There is nothing like it in civilian life, but yet the aim of the higher minds in all civilizations is to create a similar devotion to civic ideals, so that men will not only, as Pericles said, “give their bodies for the commonwealth,” but will devote mind, will, and imagination with equal assiduity and self-surrender to the creation of a civilization which will be the inheritance of all and a cause of pride to everyone, and which will bring to the individual a greater beauty and richness of life than he could finally reach by the utmost private efforts of which he was capable.
I believe that an organization of society, such as I have indicated, would evolve gradually a similar passion for the general zeal, having, without the stern restraint militarism imposes on its units, a like power of turning the thoughts to the general good.
I may say also that to create a militarist organization, before the natural principles to be safeguarded are well understood and a common possession of all the people in the country, would be a danger akin to the peril of allowing children to play with firearms. We may find it a bad business to create natural ideals as they are required, just as it is a perilous business to try to create an army when a country is in a state of war. If we do not rapidly create a national culture embodying the fundamental ideas we wish to see prevailing in society our volunteer armies will be subject to influences from the baser sort of politicians who would force party aims on the country. We shall have a wretched future unless the soul of the country can dominate the physical forces in it, unless ideals of national conduct, liberty of speech and thought, of justice and brotherhood, exist to inspire and guide it, and are recognized by all and appealed to by all parties equally.
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 bloodletting 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. Nearly every State in the world demands from youth a couple of years’ service in the army. There they are trained to defend their country—even, if necessary, to slay their own countrymen. There is much that is abhorrent to the imagination in the idea of war, and I am altogether with that noble body of men who are trying, by means of arbitration treaties, to solve national differences by reason rather than by force. But we all recognize something noble in the spirit of the nation where the community agrees that every man shall give up some years of his life to the State for the preservation of the State, and may be called upon to surrender life absolutely in that service. While the manhood of a race does this on the whole with cheerfulness, there must be something of high character in the manhood of that nation. A certain gravity attaches to national decisions which are made, as it were, upon the slopes of death, because none are exempt from service, and there is no delirious mob ready to yell for a war in which it does not run the risk of having its own dirty skin perforated by bullets. In Ireland we have never had military conscription, for reasons which are well known to all, and upon which I need not enter. I am well satisfied it should be so, for it leaves open to us the possibility of a much nobler service, one which has never yet been attempted by any modern nation, and that is civil conscription.
I throw out this suggestion, which may hold the imagination of those who have noble conceptions of what national life should be and what a nation should work for, in the hope that some time it may fructify. There is a prohibition laid on the people in this island against conscription for military purposes. Is there any reason why we should not have conscription for civil purposes? Why should not every young man in Ireland give up two years of his life in a comradeship of labor with other young men, and be employed under skilled direction in great works of public utility, in
