of the Secretary, these four boys would have been shot without having been defended, without a chance, and with no opportunity to disclose the facts. There are instances of men, absent without leave, just left the camp as some of you might leave your work and go to a baseball game—might; or to a convention, more likely. Some of them absent without leave, for a few hours, some under strong extenuating circumstances, who got sentences ranging from six days to twenty-five years.
There was no machinery to do this work any more than there was machinery for furnishing camps and cantonments. It had to be made at once and out of the material they had, without a chance to educate those who were in charge of the serious business of judging their fellowmen. And it is a serious business, which needs experience, sober-mindedness and charity. All of this was necessarily lacking in most of these trials. One can take the records, which are easily obtainable, and find case after case of this sort.
Of course there were some courts martial that were more humane than others. Men of a broader vision. Some defendants better defended than others. And there was the greatest difference and diversity in the various camps of the United States and in France.
Our military law has come down from the old-time British law; at a time when nobody but the nobility could be officers and nobody but the peasants were private soldiers. There were very few of the nobility and a good many of the peasants, which made the commanders few and the army large. Of course the commanders did it all. England has modified the proceedings. So has France, but America has not. I am not here to criticise so much what we have done, although it is wrong and cannot meet the feelings of justice or democracy of the average American, but I am here to see what shall be done with the manifold mistakes and cruelties that resulted from it all.
I need not go over these cases in detail. In one year there were sixteen thousand of them. A court of review was absolutely powerless to review them if it had been a court, and it was not a court; it was a commanding officer issuing orders.
These boys really had no trial that could resemble a trial. They had no semblance of what is called a trial when one is charged with an offense. We, in America, as in England, have cherished trial by jury as one of the priceless safeguards of freedom and of life. And yet none of those sixteen thousand
