pect of public services it would be
incomparable. The alternative to this is to starve all public services,
to make the State simply the tax-collector, to pay the interest on a
huge debt, and so get it hated because it can do nothing except collect
money to pay the interest on a colossal national debt. Obviously the
State as an agency to bring about civilization cannot perform both
services--pay interest on huge public loans, and continue an expensive
service. It must find out some way in which public services can be
continued, and if possible improved, and the open way to that is civil
conscription and the assertion of a claim to two or three years of the
work of every citizen for civil purposes, just as it now asserts a claim
on the services of citizens for the defense of the State. As national
debts are more and more piled up, it has seemed to many that here must
be an end to what was called social reform, that we were entering on a
black era, and no dawn would show over Europe for another century. There
is always a way out of troubles if people are imaginative enough and
brotherly enough to conceive of it and bold enough to take action when
they have found the way. The real danger for society is that it may
become spiritless and hidebound and tamed, and have none of those high
qualities necessary in face of peril, and the more people get accustomed
to thinking of bold schemes the better. They will get over the first
shock, and may be ready when the time comes to put them into action.
When a country is poor like Ireland and yet is ambitious of greatness;
when the aspect of its civilization is mean and when it yet aspires to
beauty; when its people are living under unsanitary conditions and yet
the longing is there to give health to all; when Ireland is like this,
its public men and its citizens might do much worse than brood over the
possibilities of industrial conscription, and of revising the character
of the purposes for which nations have hitherto claimed service from
their young citizens on behalf of the State. Debarred by a fate not
altogether unkind from training every citizen in the arts of war Ireland
might--if the love of country and the desire for service are really so
strong as we are told--suddenly become eminent among the nations of the
world by adopting a policy which in half a century would make our mean
cities and our backward countryside the most beautiful in the modern
world.

XVIII.