hour’s discussion, by the incitements and taunts of elderly non-combatants and maidens with a taste for mischief, and by the verses of poets jumping at the cheapest chance in their underpaid profession.  The difficulty begins when all the men susceptible to these inducements are enlisted, and we have to draw on the solid, sceptical, sensible residuum who know the value of their lives and services and liberties, and will not give them except on substantial and honourable conditions.  These Ironsides know that it is one thing to fight for your country, and quite another to let your wife and children starve to save our rich idlers from a rise in the supertax.  They also know that it is one thing to wipe out the Prussian drill sergeant and snob officer as the enemies of manhood and honour, and another to let that sacred mission be made an excuse for subjecting us to exactly the same tyranny in England.  They have not forgotten the “On the knee” episode, nor the floggings in our military prisons, nor the scandalous imprisonment of Tom Mann, nor the warnings as to military law and barrack life contained even in Robert Blatchford’s testimony that the army made a man of him.

What the Labour Party Owes to the Army.

And here is where the Labour Party should come in.  The Labour Party’s business is to abolish the Militarist soldier, who is only a quaint survival of the King’s footman (himself a still quainter survival of the medieval baron’s retainer), and substitute for him a trained combatant with full civil rights, receiving the Trade Union rate of wages proper to a skilled worker at a dangerous trade.  It must co-operate with the Trade Unions in fixing this moral minimum wage for the citizen soldier, and in obtaining for him a guarantee that the wage shall continue until he obtains civil employment on standard terms at the conclusion of the war.  It must make impossible the scandal of a monstrously rich peer (his riches, the automatic result of ground land-landlordism, having “no damned nonsense of merit about them”) proclaiming the official weekly allowance for the child of the British soldier in the trenches.  That allowance is eighteenpence, being less than one third of the standard allowance for an illegitimate child under an affiliation order.  And the Labour Party must deprive the German bullet of its present double effect in killing an Englishman in France and simultaneously reducing his widow’s subsistence from a guinea a week to five shillings.  Until this is done we are simply provoking Providence to destroy us.

I wish I could say that it is hardly necessary to add that Trade Unionism must be instituted in the Army, so that there shall be accredited secretaries in the field to act as a competent medium of communication between the men on service and the political representatives of their class at the War Office (for I shall propose this representative innovation presently).  It will shock our colonels; but I know of no bodies of