/.Vncif 01 Heiivuit lil'jfJ^. 



Leading Articles. 



S15 



THE MILITARY CASE AGAINST 

 CONSCRIPTION. 



Bv Col. F. N. Maude. 



We are so much accustomed to hear militaiy men 

 txtol the advantages — even the necessity — of univer- 

 sal military service, that there is something refresh- 

 ing in finding a militarj- man objecting on military 

 grounds to this popular military panacea. In the 

 Conicmporary Rezlew Colonel F. X. Maude con- 

 fesses that he was once enamoured of the German 

 and compulsory system. " But now character/' he 

 says, " and that indefinable art of command which 

 makes men willing to follow a favourite leader to 

 the death, are far more easily evolved where com- 

 pulsion is practically absent." The writer is de- 

 cidedly optimistic as to the British Army. The re- 

 sponsibility for training of the men being fixed on 

 the proper shoulders, namely company commanders, 

 and the captains having now a direct interest in 

 their companies, they are declared to realise the 

 deficiencies and tr)- to diminish them. " Greater 

 advances have been made in the last five years than 

 in the whole previous generation, and as long as 

 our present conditions hold good this progress will 

 continue in geometric progression." 



AVE HAVE THBEE MILLION SOLDIEES! 



" We never knew how strong we were," will be 

 the exclamation of many a reader as he comes on 

 this paragraph : — 



Quite apart from the 250,000 that can be sanunoned at 

 any given moment, there stand behind them somewhere 

 about one and a half million of men, still of an age to 

 bear arms, who have already pa£sed Ihrotigh the rankf, 

 whilst exclusive of the Army Reserve we have half a mil- 

 lion of ei-Eeg'ular soldiers and at least a million more of 

 «z-Militiamen and Yeomanry, practically all of whom must 

 come to the colours in a grave crisis, for there will be 

 nowhere else for them to go to. Roughly speaking, there- 

 fore, our voluntary system affords ns over three million 

 men trained to arms between the ages of 18 and 4S, out of 

 a total adult male population of ten million. This system 

 has not yet reached its culminating point, for if the steadv 

 growth of the past thirty years is maintained, and given 

 continuity of conditions, as there can be little doubt tliat 

 it will be, then in 1940 out of twelve millions we shall 

 have no less than six million more or less trained to arms. 

 Surely this is a power of expansion sufficient for anybody, 

 for even the rVench law of conscription, the most stringent 

 in Europe, would not supply a greater proportion. 



Compulsion would convert the men who now 

 come of their own free will into " incipient recal- 

 citrants of the worst description. ' A great war 

 would, he thinks, vastly increase our resources with- 

 out any compulsory aid. " It will not be men that 

 we shall want when the great struggle comes, but 

 officers trained to employ them to the best advan- 

 tage. ' So he insists that our foremost need at the 

 present time is an organ of scientific inquiry, pre- 

 sided over by a man of true scientific habit of mind, 

 by preference an ex-naval instructor, " for the de- 

 signing of an army corps is almost as much a mat- 

 ter of compromise as the designing of a battleship." 



itR. EALDANE, THE DESTEOrEE OF HIS PARTY! 



In a postscript Colonel Maude animadverts on 

 Mr. Haldane's scheme. He takes it to be convin- 

 cing evidence of the want of any scientific know- 

 ledge of the bedrock on which military efficiency 

 ultimately depends. Within the limits fixed by 

 the physique of the countn-, he maintains — " You 

 cannot train too many men to bear arms, for each 

 man as he leaves the Army has a better expectation 

 of life, and is a more efficient wealth-producer than 

 he otherwise would be." A more formidable pros- 

 pect is held out in the following paragraph: — 



Further, with reference to his proposal to hand over the 

 administration of the auxiliary forces to the County Coun- 

 cils, the same statistics which it would be the duty of my 

 proposed Department to cause to be prepared would show 

 that the ultimate result must almost inevitably be to 

 deslro.v the political party to which Mr. Haldane belongs 

 altogether. For the ex-soldiers, sailors and volunteers form 

 by far the largest collective vote in the nation, and once 

 they realise their power, good-bye to all economy for the 

 future. This consequence is inevitable, for men with the 

 keenness necessary to become volunteers never are. and 

 never can be, satisfied with the decree of efficiency attain 

 able in xjeace. The more they realise what war means, 

 the more they clamour for the unattainable. 



JAPAN AS THE NEW SINAI. 



May we hope for some betterment of the worlr* 

 through Japanese influence upon it ? That is the 

 question which Professor Robert H. Smith asks in 

 the Hibbert Journal for July. His answer is start- 

 ling, Japan, he thinks, may be destined to give the 

 world a new universal religion, a blend of Christian- 

 ity and Buddhism superimposed upon Japanese 

 spiritualism. Spiritualism is the basic principle of 

 Japanese life. Professor Smith says: — 



It is enough for all his needs that he knows — it is trans- 

 parently certain to him — that he lives amidst, and is con- 

 stantly guided by, the Spirits of his Ancestors; that he is 

 in ei,mple fact an atom of the Japanese nation, which has 

 One Soul, although it appears just now in forty million 

 embodiments; that the common spirit of his race lives in 

 him. and that he has no life apart from it. 



The pessimism of pure intellectual Buddhism and its doc- 

 trine of illusion are utterly contrary to the Japanese 

 genius, which has intense faith in life and reality, and 

 are the two fundamental and practically influential fac- 

 tors which differentiate pure Buddhism from pure Chris- 

 tianity. Since neither is accepted by Japan, the Japanese 

 have the power to effect an amalgamation of the better 

 elements of Buddhism and of Christianity. 



Jesus eipressed the brotherhood of man in terms of the 

 Fatherhood of God. Recent Japanese philosophical writers 

 liave evinced an entire readiness to extend the central 

 Shinto idea of the common fatherhood of the Japanese 

 race to the universal idea of the common fatlierhood of 

 all mankind. The Roman Catholic goddess of mercy, the 

 Holy Mother Jlarj-, is. so far as practical influence on life 

 is concerned, the spiritual counterpart of Kwanon. the 

 goddess of compassion of Japan. In Indian Buddhism. 

 Gautama himself occupies this same place of compassioner 

 because in Southern Asia woman occupies too low a station 

 in philosophical conception to take part in the divine 

 government of the universe. The misfortune of Pro 

 testantism ia that, by the very nature of its revolt, it was 

 forced to banish the Mother of Christ from its iwrsoniflcn- 

 lion of divinity. It is very important to note that this 

 is not so in Japan. In Japanese mvthology the Sun is 

 eoddess. not god. and the Sun-goddess as mother of the 

 Japanese race is the object of universal veneration and 

 adoration. 



It may be hoped, therefore, that Japan may join hands 

 with Europe and America in establishing throughout 

 Eastern Asia a pure ethical religion of the brotherhood 

 of all humanity, with womanhood and manhood equally 

 respected and equally diligently cultivated in their re- 

 spective ppheres of ethical duty; and that in this process 

 we Christians may unbind ourselves from the shackles 

 of many superstitions and from much ugly moral incon- 

 sistency and obtnseneas. 



