ministry or cabinet
which but dares, dares to trust this people's resolution, will find
that this enthusiasm is not that of men overwrought with war-fever, but
the deep-seated purpose of a people strong to defend the heritage of
its fathers, and not to swerve from the path which fate itself has
marked out for it amongst the empires of the earth. This, I maintain,
is the verdict of history upon the matter.

There is a second prominent argument against compulsory service, an
argument drawn by analogy from the circumstances of other nations. Men
point to Rennes, to the petty tyrannies of military upstarts over
civilians in Germany, and cry, "Behold what awaits you from
conscription!" Such arguments have precisely the same value as the
arguments against Parliamentary Reform fifty years ago, based on the
terror of Jacobinism. We might as well condemn all free institutions
because of Tammany Hall, as condemn compulsory service because of its
abuses in other countries. And an appeal to the Pretorians of Rome or
to the Janizzaries of the Ottoman empire would be as relevant as an
appeal for warning to the major-generals of Oliver Cromwell. Nor is
there any fixed and necessary hostility between militarism and art,
between militarism and culture, as the Athens of Plato and of
Sophocles, a military State, attests.

All institutions are transfigured by the ideal which calls them into
being. And this ideal of Imperial Britain--to bring to the peoples of
the earth beneath her sway the larger freedom and the higher
justice--the world has known none fairer, none more exalted, since that
for which Godfrey and Richard fought, for which Barbarossa and St.
Louis died. There is nothing in our annals which warrants evil presage
from the spread of militarism, nothing which precludes the hope, the
just confidence that our very blood and the ineffaceable character of
our race will save us from any mischief that militarism may have
brought to others, and that in the future another chivalry may arise
which shall be to other armies and other systems what the Imperial
Parliament is to the parliaments of the world--a paragon and an example.

With us the decision rests. If we should decide wrongly--it is not the
loss of prestige, it is not the narrowed bounds we have to fear, it is
the judgment of the dead, the despair of the living, of the
inarticulate myriads who have trusted to us, it is the arraigning eyes
of the unborn. Who can confr