Author: George Francis Shee

Publisher: Forgotten Books

Published: 2017-03-13

Total Pages: 292

ISBN-13: 9780243914036

Excerpt from The Briton's First Duty: The Case for Conscription It is no technical question that I propose to place before the reader. To look upon it in that light would be utterly to misunderstand the scope and purpose of this book. For I deal with a question which is not even, directly, a military or naval one at all. It is simply and solely a question of principle a question of plain duty to the Sovereign and the State a question that affects, not the soldier and the sailor, but every citizen of this great Empire; it is, in the highest sense of the word, a civilian question. The question whether every able-bodied white man throughout the United Kingdom - through out the Empire - ought to, and shall in future, perform the most fundamental and sacred duty of citizenship or not is one which he, in his millions, will have to answer, and no one else. At the present moment the air is full of Army Reform, as it always has been when the test of war has shown our military system to be ia adequate to our needs. The same delusive phrase will be used which has so often lulled us into a false security - a security from which our next awakening would be a far more terrible one than we have ever known in the past. Even as it is, no one can have failed to notice a singular want of earnestness in the public utterances of Ministers on the question of Army Reform. In spite of the lessons that this Empire should have learnt as to the futility of a policy of optimism, we fail to trace any serious effort on the part of either House of Parliament to add to the preparedness of Great Britain in view of possible dangers in the There can be no real and lasting Army Reform which does not start on the only possible sound basis for an Army, namely, a national one. 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.