“civilian interference.”  Such an encampment may be regarded as an historic survival representing the standing armies sustained in Europe since the days of the Roman Empire.  These large bodies of men, deprived of domestic life, have always afforded centres in which contempt for the chastity of women has been fostered.  The older centres of militarism have established prophylactic measures designed to protect the health of the soldiers, but evince no concern for the fate of the ruined women.  It is a matter of recent history that Josephine Butler and the men and women associated with her, subjected themselves to unspeakable insult for eight years before they finally induced the English Parliament to repeal the infamous Contagious Disease Acts relating to the garrison towns of Great Britain, through which the government itself not only permitted vice, but legally provided for it within certain specified limits.

The primary difficulty of military life lies in the withdrawal of large numbers of men from normal family life, and hence from the domestic restraints and social checks which are operative upon the mass of human beings.  The great peace propagandas have emphasized the unjustifiable expense involved in the maintenance of the standing armies of Europe, the social waste in the withdrawal of thousands of young men from industrial, commercial and professional pursuits into the barren negative life of the barracks.  They might go further and lay stress upon the loss of moral sensibility, the destruction of romantic love, the perversion of the longing for wife and child.  The very stability and refinement of the social order depend upon the preservation of these basic emotions.

Social customs are instituted so slowly and even imperceptibly, so far as the conforming individual is concerned, that the mass of men submit to control in spite of themselves, and it is therefore always difficult to determine how far the average upright living is the result of external props, until they are suddenly withdrawn.  This is especially true of domestic life.  Even the sordid marriages in which the senses have forestalled the heart almost always end in some form of family affection.  The young couple who may have been brought together in marriage upon the most primitive plane, after twenty years of hard work in meagre, unlovely surroundings, in spite of stupidity and many mistakes, in the face of failure and even wrongdoing, will have unfolded lives of unassuming affection and family devotion to a group of children.  They will have faithfully fulfilled that obligation which falls to the lot of the majority of men and women, with its high rewards and painful sacrifices.  These rewards as well as the restraints of family life are denied to the soldier.  A somewhat similar situation is found in every large construction camp, and in the crowded city tenements occupied by thousands of immigrant men who have preceded their families to America.