In the case of the rank and file of our army, a contract for a term of years (with obligations continuing for a further term of years) is entered into, and signed, under the circumstances which have already been considered. We are faced here with a phenomenon which seems strange in an Age which has conceded the right to 'down tools,' even though by so doing a solemn engagement is broken--in an Age which has become very fastidious about hiring agreements of most kinds, very suspicious of anything suggestive of 'servile conditions' or 'forced labour,' and which deprecates the idea of penalising breach of contract, on the part of a workman, even by process in the civil courts. As regards a private soldier in the British army, however, the Age apparently has no such compunctions. His contract has been made under duress. Its obligations last for a long period of years. The pay is below the ordinary market rates. Everything in fact which, in equity, would favour a revision, pleads in favour of the soldier who demands to be released. But let him plead and threaten as he please, he is not released. It is not a case of suing him for damages in the civil courts, but of dealing with him under discipline and mutiny acts, the terms of which are simple and drastic--in {393} peace time imprisonment, in war time death. Without these means of enforcing the 'voluntary' system the British people would not feel themselves safe. This phenomenon seems even stranger, when we remember that a large and influential part of the British people is not only very fastidious as to the terms of all other sorts of hiring agreements, as to rates of pay, and as to the conditions under which such contracts have been entered into--that it is not only most tender in dealing with the breach of such agreements--but that it also regards the object of the agreement for military service with particular suspicion. This section of the British people is anti-militarist on conscientious grounds. One would have thought, therefore, that it might have been more than usually careful to allow the man, who hires himself out for lethal purposes, to have the benefit of second thoughts; or even of third, fourth, and fifth thoughts. For he, too, may develop a conscience when his belly is no longer empty. But no: to do this would endanger the 'voluntary' system. [Sidenote: THE ANTI-MILITARIST CONSCIENCE]