THE NEED OF CONSCRIPTION.
[To THE EDITOR OF THE "SPECTATOR:1 SIE,—Since your courteous insertion, in your issue of the 6th ult., of my letter on the above subject, I have read that appearing in your issue of the 20th ult. addressed to you by the Rev. Robert Reade. In that letter your readers will have seen, for the first time I believe, that an English clergyman who has worked in a poor London parish for ten years has arrived at the conclusion that the best remedy for developing, or rather for restoring, the physical and moral strength of our poorer town-dwellers is the adoption of conscription on the lines of the German system. Mr. Reade, who writes from Germany, ie evidently as well aware as many of us here who have studied the matter in both countries, that conscription has been the true source of German national strength, and national, as also individual, prosperity. Can we not form an association for establishing conscription, and submit the draft-plan for the same to men like Lord Wolseley, Sir William Butler, Mr. Balfour, Mr. Arnold - Forster, and Liberal leaders like Sir H. Campbell-Bannerman and Mr. Asquith ? If clergymen like Mr. Reade, and traders like myself, in contact with most countries of Europe and oversee, have long felt the need of conscription from our different points of view, may we not hope that there are many others who are ready to express, and to follow, the same views? If the leaders of our Churches, as also of our armed forces, and of our widespread commercial and industrial classes, can be approached simultaneously by an Association such as that which I suggest above, and can be induced by it to express publicly the necessity, in their view, of conscription, this country and its political representatives and leaders will, I think, take the first great step towards the adoption of what I have long felt to be the inevitable, and also, let me add, the happy, solution of our present national and social weakness.—I am, Sir, &o.,
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