[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.
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.
Granting all this, however, most fully, there still
remains a long stretch from this admission to that
of forced military service. The drawbacks to
this latter are many. In the first place compulsion
anyhow is bad. A voluntary citizen army may be
all right; but to compel a man to fight, whether
he will or not—in violation, perhaps, of
his conscience, of his instinct, of his temperament—is
an inexcusable outrage on his rights as a human being.
In the second place it is gross folly; for a man who
fights devoid of freewill and against his conscience,
against his temperament, cannot possibly make a good
fighter. An army of such recusants, however large,
would be useless; and even a few mixed with the others
do, as a matter of fact, greatly lower the efficiency
of the whole force associated with them. In the
third place compulsion means compulsion by a Government,
and Government, at any rate to-day, means class-rule.
Forced military service means service under and subjection
to a Class. That means Wars carried on abroad
to serve the interests, often iniquitous enough, of
the Few; and military operations entered into at home
to suppress popular discontent or to confirm class-power.
To none of these things could any high-minded man
of democratic temper consent. There are other
drawbacks, but these will do to begin with.
