Excerpt from National Defence: A Study in Militarism When the war. Broke out conscription could not be avoided. We had committed ourselves to policies and expeditions which made every other method of raising the necessary troops a mere makeshift. If voluntaryism could have been saved, it was not by recruiting meetings which only hastened it to its end, but by a policy which at the outset would have defined in severely precise language our responsibilities and our purpose in entering the war, and which would have kept open channels for diplomatic negotiation. That was never done except in perorations which increased fervour and misunderstanding at the same time. When the Coalition was formed, voluntaryism, doomed for months, actually died, because the Cabinet had to be kept together, and in the face of the military demands the conscriptionists had to be appeased. Labour in particular lost its chance of saving the nation by keeping control upon militarism, and the country set out upon the road to military victory through the ruin of civil liberty. We sacrificed the future to the present when we might have saved both. In this book I deal with the future. About the Publisher Forgotten Books publishes hundreds of thousands of rare and classic books. Find more at www.forgottenbooks.com This book is a reproduction of an important historical work. Forgotten Books uses state-of-the-art technology to digitally reconstruct the work, preserving the original format whilst repairing imperfections present in the aged copy. In rare cases, an imperfection in the original, such as a blemish or missing page, may be replicated in our edition. We do, however, repair the vast majority of imperfections successfully; any imperfections that remain are intentionally left to preserve the state of such historical works.