A NEW WAY OF LIFE.
rTo TRU EDITOR OF T5 " SPROTATOR."1 Sin,—It is obvious that you cannot review a' book which is a reprint of articles which have appeared in the Spectator. But a correspondent may perhaps draw attention to the series of papers collected together under the title of A New Way of We, which was published in 1909. In this book you told the nation that it must get ready, not only by making military preparations, but by altering its complacent attitude of mind. It must no longer go about, like Carlyle's Anglo-Saxon, " in pot-bellied equanimity." You warned us that "we must give up the pleasant pretence that nobody could really be so wicked, so hard-hearted, so unkind as to mean us any harm, or to desire to bully us,—to knock on the head, in fact, so beneficent and kindly and 'much-respected' a middle-aged gentle- man as John Bull, . . . Next, and most important of all, we must strain every nerve, not merely to provide the material means of defence, though these of course are essential, but also to brace the nation as a whole for the great and patriotic struggle to which in all human probability it will be exposed in the course of the next ton or fifteen years, if not before. To our mind, one of the best ways of doing this is to train the nation as a whole to the use of arms, and to call no citizen capable unless he is able to use his rifle in active co-operation with his fellows, and under an appropriate organization and discipline, in the defence of his country. . . Again, universal training gives us a reservoir from which, in the event of any groat Imperial catastrophe, we can draw volunteers for ovoraea service."
In advocating the various benefits which would flow from universal service you specially mention the good results to be obtained by the fusion of classes in the common training. Have we not already seen this at work P In the chapter on compulsory training you deal with the argument, brought forward in an Army debate in the House of Commons, that if we have s. Navy strong enough we have no need for a military force in these islands. Our Navy has proved stronger than all belief, but our dire need for men, and more men, could not be greater. Indeed, time has proved true all the warnings you gave, especially when you told us not to view the world as we should like it to be, but as it really is— "the world, of blood and iron, controlled by men who are not humanitarians and philanthropists, but persons intensely human on the other side of man's nature, persons who do not take what they would call a Sunday-school view of the world, but rather the view that man is still a wild beast, that the race is to the strong and not to the well-intentioned, that victory belongs to the big battalions, not to those who say that they envy no man any- thing, ani who cannot understand why nations should hate or be jealous of each other. . . A community will not be saved as a community by the sanctity of its inhabitants. In a political sense it is perfectly true to say that a nation may be ruined by its virtues quite as much as by its vices, or, rather, that a virtuous community which neglects certain political duties may easily fall before a nation far less spiritual, far less moral, which observes those political duties."
There seems, too, every prospect that your prophecy will prove true when you say; "We are convinced that the majority of the British people do not ' bear a base mind,' and they realize that no man is too good to serve and defend his native land. Therefore we have every confidence that if the appeal is made to them plainly and directly they will respond."—I am, Sir, &o., Z.
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