Life — July 1, 1920 — page 20: what you’re looking at

Machine-transcribed from the original scan — historical spelling and the odd misread are preserved.

The Legion and the Service Men HERE is something in politics that we call “the Organization.” All parties have one. All the churches have one. Back of the Or- ganization is the body of the voters, including many rebels and many indifferent persons. Every living creature has an organization which is necessary to its earthly life, and back of it is a spiritual nature, usually more or less in conflict with it. The Legion is an organization of the men who got into military service in the war. At.present it is the only organization that aspires to represent them. It offers them the only means, as yet, of combined action, but back of the Legion is the mass of those men who saw military service and who may or may not be in sympathy and agreement with the organ- ization that aspires to represent them. It was in the papers the other day that about eleven per cent. of the service men were members of the Legion, so when we say that the Legion does thus or so, or approves or disapproves such and such measures, we must not feel, as we are so prone to feel, that the whole body of men who saw service are back of that thought or that approval. The first aim of an organization is continued life. The first aim of the body is to live. The soul may reach a level where it becomes more or less indif- ferent whether the body lives or not. As long as it helps the soul, the soul will wish to keep it going. When it stands between the soul and its purposes, the soul may come to a disposition to let it go hang. The Legion represents the body of the service men, but it may or may not represent their soul. . * * * . * S long as the country was in the war, everybody worked together, and most people put aside in great measure everything but the common object. The great body of the service men did the same. They were in the service to win the war, They spared nothing to do it. But after the armistice the country generally, and not unnaturally, reverted to self-inter- ests. The political organizations took thought how they might keep alive and keep or attain power, and they got back quickly to fighting one another. The dollar- a-year men got out of government employ back to the job of making a living. Most people in the coun- try got back to their employments as rapidly as they could, and all that was right and necessary. The service men did the same as soon as they could manage it, and of course they shared more or less the common infection of self-interest; seeing which the organization that aspired to represent them put up the bonus plan, which should appeal to the self- interest of its members and supporters. So the service men seem to have done about what everybody else has done, and, so far as their or- ganization represents them, have tried to get what they could. But just as there is a great deal more patriotism and ‘spirituality in the country at large than there is in the political organizations; and just as there is more Christianity in the Church than there is in ecclesiastical organizations, so there is a lot more capacity for unselfish action in the mass of the -ervice men than one would suppose who judges them by the efforts of their organization to pass the bonus bill. All over the world now it looks as though nothing that was good had come out of the war. It looks as though all mankind had reverted to selfish- ness. It looks as though the spiritual state of the world was worse than it was in 1914. But that is deceptive, and is part of a great process of readjust- ment, of which a great factor is the desire of every- one concerned in it to get his own. . * . . * * HE service men have been made to seem to be grabbers, but that is nostly because most of the leadership that looks the other way from self-interest dissolved after the war. That kind of leadership in the country in general became impotent. The after- the-war jobs, for the most part, have not been well done. What was due to the service men has not been done for them as it should have been. The in- tention has been good enough, but it seems not to have been possible to find the men to carry it out as it should have been carried out. In the treatment of the disabled, though a vast deal has been done, it has been done under difficulties, greatly hampered by red tape and incompetent officials. It has been impossible to keep sufficiently able men steadily in those employments that concern the care of the (Continued on page 41) ‘comicbookScom