from the beginning I have looked for the
efficiency of such an army mainly to the tactical skill and the
educating power of its officers. But experience and observation have
convinced me that a national army, such as I have so long hoped for,
cannot be produced merely by the individual zeal of its members, nor
even by their devoted co-operation with one another. The spirit which
animates them must animate the whole nation, if the right result is to
be produced. For it is evident that the effort of the volunteers,
continued for half a century, to make themselves an army, has met with
insuperable obstacles in the social and industrial conditions of the
country. The Norfolk Commission's Report made it quite clear that the
conditions of civil employment render it impossible for the training of
volunteers to be extended beyond the present narrow limits of time, and
it is evident that those limits do not permit of a training sufficient
for the purpose, which is victory in war against the best troops that
another nation can produce.

Yet the officers and men of the volunteer force have not carried on
their fifty years' work in vain. They have, little by little, educated
the whole nation to think of war as a reality of life, they have
diminished the prejudice which used to attach to the name of soldier,
and they have enabled their countrymen to realise that to fight for his
country's cause is a part of every citizen's duty, for which he must be
prepared by training.

The adoption of this principle will have further results. So soon as
every able-bodied citizen is by law a soldier, the administration of
both army and navy will be watched, criticised, and supported with an
intelligence which will no longer tolerate dilettantism in authority.
The citizen's interest in the State will begin to take a new aspect. He
will discover the nature of the bond which unites him to his
fellow-citizens, and from this perception will spring that regeneration
of the national life from which alone is to be expected the uplifting of
England.

XXII.

THE CHAIN OF DUTY

The reader who has accompanied me to this point will perhaps be willing
to give me a few minutes more in which we may trace the different
threads of the argument and see if we can twine them into a rope which
will be of some use to us.

We began by agreeing that the people of this country have not made
entirely satisfactory arrangements for a competitive struggle, at