nature of the liability to
serve in war. The distinction which strikes the popular imagination is
that between voluntary and compulsory service. But it covers another
distinction hardly less important--that between paid and unpaid
soldiers. The volunteers between 1860 and 1878, or 1880, when pay began
to be introduced for attendance in camps, gave their time and their
attention with no external inducement whatever. They had no pay of any
kind, and there was no constraint to induce them to join, or, having,
joined, to continue in their corps. The regular soldier, on the other
hand, makes a contract with the State. He agrees in return for his pay,
clothes, board and lodging to give his whole time for a specific number
of years to the soldier's life.

The principle of a contract for pay is necessary in the case of a
professional force maintained abroad for purposes of imperial police;
but it is not possible on that principle to raise or maintain a national
army.

The principle of voluntary unpaid service appears to have a deeper moral
foundation than that of service by a contract of hiring. But if the time
required is greater than is consistent with the men's giving a full
day's work to their industrial occupations the unpaid nature of the
service cannot be maintained, and the men must be paid for their time.
The merit of the man's free gift of himself is thereby obscured.

Wherein does that merit consist? If there is no merit in a man's making
himself a soldier without other reward than that which consists in the
education he receives, then the voluntary system has no special value.
But if there is a merit, it must consist in the man's conferring a
benefit upon, or rendering a service to, his country. In other words,
the excellence of the unpaid voluntary system consists in its being an
acceptance by those who serve under it of a duty towards the State. The
performance of that duty raises their citizenship to a higher plane. If
that is the case it must be desirable, in the interest both of the State
and of its citizens, that every citizen capable of the duty should
perform it. But that is the principle upon which the national system is
based. The national system is therefore an extension of the spirit of
the volunteer or unpaid voluntary system.

The terms compulsory service and universal service are neither of them
strictly accurate. There is no means of making every adult male, without
exception, a soldier, because