But if we want to get to the true basis of the principle against which the conscientious objector is contending (a principle which cannot logically be separated from any form of government built up on force) we must not colour our view with the rightness or wrongness (in our own estimation) of the war in which we are engaged, since we obscure thereby that quality of allegiance which is claimed by the State. The State’s claim--latent in peace-time and liable to emerge whenever war or crisis shall arise--is not that its citizens should fight for it when the cause is just and right, but that they should fight for it in any case, if it orders them. That claim, made by every State with more or less urgency, we are now invited to view with horror operating at its full efficiency throughout a Prussianised Germany. Thus exalted and perfected, it has become, we are told, a danger to the world; in such a State the moral conscience of the individual has become atrophied by subordination, and he is not free to choose between right and wrong. But war only brings home to us the logic of a situation which in peace-time we have burked; and now, in order to combat the evil, in its fullest manifestation, men in this country are asked to give their souls into similar keeping--to accept, that is to say, the over-riding of individual conscience by the law of State-necessity. It is a claim which any State, founded on force, is bound eventually to make; it is a claim which anyone who believes force to be evil is bound to repudiate. The follower of the one school draws his ethics from the established rules of the body politic to which he belongs; the follower of the other draws them, it may be, from the personal example and teaching of One whom the body politic of his day regarded as a criminal, and put to death; of One whose followers, it may be said further, were persecuted in the early centuries of the Christian era, not because of their opinions, but because, in practice, they were a danger to the State. The Roman mind was very logical; and only when Christianity had become absorbed in the State system and had accepted the view that physical force and persecution were good social remedies, only then did Christianity cease to be an apparent danger and a fit subject for persecution.