But there is a thing even stranger than any of these. Considering how jealous the great anti-militarist section of our fellow-countrymen is of anything which places the army in a position to encroach upon, or overawe, the civil power, it seems very remarkable that they should nevertheless have taken a large number of men--whose morals, in their view, were below rather than above the average--should have armed them with rifles and bayonets, and spent large sums of money in making them as efficient as possible for lethal purposes, while refusing firmly to arm _themselves_ with anything but ballot-boxes, or to make themselves fit for any form of self-defence. It seems never to have crossed the minds of the anti-militarist section that those whom they thus regard--if not actually with moral reprehension, at any rate somewhat askance--might perhaps some day discover that there were advantages in being armed, and in having become lethally efficient; that having studied the phenomena of strikes, and having there seen force of various kinds at work--hiring agreements broken, combinations to bring pressure on society successful, rather black things occasionally hushed up and forgiven--soldiers might draw their own conclusions. Having grown tired of pay lower {396} than the market rate, still more tired of moral lectures about the wickedness of their particular trade, and of tiresome old-fashioned phrases about the subordination of the military to the civil power--what if they, like other trades and classes, should begin to consider the propriety of putting pressure on society, since such pressure appears nowadays to be one of the recognised instruments for redress of wrongs? ... Have not professional soldiers the power to put pressure on society in the twentieth century, just as they have done, again and again, in past times in other kingdoms and democracies, where personal freedom was so highly esteemed, that even the freedom to abstain from defending your country was respected by public opinion and the laws of the land? But nonsense! In Germany, France, Russia, Austria, Italy, and other conscript countries armies are hundreds of times stronger than our own, while the soldiers in these cases are hardly paid enough to keep a smoker in pipe-tobacco. And yet they do not think of putting pressure on society, or of anything so horrible. This of course is true; but then, in these instances, the Army is only Society itself passing, as it were, like a may-fly, through a certain stage in its life-history. Army and Society in the conscript countries are one and the same. A man does not think of putting undue pressure upon himself. But in our case the Army and Society are not one and the same. Their relations are those of employer and employed, as they were in Rome long ago; and as between employer and employed, there are always apt to be questions of pay and position.