fle,' says ex-President Steyn.... As
a means of developing the physical efficiency of whole
nations, of increasing their patriotic cohesion, of implanting in
individuals the sense of political reality and responsibility, no
substitute for manhood training has yet been discovered."

This kind of argument implies despair of perpetual, or even of
long-continued, peace. It is true that those who advocate a national
training of all our manhood for war generally urge upon us that it is
the best security for peace. In the same way, peaceful Anarchists might
plead that they maintained several enormous bomb-factories in order to
impress upon rulers the advantages of freedom. But if peace were the
real and only object of Conscription, and if Conscription precluded the
probability of war, military training, after some years, would almost
certainly decline, and its supposed advantages would be lost. When you
breed game-cocks, they will fight; but if you forbid cock-fighting, the
breed will decline. You cannot have training for war without the
expectation of war. For many years I was a strong advocate of national
service, even though I knew it would never be adopted in this country
until we had seen the realities of war in our very midst, and had sat in
morning trains to the City stopped by the enemy's batteries outside
Liverpool Street and London Bridge. I also foresaw the extreme
difficulty of enforcing military training upon Quakers, the Salvation
Army, the Peace Society, and many Nonconformists and Rationalists.
Nevertheless, twenty-five years ago I advocated Conscription in a
carefully-reasoned article that appeared in Mr. Stead's _Pall Mall
Gazette_. It was received with a howl of rage and derision by both
parties in the State, and by all newspapers that noticed it at all. It
is significant--perhaps terribly significant--that it would not be
received with derision now, but that nearly the whole of one party and
the great majority of newspapers would welcome it only too gladly.

It seemed to me at that time--and it seems to me still--one of the most
horrible things in modern British life that we bribe the unemployed,
that we compel them by fear of starvation, to do our killing and dying
for us. I have passed more men into the army, probably, than any
recruiting sergeant, and I have never known a man who wished to recruit
unless he was unemployed. The Recruiting Report issued by the War Office
for 1911 shows ninety per