising and leaves behind the indolent and timorous. Above all, we must count as gain from the war the confirmation it gave us in our faith in our ability to continue our existence as a nation. The experience demonstrated that our national resources include not only valor in arms in boundless quantity, but also the ability to organize effectively a nation as great as ours for a purpose as complicated as modern war has come to be. The experience in 1917 and 1918 gave us a firm foundation for national self-confidence. These are all benefits and gains which may properly be set off against the intangible costs of the war. Among the benefits secured, however, is not yet one which we might, in 1917 and 1918, have expected to find there. The American host which crossed to France went, almost to a man, uplifted and made heroic by the feeling that it was an army of crusaders fighting to end wars forever. No mere instinct of self-preservation, no simple prospect of a victory over a strange, foreign enemy in gray uniforms, could have inspired the morale of the American Expeditionary Forces, nor yet that of the forces in training in the United States, nor that of American industry in its eager, headlong devotion to the national undertaking. This was to be Armageddon, the last of wars, the war to make safe the unwarlike peoples of the world; and no cynical dictum that man is still too near his neolithic savagery to rely on anything other than might in his international contentions, no Chauvinistic picture of new migrations of Asiatic hordes, can change the fundamental fact that America went to war in the belief that its chiefest object was to end war forever. Until we have made some national attempt to secure that benefit, the page will not balance. FOOTNOTES [1] In this the system differed from that in use in the United States. Not the Quartermaster Corps but the Embarkation Service in the United States prepared the overseas troops for the voyage and embarked them on the transports. The Embarkation Service also operated many of the transports. After the armistice the Embarkation Service, now merged into the Transportation Service, continued to manage the Army’s ocean shipping facilities, and it also attended to the details of debarking troops at the ports in this country; but its jurisdiction over those troops began only after they had boarded the ships in France. [2] Deadweight tonnage represents the weight of cargo it takes to sink a vessel in the water from her light-load line to her deep-load line.