A. It is true that we do not worry about our birth rate, although perhaps we ought to, but we suffer just the same from something very much like the French obsession with theirs. It was the French preoccupation with their inferiority in numbers, and their falling birth rate, which prevented them not merely from wasting lives, but even from using them thriftily on the battlefield, and the result was the debacle. During the Battle of France I seldom saw Colonel Schieffer, in the French Ministry of Information, that he did not exclaim, “We cannot bleed like this again. Twice in a generation is too much. We have only twenty million Frenchmen. This time we must make an end of the Boches so they can never empty our veins again.” The Colonel, who was personally most warlike, was under the impression we all had that the French Army was losing lives heavily, and he was willing that it be done to prevent ever again such bloodshed in the future, yet as a matter of fact, the impulse to save French lives had already become so strong in the Army High Command that it governed all great decisions and contributed seriously to the defeat. Now despite the fact that we are a nation of 130,000,000 we are obsessed to an equal degree with the fear of having to fight in large numbers; we have what amounts to a phobia against sending an American Expeditionary Force to Europe. We seem not to mind nearly so much the idea of American boys in the Navy or the Air Force fighting and dying abroad, but when it comes to the Army we recoil at the idea of an A.E.F. Why the life of an infantryman should be more precious than that of an aviator or sailor is not clear. The explanation of this attitude must be found in the comparative numbers of men involved. A.E.F. brings up the idea of millions of American boys laying down their lives on the battlefield, and most Americans completely forget, if they ever did know, that although we had 4,355,000 men mobilized during the last war, the total number of them killed in action and died of wounds received in action was 50,475. This is roughly one-half of the number of persons killed by accident in the United States every year. We nevertheless erected in every village and city of the land large expensive monuments to our war dead, and the impression became indelibly fixed in the American mind that we had lost millions, or at any rate hundreds of thousands of dead. The vision of this mass sacrifice of American youth is what moves the American people to reject so violently the idea of an expeditionary force. We ought now to be adult enough to see that our penurious attitude toward our precious American blood reflects the same feeling as the French, with more justification, had toward their birth rate, and that if persisted in, this attitude will lead us to similar disaster. Q. _Aren’t there any encouraging differences between ourselves and the unfortunate French?_