soliciting my custom; some one who had somehow got hold of my name, and
fancied me to be still in purgatory. This person wrote: "If you should
be in need of any extra assistance in the pressure of your Christmas
work, I hope," etc.

How otherwise could one write if addressing a shopkeeper? "The pressure
of your Christmas work"! Nay, I am too sick to laugh.

XIX.

Some one, I see, is lifting up his sweet voice in praise of Conscription.
It is only at long intervals that one reads this kind of thing in our
reviews or newspapers, and I am happy in believing that most English
people are affected by it even as I am, with the sickness of dread and of
disgust. That the thing is impossible in England, who would venture to
say? Every one who can think at all sees how slight are our safeguards
against that barbaric force in man which the privileged races have so
slowly and painfully brought into check. Democracy is full of menace to
all the finer hopes of civilization, and the revival, in not unnatural
companionship with it, of monarchic power based on militarism, makes the
prospect dubious enough. There has but to arise some Lord of Slaughter,
and the nations will be tearing at each other's throats. Let England be
imperilled, and Englishmen will fight; in such extremity there is no
choice. But what a dreary change must come upon our islanders if,
without instant danger, they bend beneath the curse of universal
soldiering! I like to think that they will guard the liberty of their
manhood even beyond the point of prudence.

A lettered German, speaking to me once of his year of military service,
told me that, had it lasted but a month or two longer, he must have
sought release in suicide. I know very well that my own courage would
not have borne me to the end of the twelvemonth; humiliation, resentment,
loathing, would have goaded me to madness. At school we used to be
"drilled" in the playground once a week; I have but to think of it, even
after forty years, and there comes back upon me that tremor of passionate
misery which, at the time, often made me ill. The senseless routine of
mechanic exercise was in itself all but unendurable to me; I hated the
standing in line, the thrusting-out of arms and legs at a signal, the
thud of feet stamping in constrained unison. The loss of individuality
seemed to me sheer disgrace. And when, as often happened, the
drill-sergeant rebuked me for some inefficiency as I sto