We are standing on the threshold of nationhood, and it is problems like
these we should be setting ourselves to solve, unless we are to be an
unimportant province of the world, a mere administrative area inhabited
by a quite undistinguished people.
XVII.
But there are other methods of devotion to the national being possible
to us through collective action, and I was moved to imagine one, having
once received a letter from a bloodthirsty correspondent--one of that
rather numerous class whose minds are always loaded with ball cartridge,
whose fingers are always on the trigger, and who are always calling on
the authorities not to hesitate to shoot. He wrote to me during a
railway strike, advocating military conscription in order that railway
men who went out on strike could be called up by the military
authorities, as the French railway strikers were, and who were subject
to martial law if they disobeyed. I do not think with those who believe
the venerable remedy of blood-letting is the best cure for social
maladies; and I would have thought no more about that stern
disciplinarian, but my mind went playing about the idea of conscription,
and there came to me some thoughts which I wish to put on record in the
hope that our people in some future, when the social order will create
public spirit and the passion for the State more plentifully than it
does today, may recur to the idea and apply it.
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