25 MARCH 1938, Page 22

NATIONAL DISSERVICE [To the Editor of THE SPECTATOR.]

SIR,—Our conscriptionists and compulsionists write and talk as if there were no such thing as Sea Power and no British Navy and as if England can be defended by soldiers. They are trying to drag the people of England down to the miserable level of the slave States of Europe with their compulsion, conscription, concentration and labour camps and their arm-and-leg-jerking antics that go with dictatorships and slavery to slavish officials.

Sea Power frees _our youth from the curse of land nations for the best of all national services, preparing themselves for their own job.

Our goose-step-minded compulsionists do not know that war is more than ever a matter of cargoes and that the side which gets the cargoes wins the war quickly and cheaply and probably bloodlessly. Our compulsionists seem to prefer the long and devastating blood-and-mud Continental methods we mistakenly used last time.

We can win wars without armies and by Sea Power alone by capturing enemy cargoes and convoying our own.

Cargo control can beat all the land armies ever conscripted, so we do not need conscription. England's only business with conscripts is to use our Cargo Control to supply all friendly con- scripts and to starve all enemy conscripts. It is high time we turned away from the land with its muddy wars and turned back again to our own clean business, the sea.—Yours faith-