on, and to the permanently solid and hard foundations of his higher life.  To coal and iron mines, to freight trains, to fishing fleets in December, to dish-washing, clothes-washing, and window-washing, to road-building and tunnel-making, to foundries and stoke-holes, and to the frames of skyscrapers, would our gilded youths be drafted off, according to their choice, to get the childishness knocked out of them, and to come back into society with healthier sympathies and soberer ideas.”

Here, indeed, is a vision more tempting than ever conscription was.  To be sure, it is not new, for Ruskin had a glimpse of it, and that was why he induced the Oxford undergraduates to vary their comfortable Greek studies and games at ball with a little honest work upon the Hinksey road.  But the vision is irresistible.  There cannot be the smallest doubt it will be realised, and when the young dukes, landed proprietors, financiers, motorists, officers in the Guards, barristers, and curates are marched off in gangs to their apportioned labour in the stoke-holes, coal-mines, and December fishing fleets, how the workmen will laugh, how exult!

Nor let it be supposed that the conscription would subject even the most luxurious conscripts to any unendurable hardship.  So hateful is idleness to man that the toil of the poor is continually being adopted by the rich as sport.  To climb a mountain was once the irksome duty of the shepherd and wandering hawker; now it is the privilege of wealth to hang by the finger-nails over an abyss.  Once it was the penalty of slaves to pull the galleys; now it is only the well-to-do who labour day by day at the purposeless oar, and rack their bodies with a toil that brings home neither fish nor merchandise.  Once it fell to the thin bowman and despised butcher to provide the table with flesh and fowl; now, at enormous expense, the rich man plays the poulterer for himself, and statesmen seek the strenuous life in the slaughter of a scarcely edible rhinoceros.  Let the conscripts of comfort take heart.  They will run more risks in the galleries of the mines than on the mountain precipice, and one night’s trawl upon the Dogger Bank would provide more weight of fish than if they whipped the Tay from spring to winter.

Under this great conscription, a New Model would, indeed, be initiated, as far superior to the conscript armies as Cromwell’s Ironsides were to the mercenaries of their time.  The whole nation from prince to beggar would by this means be transformed, labour would cease to be despised or riches to be worshipped, the reproach of effeminacy would be removed, the horrors of peace mitigated, and the moral equivalent of war discovered.  For the first time a true comradeship between class and class would arise, for, as Goethe said, work makes the comrade, and democracy might have a chance of becoming a reality instead of a party phrase.  After three years’ service down the sewers or at the smelting works, our men of leisure