WAR, THE LEVELLER

One of the prime topics of discussion with newspapers, educators, and the great public used to be, before the war came along to lift their attention to loftier things, whether college men were democratic or not. A like subject is little worth the debate that has been put upon it. The question depends on what is meant by democratic. College men are more open to fair judgments of their fellows because they associate with them in a most intimate way. But, like other men, they are subject to the errors of judgment.

With that change in manners of life, and perhaps in conception of life, which has come with the war and the subsequent intensive and universal training, there has come an upheaval in our democratic standards. Most men do not realize that a few weeks have worked a far change in their opinions, so subtle, and yet so enduring, has been that change.

The world does not love a loafer, an egoist, a poltroon or a cad. Yet the world is apt to be misled by clothes, by a distant or elevated manner, by reputation or another inessential sham. No more does the Army love a loafer, an egoist, a poltroon, or a cad. And in the Army there is nothing to conceal or overcast a man's real nature. When fifty men are put in one kind of clothes and lined up to do close-order drill in an unindividualistic way, there is not much to hide the true from the false. The soldier is judged by his willingness, by his considerateness, by his courage. Those are a few of the qualities which go to make men, and by them men are judged without mistake.

It is inspiring to one who believes in the equality of men -- and we all do in our better moods -- to see those who in the more artificial and constrained social order of the college would never have occasion to meet, and would never form an intimacy should they meet, working together on a just and natural plane of parity. The distinctions of class, of race, of money, poor and trivial as they are, have vanished.

It is a tribute to the unity of our American character, and a mark of our American liberty, that when the national need should arise to swallow up all lesser needs, the true democracy of which we so often and too valiantly boast should return again not less strong nor less fine than it has been before in our history.