If it be said that a large Army will never
be wanted again— and we sincerely hope that this may be true—it nevertheless remains very sound policy to have a large pool of men to choose from, even if the comparatively small army required for a particular emergency should be all -volunteers. The volunteers would be men worth having, the cream of the cream, instead of people taken at random from an untested mass. Our Labour leaders apparently would like to restore the old disgraceful and hopelessly undemocratic system in which the majority paid the minority to do all the fighting—the system under which men light-heartedly talked of war in the firm belief that, not being soldiers themselves, they would never suffer in their own persons. How those who profess to have evolved a coherent system of political thought can reconcile this with their consciences we have never been able to understand.
Previous page
