cent. of the recruits "out of work." I should
have put the percentage still higher. But when you next see a full
company of a hundred soldiers, and reflect that ninety of them have been
persuaded to kill and die for you simply through fear of starvation
under our country's social system--I say, whether you seek peace or
admire war, the thought is horrible; it is hardly to be endured.

To wipe out this hideous shame, to put ourselves all in one boat, and,
if war is licensed murder, at all events to share the murder that we
license, and not to starve the poor into criminals for our own relief,
perhaps Conscription would not be too high a price to pay. Other
advantages are more obvious--the physical advantage of two years'
regular food and healthy air and exercise for rich and poor alike, the
social advantage of the mixture of all classes in the ranks, the moral
advantage of giving the effeminate sons of luxury a stern and bitter
time. For all this we would willingly pay a very heavy price. I would
pay almost any price.

But should we pay the price of compulsion? That is the only price that
makes me hesitate. I used to cherish a frail belief in discipline and
obedience to authority and the State. My belief in discipline is still
alive--discipline in the sense of entire mutual confidence between
comrades fighting for the same cause; but I have come to regard
obedience to external authority as one of the most dangerous virtues. I
doubt if any possible advantage could balance an increase of that
danger; and every form of military life is almost certain to increase
it. To me the chief peril of our time is the growing power of the State,
its growing interference in personal opinion and personal life, the
intrusion of an inhuman being called an expert or official into the most
intimate, inexplicable, and changing affairs of our lives and souls, and
the arrogant social legislation of a secret and self-appointed Cabal or
Cabinet, which refuses even to consult the wishes of that half of the
population which social restrictions touch most nearly. If general
military service would tend to increase respect and obedience to
external authority of this kind, it might be too big a price to pay for
all its other advantages. And I do think it would tend to increase that
abhorrent virtue of indiscriminate obedience. Put a man in uniform, and
ten to one he will shoot his mother, if you order him. Yet the shame of
our present enlistment by hu