They are devoted to their duty, as they understand it, and are as brave and loyal _soldiers_ as ever existed on the earth. But really it is unreasonable to expect a soldier to be anything but a Militarist. He is bred if not born to war, trained to fight and to study the war game, the war maneuvers, to fortify, to attack, to repel, to figure out a masterly retreat if it becomes necessary. You cannot expect him to be a peace advocate or to work out plans which will prevent or abolish war. It is no part of his duty as he sees it to undertake to devise plans for peace that would render the professional soldier obsolete and relegate him and his brother soldiers to a place by the side of the chivalrous Knights of the Middle Ages, or the Crusaders who fought the Saracens to rescue the Holy Sepulcher from the infidels--picturesque and romantic but expensive and useless. Moreover, Army officers are hampered in all planning for constructive work by their rigid adherence to precedent. They have a medieval contempt for everything non-military, and for all civil duties and affairs. All this results from the existence of a military caste in this country which is as supercilious, self-opinionated, and autocratic as the military aristocracy of the most military ridden nation of Europe. They lack initiative and originality because their whole education has operated to drill it out of them, and to make men who are mere machines, doing what they are told to do, _and doing it well_, but doing nothing else. That is the exact opposite of the type of mind demanded in an emergency requiring initiative and the genius to originate and carry out new and better ways of doing things than those that have prevailed in the past. Men with the military training appear to entirely lack the analytical mind that seeks for _causes_, and comprehends that by removing the _cause_, the evil itself may be safeguarded against, or may in that way be prevented from ever coming into existence. _This fact is well illustrated by the stupendous losses the country has suffered from floods because the Army Engineers have for years so stubbornly refused to consider plans for controlling floods at their sources._ Solid arrays of facts presented to them have contributed nothing to breaking down their stolid egotism. They will not originate, or approve, any plan that does not center everything that is proposed to be done in the War Department and thereby enlarge its influence and prestige. They oppose every plan to coördinate the War Department with other departments, or to put the Army on the same plane with the others in working out plans for constructive coöperation.