In any case, I cannot hide my thoughts merely because they may meet no response, for after all there is not in all the world a single great belief that was not once the unregarded possession of a single mind.
While I am firmly opposed to conscription in any form that does not embrace national wealth and resources as well as men, or that singles out one class of men to the exclusion of others, while I believe that, even subject to this view of national obligation, conscription should be treated as a war measure and blotted out of the statute book in the month that sees the restoration of peace, I am not writing to protest or to complain. We are told that every cloud has its silver lining, and when the Government decided to demand the services of those unmarried men who, far more by reason of apathy than cowardice, had remained to be taken, I could not help thinking that much good might come of it. Against the hideous doctrine that the end justifies the means we may set the equally old saying that necessity knows no law, and against the compulsory making of soldiers which is an evil, I set the waking of the national consciousness, and that is a gain.
For centuries England led the vanguard of the workers for freedom. Against the will of the people the power of the great barons and of their Kings bent and broke. There were generations in which the people as a people were articulate, they stood up for their rights and privileges and were a force that few dared defy. The discovery of steam, the growth of factories, the increase of population and the struggle for life combined to make a large section of the working classes helpless. The hideous poverty and ugliness of life in the great centres of wealth drove men, and women too, to shut out the ugliness of their lives with the aid of brief spells of dissipation. Strong drink became alike a source of revenue to the country, a source of "honours"--generally paid for in hard cash--to the prosperous brewer and distiller, and the source of brief forgetfulness, misery, disease, crime and savage punishment to those who sought its dangerous solace. National expenditure and party funds alike clamoured for the maintenance of the evil, and those who are most concerned with what is euphemistically called "keeping the working classes in their places" turned a deaf ear to schemes that sought to make the places of leisure for the worker more attractive and less dangerous. Pure Beer Bills and legislation to restrict the sale of spirits to such spirit as is matured, met with no effective support. Give the worker the nineteenth and twentieth century substitutes for his old time _panem et circenses_ and he would continue until strength failed him to sow that others might reap and to earn the opprobrium and contempt of those he enriched.