Gone

If one should ask a military man, one might well get the answer that Julius Kahn had saved more lives than any other man in the U. S. Last week, Julius Kahn himself died, died at the age of 63, died at his home in San Francisco of a cerebral hemorrhage. When word of his death was telegraphed them, his colleagues, 3,000 miles distant, ceased their labor in his honor.

Julius Kahn was a Representative in Congress from the 4th California district (San Francisco). He had served in the House ever since 1899, with the exception of two years. Only six members of the present House were his seniors in point of service. Earlier than that he had been an actor, playing with Joseph Jefferson and Edwin Booth. He carried not a little of histrionic art into politics with him.

Mr. Kahn was a Republican. Therefore, during the Wilson regime, he was of the Opposition. In 1917, he was ranking Republican member of the House Military Affairs Committee. When Woodrow Wilson presented his War program and asked for a universal draft act, Chairman Committee Dent, although a Democrat, opposed the measure It remained for Mr. Kahn, a Congressman who, incidentally, had been born in the enemy country, at Kuppenheim in Baden, to lead the fight for the draft bill, to force its passage. He did.

In more than 125 years, the U. S. had gone through several conflicts without learning the lesson of the in efficiency and ineffectiveness of voluntary recruiting methods in wartime.* In 1917, when the U. S. entered the World War, some degree of system and efficient planning was started first of all by the passage of the draft bill. The result was the saving of the lives of some hundreds of thousands of men by the shortening of the conflict. Besides his great service in the passage of the draft act, Congressman Kahn, time and again, was called upon to defend and to carry out the War program of the Wilson Administration. After the Armistice, as Chairman of The Military Affair Committee during the 66th and 67th Congresses (1919-1923), he performed hardly a lesser service in reorganizing the Army for peace.

*During the Civil War, although the Confederate Army enforced conscription from the first, the Federal Government did not make use of the draft until 1863.