If 'National Service,' or 'Conscription,' has actually become necessary already, or may conceivably become so before long, it seems worth while to glance at some of the considerations which have been urged in favour of this system in the past, and also to examine some of the causes and conditions which have hitherto led public opinion in the United Kingdom, as well as in several of the Dominions, to regard the principle of compulsion with hostility and distrust. The true nature of what we call the 'Voluntary System,' and the reasons which have induced a large section of our fellow-countrymen to regard it as one of our most sacred institutions, are worth looking into, now that circumstances may force us to abandon it in the near future. Beyond the question, whether the system of recruiting, which has been employed during the present war, can correctly be described as 'voluntary,' there is the further question, whether the system, which is in use at ordinary times, and which produces some 35,000 men per annum, can be so described. Lord Roberts always maintained that it could not, and that its true title was 'the Conscription of Hunger.' {383} [Sidenote: NORMAL RECRUITING METHODS] Any one who has watched the recruiting-sergeant at work, on a raw cold day of winter or early spring, will be inclined to agree with Lord Roberts. A fine, good-humoured, well-fed, well-set-up fellow, in a handsome uniform, with rows of medals which light up the mean and dingy street, lays himself alongside some half-starved poor devil, down in his luck, with not a rag to his back that the north wind doesn't blow through. The appetites and vanities of the latter are all of them morbidly alert--hunger, thirst, the desire for warmth, and to cut a smart figure in the world. The astute sergeant, though no professor of psychology, understands the case thoroughly, as he marks down his man. He greets him heartily with a 'good day' that sends a glow through him, even before the drink at the Goat and Compasses, or Green Dragon has been tossed off, and the King's shilling accepted. Not that there is any need for pity or regret. These young men with empty bellies, and no very obvious way of filling them, except by violence--these lads with gloom at their hearts, in many cases with a burden of shame weighing on them at having come into such a forlorn pass--in nine cases out of ten enlistment saves them; perhaps in more even than that.