LAND AND .WATER, 
June 5, 1915. 
Ihe enemy, and lie has weakened himself elsewhere. 
It can only be insisted upon once more that 
this critical point of the Eastern front has not 
at the moment of writing (Tuesday evening) pro- 
duced any decision one way or the other. 
P.S. — As this paper goes to press news comes 
that the enemy has forced the outer works of 
J*rzemysl on the north (German communique) but 
failed to force the principal work on the west, as 
yet (Russian communique). This success was 
obtained by him last Simday, and on Monday he 
was turned out of the western fort (No. 7). 
Should Przemysl be forced thus by direct attack 
it will, of course, not have the effect which would 
be produced by cuting the neck of the salient : it 
would still leave the Russian centre intact. 
THE MILITARY ARGUMENT FOR AND 
AGAINST CONSCRIPTION. 
BECAUSE men who have the power both to 
promote and to burk discussion have re- 
cently worked hard in favour of immediate 
compulsory service, and because the matter is, in 
the course of such a war as this, to be regarded 
mainly from its military side, I must beg my 
readers' leave to set up, as well as I can, the argu- 
ments for and against the system; I mean the 
purely military arguments. The political and 
moral arguments for and against are not suitable 
for these pages. 
We must first of all clearly distinguish 
between a system of conscription established in 
time of peace and in preparation for war, 
.matured and organised in all its details (a task 
■ of some years), bearing its fruit in the shape of 
trained reserves, &c., we must distinguish, I say, 
between this and compulsory service (what the 
men of the French Revolution called " Levee en 
Masse '") suddenly decreed in the midst of a war. 
The two methods have widely different 
characters and are of widely different miKtary 
effect. 
ARGUMENT FOR CONSCRIPTIOxN 
WHEN LONG PREPARED. 
In favour of conscription, as organised 
during peace, with leisure for the scheme to 
mature, and as a preparation for war, the purely 
military arguments are so strong that they hardly 
need stating. Briefly, they are these : 
(1) Conscription gives j'ou the maximum 
number of men. 
(2) Conscription gives you perfect regularity 
in your recruitment. 
(3) Conscription permits you to organise the 
Tvhole State for war with the mdi^imMvn simflicity. 
lYou know just what men of just what age you 
will get and in just what numbers, if you call up 
such and such a number of classes— that is, yearly 
contingents. The " class 1915," for instance, means 
the young men who will have reached and passed 
the age of twenty in the course of 1915. You know 
what reserves you have behind, whatever number 
of " classes " you have chosen to call up. You know 
in what trades (and in what numbers in those 
trades) your reserves are employed. You exactly 
allow for the men who must remain behind as 
miners, on the railway, as ship-builders — even 
for agriculture. 
(4) Conscription lowers the expense of an 
army — 
(a) By the simplification of all its machinery; 
{h) By giving you men whom 3-ou need no£ 
tempt with the promise of a special wage ; 
(c) By providing you with a regularly work- 
ing machine for assembling men, feeding them, 
transporting them, &c., which is obviously a 
cheaper machine to work than the rapidly impro- 
vised and unexpectedly and ctipriciously expand- 
ing organisation which the voluntary system 
clamours for suddenly in time of war. 
One of the many reasons why the expenditure 
of Great Britain has been so greatly out of pro- 
portion to her military effort (compared with the 
other Allies) has been "the fact that no such simple 
machine was ready. 
(5) Finally, conscription provides a group of 
minor advantages such as these : 
(a) It allows you to drill and train your m.en 
in large known units, for which your instructors, 
training grounds, housing, (fee," are all marked 
down; 
(6) It tells you what equipments you must 
have ready for your reserves; 
{c) It enables you to keep your exact propor- 
tion between all arms ; 
{d) To draft men at will from one unit to 
another, &c., &c. 
On the other side of the account all that can 
be set is the undoubted truth that a 'professional 
army (not any sort of voluntary force) is, number 
for number, superior to a conscript army. But as 
against this one must always remember that a 
professional army can only form quite a small 
proportion of the total available material. 
Connected with — or, rather, a part of — this 
same argument is the fact that esprit de corps— 
that very valuable traditional spirit differentiat- 
ing one unit from another, stimulating competi- 
tion between all, and promoting a sort of local 
patriotisni of the utmost moral effect — tends to be 
swamped in a conscript army, and is always much 
more lively in a voluntary or professional one. 
But, I repeat, there is no comparison between 
the purely militaiy arguments in favour of and 
against a system of conscription, as established 
during some long period of peace, in preparation 
for war. The weight of argument is all in favour. 
Roughly speaking, such a system reaches its 
maximum of utility after a trial of about twenty- 
five years. Men are first drilled (when they have 
passed their medical examination) after or about 
their twentieth birthday. They are, in the bulk, 
quite unfit for even the last military duties after 
forty-five. In twenty-five years, therefore, you 
have a national system with all its hist reserves 
established. 
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