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 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