From ‘Compulsory Service’, The Spectator, 16 January 1915:
COMPULSORY service has not come yet, but it is drawing very near, and will certainly come unless some miracle should intervene—as, for example, the conquest of this country or the sudden collapse of our enemies. Those who dispute our statement that compulsion is coming must be very poor readers of the signs of the times, or else have paid no attention to Lord Haldane’s speech in the House of Lords on Friday week. In that speech Lord Haldane, with great emphasis and with perfect clearness, laid down the principle which we have preached in these columns for the last seven or eight years when supporting the policy of Universal National Service. Our line has been that the State, under the law and custom of the Constitution, has already the right and the power to call the whole of the adult male population of the country to arms in order to resist invasion and to repel the King’s enemies.
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