Gratitude: Reflections on What We Owe to Our Country.

THIS BOOK (as readers of the excerpt of it in our anniversary issue know) begins with a simple premise: that each of us owes a measure of gratitude for his patrimony; and a contention: that the best way at once to stimulate that feeling and to requite it is to serve others. There is a further contention: that society can encourage this feeling in the young through certain inducements administered by the state, without embarking on a "government program," with all the baggage that would entail.

That is where the argument rested at the end of the excerpt printed in NR. In succeeding characters Mr. Buckle traces his own movement toward the idea of national service (beginning fifty years ago, when he was introduced to it by his headmaster, Edward Pulling, and rejected it, "thinking it faintly collectivist in nature"); outlines other national-service proposals; and discusses in detail the range of activities that volunteers could usefully engage in, the rewards and penalties that might be used to encourage them to serve, and a rough accounting of the initial costs of his version, which he calls, picking up a phrase from-surprisingly-William Gladstone, the Service Franchise model. In outline, this program would enlist young people when they turned 18; put them to work for a year, normally between high school and college, performing some task of benefit to the community; and then, when they have completed their year's service, give them a tangible reward-in addition to society's gratitude. The outline is not very different from those of a dozen other national-service proposals; but that is like saying that a stick-figure drawing of one man is much like the stick-figure drawing of another. What is distinctive about the Buckley program in every aspect is choice.

First of all, the program would be national, but not centralized. It would be truly federal, in the sense of having a (small) central coordinating administration but entrusting most of the details, including the initial disbursement of funds, to the several states. This is partly because "When considering a new national program, it clearly makes sense to ask whether we shouldn't jolt ourselves awake from the myth of the spontaneously generated dollar sprouting up in Washington, D.C. . . ." and partly because the states have (or ought to have) a clearer idea of what their own citizens need: "In Florida, perhaps care for the old; in Wyoming, conservation; in Illinois, school tutoring; in the District of Columbia, crime prevention." (By the way, I wonder if the Ramsey Clarks will be appropriately outraged by Mr. Buckley's list of current ventures in voluntarism, which begins predictably with the Peace Corps but winds up, with no change in tone of voice, with the Guardian Angels.)

Young people signing up for National Service would be able to choose among the jobs available in their locality, and perhaps even further afield through a list maintained in the central office. ('Dear Sirs: Where do you go if you are interested in learning how to fight the hoof-and-mouth disease?')" re would also be a certain amount of flexibility in timing, so that if one of the hard cases Mr. Buckley sketches in Chapter One-Isabelle Noyes, let's say, who for family reasons can't afford to take a year off school-wants to serve, she could make up the two thousand hours in four summers, or in evenings during the school term, or even spread out over ten years.

Likewise in the structure of inducements, positive and negative, choice is kept uppermost (with one exception, which I'll come to in a moment). Unlike, say, the bill proposed by Senator Sam Nunn, which would reward National Service veterans by sending $10,000 on their account to the college they go on to attend (or, if they aren't going to college, permitting them to apply the $10,000 to a home mortgage), the Buckley plan would simply grant immunity from the first $10,000 in federal income tax owed, however many years that covered. "There is no reason," Mr. Buckley writes, "to make the reward restrictive"-no reason except that most of the people who come up with national-service plans tend to enjoy prescribing for others.

On the question of negative inducements, Mr. Buckley would make nonparticipants ineligible for federal college loans, and would permit the states to come up with locally appropriate sanctions of their own; but he flatly rejects the proposal by Richard Danzig and Peter Szanton for a 5 per cent surtax on non-participants: "This is a dangerous road to travel, since the power to tax is indeed the power to destroy." But having avoided that trap, he falls into another: he seriously considers denying driver's licenses to 18year-olds who decline to participate. This, says Mr. Buckley, is, "in most cases, the ultimate weapon." It surely is: the biological/chemical/hydrogen bomb. Except for residents of a few large Northern cities, invoking this provision would be tantamount to conscription. I urge Mr. Buckley to think of Isabelle Noyes and Kathy Ellis, and drop this weapon from his arsenal as he argues for his proposal in other fora.

There is much more in this small book: detailed financial and logistical analyses, refutations of counterarguments, lyrical evocations of "a country we achingly long to make as great as the legends insist that the United States is"; but they, like the imperishable account of a plane-spotting episode in World War II, will have to be left for the book itself.

Readers of this journal will not need an extended discussion of Mr. Buckley's style. But I would quote two favorite passages:

A society that strives after the enhancement

of the commonly recognized virtues

must encourage, not discourage, civic distinctions,

always provided there is perpetual

mobility across the tracks. The example

set by the more virtuous citizen is

a force for the good. To suggest that it is

divisive is on the order of frowning on

Eagle Scouts because their mere existence

discourages the mass of Tenderfoots.

I am not conversant with the literature

of clinical psychology, and do not intend

to become so. But I sense intuitively that

while friendship does not necessarily

grow out of experience shared, experience

shared conduces to a bond from

which friendship can grow. I move on to

say that my conviction is that friendship

is strengthened by such experiences as

bring out in us that which ever so lightly

elevates us from the trough of self-concern

and self-devotion.

But while a novel, a biography, a history has done its job if it has enriched the reader's mind and spirit, this book is a polemic, and a polemic seeks to have some effect beyond itself. Libertarians, I'd guess, will find the national-service proposal much too liberal; but liberals-even if pleasantly surprised to see Mr. Buckley use the word "national" favorably other than before the word "anthem" (which, no, by the way, it would not be a grand idea to replace with "America the Beautiful")-will find it too flexible and modest to be of any use.

The idea's natural constituency, then, is among traditionalists, who both feel that sense of gratitude to those who developed and maintained Western civilization, and wish to pass that sense along to another generation. Most of them, I think, would find Mr. Buckley's premise compelling, and many of them will be convinced also of his program's practicality; but they might well, with one eye on the budget spectacle in Washington, be nervous about turning any such project over to our current legislators and administrators. If the day comes when a bill can be passed embodying the essential elements of the Buckley proposal (voluntarism; true federalism; tight restrictions on the mandate of the overseeing bureaucracy), we will know that our beloved country is already starting to recover from its sixty-year bout with galloping statism.