PART III
THE NATIONAL SERVICE LEAGUE AND THE WORKING CLASSES
INTRODUCTORY NOTE.
I here insert a letter on the political situation, which I wrote to the Times a year ago. This letter, I hope, will serve to show that the National Service League has at least considered the effects which National Service in Arms would have upon the working men of this country.
The assertion advanced by Mr. Blatchford in criticizing my Manchester speech, that the working men of Great Britain will never hear of compulsory service because they distrust the ruling classes, rests upon a misconception of the English Constitution almost too obvious to require exposure. This subject has already been dealt with in Part III. of "Fallacies and Facts" (pp. 208-217), and to that work I must refer the reader. I shall only observe in this place that in a democratic nation the working classes are themselves the ruling classes, and that the interests of England and of the Empire are their interests. Does Mr. Blatchford really imagine that the working men are so blind that, rather than defend those interests like men, they will prefer tamely to hand them over to Germany or to any other foreign Power? For this, and this only, is the logical consequence of his assertion, that he and his fellow-workers prefer invasion to universal compulsory service.
In former times, when the ruling classes of this nation consisted in very deed of the men of birth and property, that class considered it as its sacred right and inalienable privilege to serve the nation in war. Now, in the twentieth century, when the working men of this country have by the gradual extension of the franchise succeeded to the political influence and supremacy of the old aristocratic class, is it too much to hope that, as their condition of life improves, they will seek in the same spirit to secure that right and that inalienable privilege—service in war? For such service is the only mark of the true and perfect citizenship.
Surely that were a greater path and to a nobler goal than the path and the goal prescribed to the workers of this nation by the criticism in the Clarion, to which I have just referred.