Note 5 — Chapter VI · METHODS OF RECRUITING

The following letter which appeared in the Westminster Gazette (January 20, 1915), states the case so admirably that I have taken the liberty of quoting it in full:

"DEAR SIR—Every day you tell your readers that we are collecting troops by means of voluntary enlistment, yet it is self-evident that our recruiting campaign from the first has been a very noisy and a very vulgar compulsion, which in a time of immense crisis has lowered the dignity of our country and provoked much anxiety among our Allies. Our national habit of doing the right thing in the wrong way has never been exercised in a more slovenly and unjust manner. It is a crime against morals not to use the equitable principles of national service when our country is fighting for her life; and this obvious truth should be recognised as a matter of course by every true democrat. A genuinely democratic people, proud of their past history, and determined to hold their own against Germany's blood-lust, would have divided her male population into classes, and would have summoned each class to the colours at a given date. Those who were essential to the leading trades of the country would have been exempted from war service in the field, as they are in Germany; the younger classes would have been called up first, and no class would have been withdrawn from its civil work until the military authorities were ready to train it. Instead of this quiet and dignified justice, this admirable and quiet unity of a free people inspired by a fine patriotism, we have dazed ourselves with shrieking posters and a journalistic clamour against 'shirkers,' and loud abuse of professional footballers; and now an advertisement in the newspapers assures the women of England that they must do what the State declines to achieve, that they must send their men and boys into the field since their country is fighting for her life. What cowardice! Why impose this voluntary duty on women when the State is too ignoble to look upon her own duty in this matter as a moral obligation?

"The one virtue of voluntary enlistment is that it should be voluntary—a free choice between a soldier's life and a civilian's life. To use moral pressure, with the outcries of public indignation, in order to drive civilians from their work into the army—what is this but a most undignified compulsion? And it is also a compulsion that presses unequally upon the people, for its methods are without system. Many families send their all into the fighting line; many decline to be patriotic. A woman said to me yesterday: 'My husband has gone, and I am left with his business. Why should he go? Other women in my neighbourhood have their husbands still, and it's rubbish to say that the country is in danger when the Government allows and encourages this injustice in recruiting. If the country is in danger all the men should fight—if their trade work is unnecessary to the armies."

"This point of view is right; the wrong one is advocated by you and by other Radicals who dislike the justice of democratic equality.—Yours truly, WALTER SHAW SPARROW."