anarchy and incompetence should be tolerated.  As to allowing that admirable detective agency for the defence of the West End against begging letter writers, the Charity Organization Society to touch the soldier’s home, the very suggestion is an outrage.  The C.O.S., the Poor Law, and the charitable amateur, whether of the patronizing or prying or gushing variety, must be kept as far from the army and its folk as if they were German spies.  The business of our fashionable amateurs is to pay Income Tax and Supertax.  This time they will have to pay through the nose, vigorously wrung for that purpose by the House of Commons; so they had better set their own houses in order and leave the business of the war to be officially and responsibly dealt with and paid for at full standard rates.

Wanted:  Labour Representation in the War Office.

But parliamentary activity is not sufficient.  There must be a more direct contact between representative Labour and the Army, because Parliament can only remedy grievances, and that not before years of delay and agitation elapse.  Even then the grievances are not dealt with on their merits; for under our party system, which is the most abominable engine for the perversion and final destruction of all political conscience ever devized by man, the House of Commons never votes on any question but whether the Government shall remain in office or give the Opposition a turn, no matter what the pretext for the division may be.  Only in such emergencies as the present, when the Government is forced to beg the Labour members to help them to recruit, is there a chance of making reasonable conditions for the soldier.

The Four Inoculations.

It is therefore necessary that the War Office should have working class representatives on all committees and councils which issue notices to the public.  There is at present, it would seem, not a single person in authority there who has the faintest notion of what the immense majority of possible British recruits are thinking about.  The results have been beyond description ludicrous and dangerous.  Every proclamation is urgently worded so as to reassure recruits with L5,000 a year and repel recruits with a pound a week.  On the very day when the popular Lord Kitchener, dropping even the et rex meus of Wolsey, frankly asked the nation for 100,000 men for his army, and when it was a matter of life and death that every encouragement should be held out to working men to enlist, the War Office decided that this was the psychological moment to remind everybody that soldiers on active service often die of typhoid fever, and to press inoculation on the recruits pending the officially longed-for hour when Sir Almroth Wright’s demand for compulsion can be complied with.  I say nothing here about the efficacy of inoculation.  Efficacious or not, Sir Almroth Wright himself bases his demand for compulsion on the ground that it is hopeless to expect the whole