Evening Republican, Volume 21, Number 282, Rensselaer, Jasper County, 3 December 1918 — NATION DEPENDS UPON HOME [ARTICLE]

NATION DEPENDS UPON HOME

I .111—1.1 !—■■■ Great Truth Revealed by the War la - Not Likely to Be Forgotten When It Ends. “If the health of the people had been looked after properly, Britain would have a million more fighting men at the front. You cannot have an A-l nation with a C-3 population,” declared Premier Lloyd George In a recent speech at Manchester. Here in America the same thought was forced upon us by the disclosures of physical unfitness in the selective draft, and the comment was made that the military loss thus represented was just as much a loss to the nation industrially and economically. The British statesman proposes to do more than talk about it He says the abolition of the evil social conditions of pre-war days will be the greatest problem after the coming of peace. He uses a simile that will appeal to Pittsburgh: “With our machinery we take the greatest care. The way we look after it if the steel is defective through badly-ventilated or illconstructed furnaces or insufficient fuel! The quality of the steel in the national fabric depends upon the home. If it is unhealthy, ill-equipped, ill-man-aged, the' quality becomes defective and it cannot bear the strain.” To enable the nation to bear the g» gantlc burden of debt the war will impose on it and the still greater burden of. recuperation and reconstruction, Lloyd George warns the national resources must be developed to the full. First among these is the human factor. Just as today everyone of us was expected to do his or her part toward the winning of the war, when the sense of common peril brought to each and all the sense of interdependence, Lloyd George insists that in the years to come we must carry the same spirit into the ■ everyday life of the nation. We nnigt concern ourselves with the care of our fellow citizens, the steel in the national machine upon all depend. We cannot after the war -withdraw ourselves into our pre-war selfish Isolation. We must constantly keep before us and act upon the same enlightened spirit of comradeship we exact today from every fellow citizen. If we want to remain an A-l nation, we must see that we have the fewest possible C-3 men, women and children.