But talk about compulsion and the voluntary principle! What strikes the observer most about such a scene as this is certainly not anything which can be truly termed 'voluntary.' If one chooses to put things into ugly words--which is sometimes useful, in order to give a shock to good people who are tending towards self-righteousness in their worship of phrases--this is the compulsion of hunger and {384} misery. It might even be contended that it was not only compulsion, but a mean, sniggling kind of compulsion, taking advantage of a starving man. The law is very chary of enforcing promises made under duress. If a man dying of thirst signs his birthright away, or binds himself in service for a term of years, in exchange for a glass of water, the ink and paper have no validity. But the recruit is firmly bound. He has made a contract to give his labour, and to risk his life for a long period of years, at a wage which is certainly below the market rate; and he is held to it. Things much more 'voluntary' than this have been dubbed 'slavery,' and denounced as 'tainted with servile conditions.' And the loudest denunciators have been precisely those anti-militarists, who uphold our 'voluntary' system with the hottest fervour, while reprobating 'compulsion' with the utmost horror. [Sidenote: MORAL AND ECONOMIC ASPECTS] We have heard much caustic abuse of the National Service League. It has been accused of talking 'the cant of compulsion'; by which has been meant that certain of its members have put in the forefront of their argument the moral and physical advantages which they imagine universal military training would confer upon the nation. Some may possibly have gone too far, and lost sight of the need of the nation, in their enthusiasm for the improvement of the individual. But if occasionally their arguments assume the form of cant, can their lapse be compared with the cant which tells the world smugly that the British Army is recruited on the voluntary principle? The 'economic argument,' as it is called, is another example. The country would be faced with {385} ruin, we are told, if every able-bodied man had to give 'two of the best years of his life,'[1] and a week or two out of each of the ensuing seven, to 'unproductive' labour. Sums have been worked out the to hundreds of millions sterling, with the object of showing that the national loss, during a single generation, would make the national debt appear insignificant. How could Britain maintain her industrial pre-eminence weighted with such a handicap? One answer is that Britain, buoyed up though she has been by her voluntary system, has not lately been outstripping those of her competitors who carried this very handicap which it is now proposed that she should carry; that she has not even been maintaining her relative position in the industrial world in comparison, for example, with Germany.