Individualism has achieved its inevitable failure; "go as you please" in a world that also contained aggressive militarism, has broken down.

In the degree to which professional militarism prevails in any society, women are forced into hard industrial activities, despised because fulfilled by women.

The arrogance, the insolence, of the Junker officer, his aristocratic pretension, his bearish manners, have made him a byword, not only in his own country but all over Europe; and his belief in sheer militarism and Jingo imperialism has made him a menace.

Why, then, make compulsory militarism foundational in our national life?

In the smaller towns and villages the population must keep indoors at night; for egress and ingress are more difficult to control there than in large cities, where guards at every corner sufficewatching, watching, these disciplined pawns of remorselessly efficient militarism; watching every human being in Belgium.

On the other hand, if we reject enforced militarism are we to throw overboard the idea of "national service" altogether?

We are fighting "to put down militarism and the dominance of a military class," says the great B.P., and one can only hope that when the war is over we shall remember and rivet into shape this great and good purposenot only with regard to foreign militarism, but also with regard to our own.

It is possible that the Social Revolution will be the last act in the present tragedy; possible that murderous militarism will be drowned in the blood of its numberless victims; that the people of the different countries will unite against the bloody regime of modern Capitalism and its institutions, and finally produce a new social culture upon the basis of free Socialism.

That the government of the Republic, if victorious, will make the retrocession of Alsace-Lorraine its prime condition of peace, is as certain as anything can be certain in the seething pot to which triumphant militarism has reduced unhappy Europe.

In the last days of July, 1914, backed by the Kaiser, he had opposed the mobilisation order sufficient to cause a three days' delaywhich his military opponents in German politics claim was the chief cause of the failure to take Parisbut in the case of the Lusitania he was even more powerless against rampant militarism.

We are persuaded that Russian absolutism is the chief support of reactionary militarism in Europe, and that it has bred in the German hegemony the dangerous enmity towards European democracy.

It was, I suppose, this assertion of personal liberty which drove our extreme Liberal wing before the war into that determined fighting of the Naval and Military Estimates year after year, that determined hatred of anything that looked like "militarism," and that constant belittlement of the soldier and his profession which so nearly handed us over, for lack of a reasonable "militarism," to the tender mercies of the German variety.

If the Prussian Government insisted on the necessity for a large and efficient army, they were accused of reckless militarism.

And in his tale of "The Tin Soldier" he uttered the true defence of romantic militarism against the prigs who would forbid it even as a toy for the nursery.

The free peoples of the world have banded together against tyrannous militarism and government by caste.

In England as in the United States, domestic pacificism has been the most potent ally of alien militarism.

It was to escape just this vexatious control, with the arduous militarism in which it culminates, that so vast a multitude of Germans left their native land and came to the United Statesnot all of whom have shown appreciation and loyalty to the free land that welcomed them.