More peaceful times have substituted for the duty of fighting the duty of voting. But even in small communities the latter duty has been often neglected. In Athens the magistrates used to send round the Scythian bowmen, who acted as their police, to scour the streets with a rope coloured with vermilion, and drag towards the Pnyx (the place of assembly), citizens who preferred to lounge or to mind what they called their own business, as if ruling the State was not their business. So in modern Switzerland some cantons have enacted laws fining those who, without reasonable excuse, neglect to vote.[1] This is the more remarkable because the Swiss have a good record in the matter of voting, better, I think, than any other European people. Such a law witnesses not to exceptional negligence but to an exceptionally high standard of duty. In Britain we sometimes bring to the polls at a parliamentary election eighty, or even more than eighty, per cent of our registered electors, which is pretty good when it is remembered that the register may have been made up eleven months earlier, so that many electors are sure to have moved elsewhere. At elections for local authorities a much smaller proportion vote; and I fancy, though I have no figures at hand, that in France, Belgium, and still more in Italy the percentage voting at all sorts of elections is less than in Switzerland or in Britain. The number who vote does not perfectly measure the personal sense of duty among electors, because an efficient party organization may, like the Scythian bowmen, sweep voters who do not care but who can be either driven to the polls or paid to go. Unless it is money that takes the voters there, it is well that they should go; for it helps to form the habit. [1] This example has, I believe, been followed in Belgium.