IT is inevitable that there should be in every country degenerates who decline to play the game. England has her disreputable leaven of shirkers; France, whose heroism beggars description, has to reckon with her embusquÉs. The serene cheerfulness with which the bitterest sacrifices are faced daily by the mass of the nations engaged in the terrible conflict, bring into powerful relief the obliquity and depravity of the handful of men who seek to escape the heavy burden that lies upon all. There is no possibility of exaggerating the mean infamy of the men who seek their own safety by skulking behind the broad backs of the defenders of their country, when every call of duty and right demands their presence in the fighting-line. It is very difficult to distinguish between the sinfulness of shirking at a crisis like the present and the crime of overt treachery. No injustice would be done if every shirker were made to understand that he is liable to the traitor’s penalty if he persist in his offense.

The repetition of conscientious objections to war, at a time when a nation is committed to a strife in which any slackening spells for it practical annihilation, causes graver and graver perplexity. It is doubtful whether any healthy mind can now plead a conscientious objection without provoking suspicion of his powers of coherent reasoning. A condition of things has arisen in which private sentiment, however honestly cherished, is bound to yield to public needs. It is a tradition of the country in normal times to treat the conscientious objector with tenderness. As far as public safety allows, it is even now a proper function of Government to discriminate between an honest delusion, however anti-social, and a wilful defiance, from contemptible motives of selfishness or cowardice, of right principle. A very formidable danger clearly lurks in any continuance of the lax toleration which is often extended to the conscientious objector, by virtue of the opportunity such considerate treatment offers the shirker of indulging his evil propensities.

SIDNEY LEE.