"TO CAESAR SHALT THOU GO."
[To THE EDITO1 OP THE " SPECTATOR."' Sra,—By all means let these extreme conscientious objectors who refuse alternative work under the Home Office scheme go before Caesar, if by Caesar is meant the common-sense of ordinary Noglishmen. As Visiting Magistrate at WIt. prison at Winchester 1 Lave for the last y ear and a half had murk to do with these -- men; at the present moment we have about a hundred in the prison, and I should like with your permission to describe two or three typical interviews I have had with them. One man, before had had time to enter into conversation with him, said : "I not only refuse to fight, but I refuse to help a wounded man." When I asked his reason, he replied "Why! that wounded man might be cured if I helped him to get to hospital; then he would be able to fight again, and so I should be guilty of Riding and abetting war": Another, one of several, refused to make mailbags because they might be used to take letters to the front. A third gave a different reason for his refusal, saying: "I refuse to do anything tinder Government"; and when I asked him whether he thought that policemen and postmen were doing wrong he replied: " 'Tis the voice within me." It seems to me that men who put "the voice within them" before the voice of their country appealing to them in its dire need and who refuse to help her in any shape or form have forfeited all claim for consideration. Only to-day we have had before us a man who has persistently refused to submit to prison discipline, and who justifies his conduct by declaring that he refuses to obey any law which rests upon force as its sanctior. Such a man is an Anarchist, and be is not by any means the only one of those so-called conscientious objectors who while they prate of conecience are all the time apostles of Anarchy. The fact is that while these men, like the rest of us, turn with loathing from war with all its horrors, they also shy at the driU and discipline of the barrack square. They resent discipline in any shape or form, not only when the reason for that discipline is based on what many of them despise—viz., what they regard as the exploded theory of patriotism, for some of them have told me that they are citizens of the world, and that the word " country " has no mean- ing for them—but even on the higher and spiritual ground of ridding the world from the domination of German tyranny and brutality. To let such men, of whom a considerable number are schoolmasters and lecturers, with their glib tongues and peas, loose upon the country in these days of war-weariness and with the awful example of Russia before our eyes would be an act a weakness which would, I feel sure, be condemned by the great majority of sensible Englishmen. They have appealed to Caesar; to Caesar let them go.—I am, Sir, Ac., E. J. TURNER.
Winchester, October 1st.
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