No one who thinks seriously of the consequences of such a policy can doubt that, if it could be carried out, it would effect a greater transference of real power to the democracy than any Reform Bill. The objection which most reformers instinctively feel to any proposal to increase military establishments rests, I fancy, at bottom on their sense that such establishments are organized by a class to protect its narrow class interests. So it is that British troops are found useful to British governments not only in Egypt and South Africa but also at Featherstone and Bethesda. With such a military organisation as I have suggested this menace would disappear. Nay, the weights would be transferred to the other scale. Nothing, I conceive, is so likely to put a little of the fear of God into the hearts of our Liberal and Conservative rulers as the knowledge that they have to deal with a democratic army and a democracy trained in arms. This, I know, will sound shockingly heterodox to idealistic persons who are fond of repeating (in defiance of universal human experience) the foolish maxim of John Bright, the Quaker apologist for plutocratic Anarchism, that “force is no remedy,” and the equally unhistorical statement that “violence always injures the cause of those who use it.” But practical men pay little attention to such talk, knowing that nothing helps a strike so much as a little timely rioting and that the most important reforms of the late century were only carried when it was known that the mob of the great towns was “up.” As a matter of fact, force is the _only_ remedy. If Socialism comes about, as I think it probably will in this country, in the constitutional Fabian way, this will only mean that the Socialists will themselves have captured the control of the army and the police and will then use them against the possessing classes, forcing them to disgorge at the bayonet’s point. And, if it does not superficially wear this aspect, that will merely be because the latter, seeing how invincible is the physical force arrayed against them, may very likely surrender position after position at discretion until they find that they have no longer anything to defend.[5]