I repeat that I am opposed to conscription, particularly to a conscription that picks and chooses, and does not demand capital as freely as it demands life; equally am I opposed to the action of the young and unattached men who shrink from assuming their proper responsibilities. That they would have held back if the conditions of their life, whether favourable or unfavourable, had been the true conditions of an enlightened citizenship, I sincerely doubt, that they should have been forced to undertake as a duty what they should have embraced as a privilege is matter for regret. Happily they will not go unrewarded, they will see their errors, and they will come back to a country they have helped to save with the keenest determination to make it worth living in as well as worth fighting for.
"Why is it," wrote an editor, criticising a view of women that I had put forward, "why is it that woman is actually a war lover at heart, an inciter to and encourager of war? Can you explain why, while some women condemn fighting, the great majority do not shrink from it, and even regard the fighting man as the proper object of their admiration?" It was a challenge, that I will answer to the best of my ability.
In the first place, I must admit that the statement is true about countless women. Only yesterday I had a letter from a friend to whom I had written my sympathy; her only son was killed in the British advance. "I need no more consolation," she wrote. "Harry's colonel has sent me a letter telling me of my poor boy's bravery. I am proud to think that he has lived up to our tradition--ours has always been a fighting family, you know."
I would not criticise a bereaved mother; I can never forget that my eldest son has been in the fighting line, that my other boy gave up Cambridge for the aviation school, and is now flying in France, that my son-in-law is a soldier, and that of many friends and a few relatives only the memory remains. But I feel, from the bottom of my heart, that the death and glory idea is wrong; that the attraction of medals, ribbons, stars, orders, titles and uniforms and brass buttons is false, and that an ever-increasing number of women are conscious of the truth, not only here but in France, Germany, Austria, Russia and Italy.