There are three main points in respect of each of which a choice has to be made.  They are the motive which induces men to become soldiers, the time devoted to military education, and the nature of the liability to serve in war.  The distinction which strikes the popular imagination is that between voluntary and compulsory service.  But it covers another distinction hardly less important—­that between paid and unpaid soldiers.  The volunteers between 1860 and 1878, or 1880, when pay began to be introduced for attendance in camps, gave their time and their attention with no external inducement whatever.  They had no pay of any kind, and there was no constraint to induce them to join, or, having, joined, to continue in their corps.  The regular soldier, on the other hand, makes a contract with the State.  He agrees in return for his pay, clothes, board and lodging to give his whole time for a specific number of years to the soldier’s life.

The principle of a contract for pay is necessary in the case of a professional force maintained abroad for purposes of imperial police; but it is not possible on that principle to raise or maintain a national army.

The principle of voluntary unpaid service appears to have a deeper moral foundation than that of service by a contract of hiring.  But if the time required is greater than is consistent with the men’s giving a full day’s work to their industrial occupations the unpaid nature of the service cannot be maintained, and the men must be paid for their time.  The merit of the man’s free gift of himself is thereby obscured.

Wherein does that merit consist?  If there is no merit in a man’s making himself a soldier without other reward than that which consists in the education he receives, then the voluntary system has no special value.  But if there is a merit, it must consist in the man’s conferring a benefit upon, or rendering a service to, his country.  In other words, the excellence of the unpaid voluntary system consists in its being an acceptance by those who serve under it of a duty towards the State.  The performance of that duty raises their citizenship to a higher plane.  If that is the case it must be desirable, in the interest both of the State and of its citizens, that every citizen capable of the duty should perform it.  But that is the principle upon which the national system is based.  The national system is therefore an extension of the spirit of the volunteer or unpaid voluntary system.

The terms compulsory service and universal service are neither of them strictly accurate.  There is no means of making every adult male, without exception, a soldier, because not every boy that grows up has the necessary physical qualification.  Nor does the word compulsion give a true picture.  It suggests that, as a rule, men would not accept the duty if they could evade it, which is not the case.  The number of men who have been volunteers since 1860 shows that the duty is widely accepted.  Indeed,