ain that real security is
not possible without citizen service, and that the training of every
able-bodied man to be capable of taking part, if need be, in the
defence of his country, is not only good for the country but good for
the man--and would materially assist in the solution of many other
problems, social and economic. But being, as I am, thus
uncompromising, and quite prepared to find myself unpopular, on these
vital questions of national security, and of our Imperial duties and
responsibilities, I can perhaps afford to say, without being suspected
of fawning or of wishing to play the demagogue myself, that in the
matter of domestic reform I am not easy to frighten, and that I have a
very great trust in the essential fair-mindedness and good sense of
the great body of my fellow countrymen with regard to questions which
come within their own direct cognisance. And therefore it was most
reassuring to me at any rate--and I hope it was to you--to observe,
that that large section of the Unionist Party which met at Birmingham
last week, not so much by any resolutions or formal programme--for
there was nothing very novel in these--as by the whole tone and temper
of its proceedings, affirmed in the most emphatic manner the
essentially progressive and democratic character of Unionism. The
greatest danger I hold to the Unionist Party and to the nation is that
the ideals of national strength and Imperial consolidation on the one
hand, and of democratic progress and domestic reform on the other,
should be dissevered, and that people should come to regard as
antagonistic objects which are essentially related and complementary
to one another. The upholders of the Union, the upholders of the
Empire, the upholders of the fundamental institutions of the State,
must not only be, but must be seen and known to be, the strenuous and
constant assailants of those two great related curses of our social
system--irregular employment and unhealthy conditions of life--and of
all the various causes which lead to them.

I cannot stay here to enumerate those causes, but I will mention a
few of them. There is the defective training of children, defective
physical training to begin with, and then the failure to equip them
with any particular and definite form of skill. There is the irregular
way in which new centres of population are allowed to spring up, so
that we go on creating fresh slums as fast as we pull down the old
rookeries. There is