Allowances to dependents are more, however, than financial expedients.
They are part of the psychological stage-setting of the Great War. The
fighting man must be more than well-fed, well-clothed, well-equipped,
more than assured of care if ill or wounded; he must have his mind
undisturbed by conditions at home. Governments now know that there must
be no just cause for complaint in the family at the rear, if the man at
the front is to be fully effective. In the interest of the fighting
line, governments dare not leave the home to the haphazard care
of charity.

And so the great belligerents have adopted systems for an uninterrupted
flow of money aid to the hearthstone. The wife feels dependence on the
nation for which she and her man are making sacrifices, the soldier has
a sense of closer relationship with the country's cause for which he
fights. Content at home and sense of gratitude in the trenches build up
loyalty everywhere. The state allowance answers an economic want and a
psychological necessity.

It is part of our national lack of technique that we were slow to make
provision for the dependents of enlisted men, and even then were not
whole hearted. It may have been our inherited distrust of the conscript
that led us to feel that only by his volunteering something will a
precious antidote be administered to the spirit of the drafted man. To
protect his individualism from taint, the United States soldier must
bear part of the financial burden. Europe, on the other hand, is working
on a basis of reciprocity. The nation exacts service from the man and
gives complete service to his dependents. In America the man is bound to
serve the community, but the community is not bound to serve him. And
yet in our case there is peculiar need of this even exchange of