It is useful in this connection to think a little of Rome with its 'voluntary' or 'mercenary' or {397} 'professional' army--an army underpaid at first, afterwards perhaps somewhat overpaid, when it occurred to its mind to put pressure on society. But Rome in the first century was a very different place from England in the twentieth. Very different indeed! The art and rules of war were considerably less of an expert's business than they are to-day. Two thousand years ago--weapons being still somewhat elementary--gunpowder not yet discovered--no railway trains and tubes, and outer and inner circles, which now are as necessary for feeding great cities as arteries and veins for keeping the human heart going--private citizens, moreover, being not altogether unused to acting with violence in self-defence--it might have taken, perhaps, 100,000 disciplined and well-led reprobates a week or more to hold the six millions of Greater London by the throat. To-day 10,000 could do this with ease between breakfast and dinner-time. Certainly a considerable difference--but somehow not a difference which seems altogether reassuring. Since the days of Oliver Cromwell the confidence of the anti-militarists in the docility of the British Army has never experienced any serious shock. But yet, according to the theories of this particular school, why should our army alone, of all trades and professions, be expected not to place its own class interests before those of the country? [Sidenote: ARMIES AS LIBERATORS] When professional armies make their first entry into practical politics it is almost always in the role of liberators and defenders of justice. An instance might easily occur if one or other set of politicians, in a fit of madness or presumption, were to ask, or order, the British Army to undertake certain {398} operations against a section of their fellow-countrymen, which the soldiers themselves judged to be contrary to justice and their own honour. Something of this kind very nearly came to pass in March 1914. The Curragh incident, as it was called, showed in a flash what a perilous gulf opens, when a professional army is mishandled. Politicians, who have come by degrees to regard the army--not as a national force, or microcosm of the people, but as an instrument which electoral success has placed temporarily in their hands, and which may therefore be used legitimately for forwarding their own party ends--have ever been liable to blunder in this direction. Whatever may have been the merits of the Curragh case, the part which the British Army was asked and expected to play on that occasion, was one which no democratic Government would have dared to order a conscript army to undertake, until it had been ascertained, beyond any possibility of doubt, that the country as a whole believed extreme measures to be necessary for the national safety.