urselves to solve, unless we are to be an
unimportant province of the world, a mere administrative area inhabited
by a quite undistinguished people.

XVII.

But there are other methods of devotion to the national being possible
to us through collective action, and I was moved to imagine one, having
once received a letter from a bloodthirsty correspondent--one of that
rather numerous class whose minds are always loaded with ball cartridge,
whose fingers are always on the trigger, and who are always calling
on the authorities not to hesitate to shoot. He wrote to me during a
railway strike, advocating military conscription in order that
railway men who went out on strike could be called up by the military
authorities, as the French railway strikers were, and who were subject
to martial law if they disobeyed. I do not think with those who believe
the venerable remedy of blood-letting is the best cure for social
maladies; and I would have thought no more about that stern
disciplinarian, but my mind went playing about the idea of conscription,
and there came to me some thoughts which I wish to put on record in the
hope that our people in some future, when the social order will create
public spirit and the passion for the State more plentifully than it
does today, may recur to the idea and apply it. Nearly every State in
the world demands from youth a couple of years' service in the army.
There they are trained to defend their country--even, if necessary,
to slay their own countrymen. There is much that is abhorrent to the
imagination in the idea of war, and I am altogether with that noble
body of men who are trying, by means of arbitration treaties, to
solve national differences by reason rather than by force. But we
all recognize something noble in the spirit of the nation where the
community agrees that every man shall give up some years of his life to
the State for the preservation of the State, and may be called upon to
surrender life absolutely in that service. While the manhood of a race
does this on the whole with cheerfulness, there must be something of
high character in the manhood of that nation. A certain gravity attaches
to national decisions which are made, as it were, upon the slopes of
death, because none are exempt from service, and there is no delirious
mob ready to yell for a war in which it does not run the risk of having
its own dirty skin perforated by bullets. In Ireland we have never had