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The family of the disabled man gives him no constructive help. The employer has always been willing to give the cripple charity but not willing to give him a job. The public at large has thought its duty to disabled men in general was discharged by offering them alms, or its duty to the disabled soldier largely fulfilled by entertainment.

One thing which will come home to us is the damage that is going to be done some disabled soldiers, through using them in a liberty loan campaign and other drives of a similar nature, to serve as object lessons, make speeches, and the like. The public may be in need of that kind of appeal, but it is certainly going to do the disabled men themselves no end of injury and it is going to be years before those men will recover from the effects of being made popular heroes in that way.

It is doing just the kind of thing that the people who are working with cripples are trying sedulously to avoid. We had a young Canadian come in to see us a little while ago. He was a disabled man who had been brought to this country by the Red Cross, and who had been going around making speeches. He came in to get employment and when he was asked what kind of work he wanted he said, "A job in some kind of propaganda." He did not want a trade employment or regular work but he wanted to go around, be in the public eye, and make speeches. I need not emphasize how injurious it is to have many of the ladies think that their duty to the disabled soldier is to entertain him at pink teas and in an unwise and inappropriate way. That again sets the man back. To entertain a man is easy but to give real thought to what you should do for him is hard. It is a public duty which we cannot impress too strongly, that every reaction, every influence on the returned disabled soldier shall be constructive, and help to build up character rather than aid in any way in breaking it down. That is the last link of the chain and that is something that the government or any other agency cannot provide. The public will decide whether the work of rehabilitating disabled American soldiers is going to be a complete success.

We know from the demonstrated results what can be accomplished. In the words of one European writer, "there are no more cripples," and the literal truth of this statement is in process of demonstration. There may be physical cripples, but certainly with the best provision and the best help of everybody concerned there need be no social and economic cripples consequent on the engagement of American forces in the defence of civilization.