Notable progress, too, was being made along another line. Humanitarianism in its modern connotation is the child of the nineteenth century. To feel distress over the knowledge that famine or other ill afflicts a distant people is a purely modern accomplishment of which our forefathers of two or three centuries ago were wholly innocent. As applied to armies, the humanitarian impulse has worked a startling revolution. Organizations designed to care for the sick and the wounded have developed on an elaborate scale. The Red Cross was called into being only half a century ago as an indirect result of the horrors of the battlefield of Solferino. It was born too late to have any share in alleviating the miseries of our own Civil War but since that time it has constituted an ever increasing agency for the relief of human suffering, whether in peace or in war. Even the “unspeakable Turk” has been infected by the virus of humanitarianism and the Red Crescent plays for the Mohammedan world the rôle fulfilled by the Red Cross among the nations of Christendom. OTHER AGENCIES The progress made in recent years in the fields of medicine and surgery has been no less striking than in that of humanitarianism; while the development of a new social consciousness (a concomitant, of course, of the humanitarian movement) has resulted in throwing about the soldier who wars for America in 1918 a set of safeguards, and in providing him with a degree of comfort such as no other warriors in the history of the world ever enjoyed. Against drunkenness and vice, twin plagues of army life since the beginning of the world, he is at least as well protected as is the civilian at home. Libraries and clubhouses and games and lectures are provided with unstinted generosity for his recreation and instruction. That his mind may be free from incidental worry, a system of life insurance on a scale hitherto undreamed of has been evolved; while the wife or other dependents at home are insured by the largess of a parental government against coming to actual want during his absence. SOME FACTS AND FIGURES