SERVICE AND NATIONAL TRAINING.
(TO THE EDITOR OF THE "SPECTATOR.']
SIR,—Your efforts on behalf of what is badly termed con- scription are well timed, and I rejoice with you at Colonel Weston's victory in Kendal, and that even though in politics
I am a Radical. If not out of place, I should like this oppor- tunity to urge my countrymen to give this question their earnest thought, not so much with the view, so prevalent, of enabling them to shoot down those people who may disagree with them, but solely as a means of discipline, of forming their character, of straightening their bodies, to teach them promptitude and smartness, how to work, and to be able to look every man square in the face without fear and panic such as is served up to us every morning with our daily papers.
I speak with knowledge of what military training has done for other countries. I know the good and the bad side, the arguments advanced on both sides, and the former entirely outweighs the latter. A little over twenty years ago I spent two years in Germany, and on my last visit the enormous industrial development that has taken place in these years did not strike me so much as the all-round improvement in the Germans themselves. They are a nation. Their physique has improved greatly, they walk straighter and infinitely smarter, their eyes are clearer, they drink and smoke less, they are more fit to do their daily work. They themselves are aware of this change, and ascribe it solely to the year's drill and exercise, which is not the drudgery it was to them once—that state has passed ; it is now part and parcel of their industrial life and well-being. There are still "shirkers" among them, a class that is becoming smaller each year. There is no difficulty in telling them; they are as the Germans I knew twenty years ago, and fairly represent one out of every three of the young men in my own country.
Every day brings me in touch with them, socially, in offices, and business takes me to one or two large factories in Edinburgh, and I see the "shirkers," under-sized, pigeon- chested, anaemic youths, dulled eyes, fingers yellow with cigarette-smoking, with no pride in themselves and none for their country. Every day I see in the Cowgate the same loafers standing in the same places, their backs against the
same walls, their one ambition to see who can spit farthest; women too, alas ! dirty, in keeping with the men—to paraphrase Stevenson, butt ends of human beings, almost unrecognizable but still breathing. This applies to all classes—time to loaf, whether it be in Hyde Park, New Bond Street, or Whitechapel. The fault is not wholly theirs. Their highest ambition is to slouch through life, their one concern to "shirk." God help my country ! These women, with no inclination to nurse their own babes, these bottle-fed, weedy, cigarette-smoking youths will be the undoing of it. I am unable to look to my own, the Radical Party, for hope of a system of national training, they are too afraid of losing their " job "; but I can now look to the other, the Conservatives, and in this they will have the whole- hearted support of all that is best and manly in the Labour Party. Let this be their programme: sink Tariff Reform, a whole year's national training, strict hard physical work on land or at sea, with school for those below a certain standard, and they will win. As for our own country, I do not prophesy, for I know that in ten years thereafter, nay five years' time, we shall have regained much of our manhood and be better fit to live our lives, to do justice to our work, and to grapple with other questions of domestic policy and social reform.—I am,
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