An empire based on brotherhood--a holy _human_ empire of the World, including all races and colours in a common unity and equality--yes! But these shoddy empires based on militarism and commercialism, and built up in order to secure the unclean ascendancy of two outworn and effete classes over the rest of mankind--a thousand times no! That dispensation, thank Heaven! is past. "These fatuous empires with their parade of power and their absolute lack of any real policy--this British Lion, this Russian Bear, these German, French, and American Eagles--these birds and beasts of prey--with their barbaric notions of Greed and War, their impossible armaments, and their swift financial ruin impending--will fall and be rent asunder. The hollow masks of them will perish. And the sooner the better. But underneath surely there will be rejoicing, for it will be found that so after all the real peoples of the earth have come one degree nearer together--yes, one degree nearer together." FOOTNOTES: [22] In Servia, for instance, which many folk doubtless regard as a benighted country, more than four-fifths of the people are peasant farmers and cultivate lands belonging to their own families. "These holdings cannot be sold or mortgaged entire; the law forbids the alienation for debt of a peasant's cottage, his garden or courtyard, his plough, the last few acres of his land, and the cattle necessary for working his farm." [Encycl. Brit.] In 1910 there were altogether _five hundred_ agricultural co-operative societies in Servia. IX CONSCRIPTION _December_, 1914. While protesting, as I have already done, against forced military service, it must still be admitted that the argument in favour of it retains a certain validity: to the extent, namely, that every one owes a duty of some kind to his own people, that it is mean to accept all the advantages of citizenship--security, protection, settled conditions of life, and so forth--and still to refuse to make sacrifice for one's country in a time of distress or danger. It is difficult of course for any one to trace all the threads and fibres which have worked themselves into his life from his own homeland--as it is difficult for a child to trace all the qualities of blood that it owes to its mother; but there they are, and though some of these native inheritances and conditions may not really be to a man's liking, yet he can hardly refuse to acknowledge them, or to confess the debt of gratitude that he owes to the land of his birth.