army to submit to it voluntarily.  That being so, it seems to me that when men are hesitating on the threshold of the recruiting station, only a German spy or our War Office (always worth ten thousand men to our enemies) would seize that moment to catch the nervous postulant by the sleeve and say, “Have you thought of the danger of dysentery?” The fact that the working class forced the Government, very much against its doctor-ridden will, to abolish compulsory vaccination, shews the extent to which its households loathe and dread these vaccines (so called, but totally unconnected with cows or Jenner) which, as they are continually reminded by energetic anti-inoculation propagandists in largely circulated journals and pamphlets, not to mention ghastly photographs of disfigured children, sometimes produce worse effects than the diseases they are supposed to prevent.  Indifferent or careless recruits are easily induced to submit to inoculation by little privileges during the ensuing indisposition or by small money bribes; and careful ones are proselytized by Sir Almroth’s statistics; but on the whole both inoculation and amateur medical statistics are regarded with suspicion by the poor; and the fact that revaccination is compulsory in the regular army, and that the moral pressure applied to secure both typhoid inoculation and vaccination both in the regular army and the Territorials is such as only a few stalwarts are able to resist, is deeply resented.  At present the inoculation mania has reached the pitch of proposing no less than four separate inoculations:  revaccination, typhoid, cholera, and—­Sir Almroth’s last staggerer—­inoculation against wounds!  When the War Office and its medical advisers have been successfully inoculated against political lunacy, it will be time enough to discuss such extravagances.  Meanwhile, the sooner the War Office issues a proclamation that no recruit will be either compelled or importuned to submit to any sort of inoculation whatever against his will, the better for the recruiting, and the worse for the enemy.

The War Office Bait of Starvation.

But this blunder was a joke compared to the next exploit of the War Office.  It suddenly began to placard the country with frantic assurances to its five-thousand-a-year friends that they would be “discharged with all possible speed THE MINUTE THE WAR IS OVER.”  Only considerations of space restrained them, I presume, from adding “LAWN TENNIS, SHOOTING, AND ALL THE DELIGHTS OF FASHIONABLE LIFE CAN BE RESUMED IMMEDIATELY ON THE FIRING OF THE LAST SHOT.”  Now what does this mean to the wage worker?  Simply that the moment he is no longer wanted in the trenches he will be flung back into the labour market to sink or swim without an hour’s respite.  If we had had a Labour representative or two to help in drawing up these silly placards—­I am almost tempted to say if we had had any human being of any class with half the brains of a rabbit there—­the placards would have contained a solemn promise that no single man should be discharged at the conclusion of the war, save at his own request, until a job had been found for him in civil life.  I ask the heavens, with a shudder, do these class-blinded people in authority really intend to take a million men out of their employment; turn them into soldiers; and then at one blow hurl them back, utterly unprovided for, into the streets?