Then in 1910 Harvard philosopher William James published an essay
entitled "The Moral Equivalent of War," in which he wrote:

    Now--and this is my idea--there were, instead of military
    conscription a conscription of the whole youthful population to form
    for a certain number of years a part of the army enlisted against
    _Nature_, the injustice would tend to be evened out, and numerous
    other goods to the commonwealth would follow. The military ideals of
    hardihood and discipline would be wrought into the growing fibre of
    the people; no one would remain blind as the luxurious classes now
    are blind, to man's relations to the globe he lives on, and to the
    permanently sour and hard foundations of his higher life. To coal
    and iron mines, freight trains, to fishing fleets in December, to
    dishwashing, clothes-washing, and window-washing, to road-building
    and tunnel-making, to foundries and stoke-holes, and to the frames
    of skyscrapers, would our gilded youths be drafted off, according to
    their choice, to get the childishness knocked out of them, and to
    come back into society with healthier sympathies and soberer ideas.
    They would have paid their blood-tax, done their own part in the
    immemorial human warfare against nature; they would tread the earth
    more proudly, the women would value them more highly, they would be
    better fathers and teachers of the following generation.

    *The Civilian Conservation Corps and
    the National Park Service, 1933-1942:*
    *An Administrative History**y

    http://www.cr.nps.gov/history/online_books/ccc/ccct.htm


    *histo presto content: my maternal grandfather, the master finish
    carpenter, was in the CCC for a while and worked at Milord Filmore
    State Park at Moravia, NY. The only story he ever told me, briefly,
    was the beginning of my exposure to the construction mythology of
    the "young engineer". The young engineer is always, and sadly, known
    to do dumb and often dangerous things out of a spirit of "can do", a
    healthy leadership ego, and inexperience... or failure to fully
    think through the potential consequences of an action. In this case
    the story, one of warning from an old to a young man, was that the
    young engineer placed a bit too much dynamite under a tree stump and
    it blew up, flew up into the air a great ways, and when it came back
    down it hit the young engineer in the head and killed him.

    ][<

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