If there is not to emerge from this community of suffering some community of fellowship and gladness, some sweeping out of old rancours from our hearts and of prejudices from our brains, and a resolve to fight the contests of the future with a greater generosity—then Peace will be a sorry festival. There is so much work to be done, so great a fight for the nation’s health, ahead. It is time the decks were cleared of lumber! III—THE NATION AND TRAINING We have adopted Compulsion, become a militarist Power! Melancholy consummation; but for the period of the war it was always, I think, a foregone conclusion. What is to happen after? How is national security to be guaranteed without permanent surrender to militarism? Assuming that attention will be paid to retaining due command at sea and in the air, what further will be necessary to fit us for our part in a League for Peace if it comes, or, if it does not come, to make us safe? There will here be put forward in roughest outline a notion—long in the writer’s mind, but for which there has seemed hitherto little chance of serious consideration—with the plea that there is really no alternative solution commensurate with the need for being thoroughly prepared, no other adequate way, in fact, out of a dilemma, short of retaining a measure of Continental militarism, repugnant to our traditions, and ruinously costly to a people in our position. Put with the utmost brevity it is this: That all boys between the ages of fourteen and eighteen, not then at school, shall pass four months yearly in camps, which shall give them continuation schooling so far as practicable, technical education in the craft, trade, or occupation for which the boy is most suited or intends to adopt, together with training in all the essentials of a soldier’s life. At the close of their fourth training the boys should be affiliated to Territorial regiments, and pass at once to one definite period of military service, from three to six months, as may be necessary to convert them into potential soldiers; and that, from that point on, we should rely, as hitherto, on purely voluntary service. From such a nucleus a really efficient Territorial force of at least a million could probably be enrolled, and the skeleton of a much larger force kept in being. The scheme is admittedly heroic, but it could be as gingerly introduced as seemed good to more practical men than is this writer.