SIR,—A visit to the conscientious objectors' tribunal at Leeds this
week made clear to me the difficulties which quite sincere men trained only in law find when trying to assess " conscientious objection." The chairman deserved great praise for doing his best to fathom motives and attitudes with which he obviously had no sympathy, but the habits of a life-time were too strong for him.
A judge is faced in the course of his work with law-breakers, and there is usually clear guidance in positive law which tells him what to do with them. But these young men are not law-breakers ; they are people whose position—if they can establish it—is recognised by the law, and what is required of the tribunal is to discover if that position is established. This is a task far more akin to that of the psychologist or the Christian pastor than to that of the lawyer, for it needs sympathetic insight into a situation rather than the application of well-defined rules.
In these matters there are no well-defined rules, and so the lawyer is apt to try to make some. One such makeshift is to relate the value of an appellant's conscientious objection to his connexion with some religious body. The man who can prove his Church membership (this being in three cases out of four what the judicial mind understands by " religion ") tends to be more acceptable, be his views ever so outrageous, than the man whose stand is taken not on religious grounds at all, be his views ever so reasonable. This ought not to be so, but it is quite understandable why it is so. To a lawyer an external thing like Church membership is something that he thinks he can recognise as " evidence," while " loyalty to humanity " strikes him as so much talk. It is rather depressing to think that the only external test which in the case of an appellant on ethical grounds could be made to look like " evidence " is whether later he actually goes to prison for his views. Yet this willingness to go to prison (as experience in the last War showed) can be just as misleading in the assessment of a man's conscience as his membership of a
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