In the past England’s volunteer army had been maintained by a recruiting system which produced, on the average, about thirty-five thousand new men a year. They did not come easily, even in halcyon peace times, and the gaily-caparisoned recruiting-sergeant in Trafalgar Square, who would buttonhole a hundred likely "Tommies" in a day, earned well his fee if he succeeded in inducing ten of them to "take the shilling." It remained to be seen if "the present grave National Emergency" would find dormant in Britain military talent and inclination hitherto undreamt of. In the opening flush of the excitement and enthusiasm which the war engendered, Lord Kitchener’s hopes were satisfactorily realized. Recruiting-offices in numerous districts were literally stormed. The response from the middle, "upper-middle" and upper classes was particularly buoyant. Duke, peer, aristocrat, nobleman, "nut," banker, lawyer, doctor, merchant, teacher and clerk came forward splendidly. But artisan, docker and miner lagged. The lower class revealed an inclination to continue to throng the public-houses rather than the recruiting-offices. It seemed evident at the outset that it was not they who were bent on saving England. They gave disquieting indication that their sort of patriotism was primarily individual self-preservation, that for them, love of country began at home. A waking-up process in their unenlightened ranks was destined to come to pass, thanks mainly to "separation allowances" for missus and the kids, but it was never to attain the dimensions of a rousing which extorted from their atrophied intelligence even an approximate appreciation of their obligations or their country’s peril. Britain’s war is being waged, as it will be won--speaking broadly--by the patriotism and blood of the excoriated upper ten thousand. The struggle had been in progress for more than a year, at a cost of nearly five hundred thousand British casualties, when it was still necessary for Lloyd-George to remind working-class England, in as unqualified language as a politician dare speak to the nation’s electoral masters, that it was not doing its full duty.