“Oh, yes!” Dick nodded his understanding, and grew more serious.  “My pater — he’s a V. C., you know —­ says that, too.  He says we’ll have to fight Germany, sooner or later.  And he seems to think the sooner the better, too, before they get too big and strong for us to have an easy time with them.”

“They’re too big now for any nation to have an easy time with them,” said Harry.  “But you see what I mean now, don’t you, Dick?  We Boy Scouts aren’t soldiers in any way.  But we do learn to do the things a soldier has to do, don’t we?”

“Yes, that’s true,” said Dick.  “But we aren’t supposed to think of that.”

“Of course not, and it’s right, too,” agreed Harry.  “But we learn to be obedient.  We learn discipline.  And we get to understand camp life, and the open air, and all the things a soldier has to know about, sooner or later.  Suppose you were organizing a regiment.  Which would you rather have —­ a thousand men who were brave and willing, but had never camped out, or a thousand who had been Boy Scouts and knew about half the things soldiers have to learn?  Which thousand men would be ready to go to the front first?”

“I never thought of that!” said Dick, mightily impressed.  “But you’re right, Harry.  The Boy Scouts wouldn’t go to war themselves, but the fellows who were grown up and in business and had been Boy Scouts would be a lot readier than the others, wouldn’t they?  I suppose that’s why so many of our chaps join the Territorials when they are through school and start in business?”

“Of course it is!  You’ve got the idea I’m driving at, Dick.  And you can depend on it that General Baden-Powell had that in his mind’s eye all the time, too.  He doesn’t want us to be military and aggressive, but he does want the Empire to have a lot of fellows on call who are hard and fit, so that they can defend themselves and the country.  You see, in America, and here in Enland, too, we’re not like the countries on the Continent.  We don’t make soldiers of every man in the country.”

“No —­ by Jove, they do that, don’t they, Harry?  I’ve got a, cousin who’s French.  And he expects to serve his term in the army.  He’s in the class of 1918.  You see, he knows already when he will have to go, and just where he will report — almost the regiment he’ll join.  But he’s hoping they’ll let him be in the cavalry, instead of the infantry or the artillery.”

“There you are!  Here and in America, we don’t have to have such tremendous armies, because we haven’t got countries that we may have to fight across the street — you know what I mean.  England has to have a tremendous navy, but that makes it unnecessary for her to have such a big army.”