A Scotch Homecroft Reserve of a million men would have been an almost certain guarantee that no war would have broken out; and if it had, such a Homecroft Reserve would have been worth to England the billions of dollars she is now spending in a paroxysm of haste to train a million soldiers for service on the continent and to conduct the war. The Scotch Homecroft Reserve would have had the added value of being thoroughly trained and hardened troops as compared with the new levies they are now training to be soldiers. Those raw levies of volunteers, many from clerical employments, lack the qualities that would have been furnished by the Scotch Highlanders, or the descendants of forty generations of border-raiders, or the hardy fishermen of the Sea Coast and Islands of Scotland. Some idea of the sort of men who would have composed this Scotch Homecroft Reserve that England might have had, may be gained from the following very brief story of the Gordon Highlanders which appeared in the "Kansas City Times" of October 27, 1914: "Who's for the Gathering, who's for the Fair? (Gay goes the Gordon to a fight.) The bravest of the brave are at deadlock there. (Highlanders! March! By the right!) There are bullets by the hundred buzzing in the air: There are bonny lads lying on the hillsides bare; But the Gordons know what the Gordons dare When they hear their pipes playing. --'The Gay Gordons,' by Henry Newbolt. "One hundred and thirty years ago the bagpipes of the 'Gay Gordons' first swirled the pibroch. Since then they have played it in every clime and nearly every land where British troops have fought. "The Duke of Gordon was granted a 'Letter of Service' in 1794 to organize a Highland infantry regiment among his clansmen. Lady Gordon, 'The Darling Duchess,' took charge of the enlisting. Their son, the Marquis of Huntley, was the first colonel. "The Gordons first saw service against the French in Holland in 1799. Outnumbered six to one, they received their baptism of fire in a wild charge at Egmont-op-Zee that made all Great Britain ring with their praises. Their first laurels, won at a bloody cost, have never been dimmed. "From Holland they went to Egypt, and with the Black Watch, the Cameronians and the Perthshire Greybreeks stormed up the shore of Aboukir Bay and later the height of Mandora. The name of every battle of Napoleon's futile attempt to master Egypt appears on their battle flags. "They came home from there to line the streets of London at Nelson's funeral, a post of honor coveted by every British regiment. Next they appeared in Denmark and were at the fall of Copenhagen. Without a visit to Scotland the Gordons went to Spain and went through the glorious campaign of Sir John Moore. The French long remembered them for their fight at Corunna.