I believe, further, that this restriction applies with special force to the Army and Navy and to the police. The state is justified, in the interest of the community, in placing an absolute embargo upon the political activities of all their members. For unless this liberty is restrained, their allegiance becomes the possession of a party and they cannot give that neutral service which is the basic principle of their existence. Anyone who remembers the attempted use of the Army in 1913-14 for Ulster, the habits of the French Army during the Dreyfus period, the peculiar relations between the German Army and the Monarchy, will easily see how vital is this abstinence. There are American cities where the relations between big business and the police mean that the authority of the latter is certain to be abused in an industrial dispute. Nothing, perhaps, illustrates more nicely the delicacy of this problem than the activities of Sir Henry Wilson[36] during the years from 1912. He was, it appears, prepared to go from a meeting of the Committee of Imperial Defence to a discussion of its plans with the leaders of the Conservative opposition; and to advise with them upon the best way of rendering some of those plans nugatory. Even during the Great War he did not cease from the cultivation of political intimacies of this kind. Nor must we forget that Sir John French, at the time the Commander-in-Chief of the British Armies in France, was ready to go behind the back of the Government he served to offer secret information to the military correspondent of a Conservative newspaper; and the result of that betrayal of confidence was the breakdown of the first Asquith Government in 1915. The proper conduct of political life is clearly impossible, if the armed forces of the state are free to take a definite part in its formation. No one would endorse the Russian principle that a soldier’s quality is a function of his agreement with the political faith of the government; yet once relations are established between the politician and the Army a movement towards this principle is inevitable. Sooner or later, in this condition, the Army, like the Praetorian guard, determines the personality of the state. When that occurs, no one can hope for the enjoyment of political freedom. I turn, in the third place, to the view that industries which have a vital impact on social life can restrain the right to strike in those engaged in them. That is a peculiarly favoured doctrine at the present time; some writers even use the analogy of the Army and Navy, and argue that the principles applicable to these have a legitimate extension to this field. Others, the eminent French jurist M. Duguit, for example, take a similar view, but upon other grounds. They argue that vital public service, transport, for instance, or electricity supply, derive their whole meaning from continuity; to allow an interruption of them is, therefore, to destroy the whole law of their being.