LA GARDE CIVIQUE

The various home guards being established through the country by locally patriotic citizens who still cherish the traditions of the Revolution, are admirable. These men remember the time, well sung by poets, when a man's house was his castle, a flintlock over the mantelpiece his artillery, and his neighbors and himself the defending army. At the call of the tocsin from every home would emerge the embattled citizens, and foreign soldiers would melt before their aroused wrath like the milky way before the sun. For the sake of truth, which is always a prosaic busybody, we must admit that occasionally the embattled citizens failed to defend their castles with the utmost skill, and the foreign soldiery refused to melt at the psychological moment. However, excepting such minor failures, a like scheme of war was a locally tremendously successful campaign.

Humbly we beg to submit that the times have somewhat changed. The sturdy farmer so longer defends his one man castle. The flintlock has been superceded by breech loading machine guns which fire four hundred shots at a clip. To defend his home a man may have to defend a trench some four thousand miles away, over seas and foreign soil. From our expert and trusted correspondents in Berlin we learn also that the German general staff has not included in its plan of war a campaign against Fitchburg, or an invasion into becastled Quincy. The home guards might well, so far as the Germans are concerned, enbalm their pre-Spanish war Springfields in a good quality of oil, and turn their energies to planting potatoes.

As a friendly reminder we might point out that in case Germany by some dark mischance should invade our shores, the home guards would be classed as franctireurs. So that same warwise power saw fit to regard the Belgian uniformed and governmentally recognized Gorde Civique, subjecting all that fell within her hands to the German jury of justice, which is eight men, more or less, casting ballot by rifle volley.