skin had a glimpse of it, and that was why
he induced the Oxford undergraduates to vary their comfortable Greek
studies and games at ball with a little honest work upon the Hinksey
road. But the vision is irresistible. There cannot be the smallest doubt
it will be realised, and when the young dukes, landed proprietors,
financiers, motorists, officers in the Guards, barristers, and curates
are marched off in gangs to their apportioned labour in the stoke-holes,
coal-mines, and December fishing fleets, how the workmen will laugh, how
exult!

Nor let it be supposed that the conscription would subject even the most
luxurious conscripts to any unendurable hardship. So hateful is idleness
to man that the toil of the poor is continually being adopted by the
rich as sport. To climb a mountain was once the irksome duty of the
shepherd and wandering hawker; now it is the privilege of wealth to hang
by the finger-nails over an abyss. Once it was the penalty of slaves to
pull the galleys; now it is only the well-to-do who labour day by day at
the purposeless oar, and rack their bodies with a toil that brings home
neither fish nor merchandise. Once it fell to the thin bowman and
despised butcher to provide the table with flesh and fowl; now, at
enormous expense, the rich man plays the poulterer for himself, and
statesmen seek the strenuous life in the slaughter of a scarcely edible
rhinoceros. Let the conscripts of comfort take heart. They will run more
risks in the galleries of the mines than on the mountain precipice, and
one night's trawl upon the Dogger Bank would provide more weight of fish
than if they whipped the Tay from spring to winter.

Under this great conscription, a New Model would, indeed, be initiated,
as far superior to the conscript armies as Cromwell's Ironsides were to
the mercenaries of their time. The whole nation from prince to beggar
would by this means be transformed, labour would cease to be despised or
riches to be worshipped, the reproach of effeminacy would be removed,
the horrors of peace mitigated, and the moral equivalent of war
discovered. For the first time a true comradeship between class and
class would arise, for, as Goethe said, work makes the comrade, and
democracy might have a chance of becoming a reality instead of a party
phrase. After three years' service down the sewers or at the smelting
works, our men of leisure would no longer raise their wail over national
degeneracy or the need of ma