To me it seems that submitting to conscription even for civilian service is permitting oneself thus to be branded by the State. It makes the work of the State in preparing for war and in securing the desired impression of unanimity much easier. It seems, therefore, that pacifists should refuse to be thus branded. In the introductory chapter to Kay Boyle’s volume of short stories about occupied Germany, _The Smoking Mountain_, there is an episode which seems to me to emphasize the need of Resistance and of not waiting until it is indeed too late. She tells about a woman, professor of philology in a Hessian university who said of the German experience with Nazism: “It was a gradual process.” When the first _Jews Not Wanted_ signs went up, “there was never any protest made about them, and, after a few months, not only we, but even the Jews who lived in that town, walked past without noticing any more that they were there. Does it seem impossible to you that this should have happened to civilized people anywhere?” The philology professor went on to say that after a while she put up a picture of Hitler in her class-room. After twice refusing to take the oath of allegiance to Hitler, she was persuaded by her students to take it. “They argued that in taking this oath, which so many anti-Nazis had taken before me, _I was committing myself to nothing, and that I could exert more influence as a professor than as an outcast in the town_.” She concluded by saying that she now had a picture of a Jew, Spinoza, where Hitler’s picture used to hang, and added: “Perhaps you will think that I did this ten years too late, and perhaps you are right in thinking this. _Perhaps there was something else we could all of us have done, but we never seemed to find a way to do it, either as individuals or as a group, we never seemed to find a way._” A decision by the pacifist movement in this country to break completely with conscription, to give up the idea that we can “exert more influence” if we conform in some measure, do not resist to the uttermost—this might awaken our countrymen to a realization of the precipice on the edge of which we stand. It might be the making of our movement. The Reconciling Resistance