It was not long after the Bristol Trade Union Congress defied the Government to establish Conscription that Vernon Hartshorn, the Socialist miners’ leader, declaimed in the _Christian Commonwealth_ that "a golden opportunity for Labor" had arrived, asked "whether trade-unions shall now not be successfully recognized as the controlling authority in a new industrial democracy," and set up "the irresistible claim of Labor to control its own destinies and those of the country." The Bristol and Hartshorn manifestoes were followed by the most extraordinary outburst of all--the formal declaration on the official premises of the British House of Commons by J. H. Thomas, a Member of Parliament for Derby and Organizing Secretary of the Amalgamated Society of Railway Workmen, that if the Government attempted to enforce Conscription, 3,000,000 employees of the national transportation lines of the country would not shrink from precipitating "industrial revolution!" Interesting to the foreign observer as are all these manifestations of the British masses’ opposition to war-time "control" and universal military service, the pathological causes of it are no less absorbing. They are not, in my judgment, far to seek. I thought I gained a composite glimpse of them one day at Shepherd’s Bush, by no means the most squalid section of London, for it lies in the west, far from the putrid east. I had gone to watch a great "recruiting-rally"--an attempt to inject some patriotism into regions where it was sadly lacking. I found myself in the midst of a huge typically lower-class and lower middle-class multitude. Scattered throughout it were countless hundreds of what should have been young men fit for military service. It was for the most part a motley throng of blear-eyed men and women of all sorts, sizes and conditions of mental and physical deterioration. Nearly everybody, particularly children, was unkempt and seemed underfed. In the wide-open doors of odoriferous saloons stood hatless, slovenly females, balancing with one hand a half-emptied mug of beer, while the other shepherded a cluster of wretched youngsters with dirty faces, tattered clothing and shredded shoes. Collarless men slouched along, filthy of attire and language alike. The remarks one overheard, as the troops trudged by and the bands blared _Rule, Britannia_, were usually purely ribald, and the cheering, when a taxi full of wounded Tommies, shoved into the procession to lend corroborative detail to what Sir W. S. Gilbert would have called an otherwise bald and unconvincing spectacle, was desultory and short-lived. The parade had been assigned a line of march through several miles of district precisely like Shepherd’s Bush. I could hardly imagine that the scenes anywhere were considerably different from those of which I was an astonished and chagrined witness. There were very few recruits.