“Out of the mouths of babes and sucklings hast Thou ordained strength, because of Thine enemies, that Thou mightest still the enemy and the avenger.” Out of the mouth of a French _simple soldat_ the Englishmen who are still holding back as I write from the supreme sacrifice or privilege of national service, the Britons who never, never, never will be slaves, are condemned. A year of the war has passed, and hundreds of thousands of their fellow subjects of all classes have given up their professions and their positions, their pleasures and their ease, their wives and their families, and have freely offered themselves on the field of battle as part of the strength by which the enemy can be stilled. But they themselves have done none of the things for which their French socialist comrade unhesitatingly gave them credit. They have not—up to October, 1915—realized that we are at the parting of the ways, they have not with one voice answered “Present” to the call of their native land, they have not flown to arms at the cry of liberty, they have not proved by defending themselves that they mean to fight to the end for their national independence. Instead, they sit at home and strike—not for freedom, but for higher wages and less work—and prate of Conscripts and a Capitalists’ War and a Capitalists’ Press, and all the other labour shibboleths which have lost whatever sense they had before the war and become mere nonsense, because the war is different from all other wars and has changed everything in the world. It is a Capitalists’ War, of course. It was made by the Prussian Junkers and the business men of Germany with no other object than that of increasing their capital and destroying that of the Allies and particularly of England. It is a war fought by “conscripts” (though I should like to hear Mr. J. H. Thomas, M.P., use that term to Private Jouanard) in the case of every country engaged in it except England. And it is also, because of these two undeniable premises, the greatest strike against selfishness in high places that has ever taken place, and the conscript brothers who are fighting or working for it are the champions of freedom, and the men who refuse to stand by their side are, without knowing it, the blackest blacklegs in the history of the world. And no one knows better than they and the newspapers and politicians who support them what blacklegs are. They are the men who in the wars of labour refuse to submit to the Compulsory Service of trade-unionism, which is sometimes the most servile service and the most autocratic and deadening compulsion that ever was enforced in a free country, and the badge and livery and alpha and omega of the god with the feet of clay before which they bow down and worship. * * * * *