life of many is nothing else but toil and pain, while others "get no
taste of this campaigning life at all," he continued:

"If now--and this is my idea--there were, instead of military
conscription, a conscription of the whole youthful population
to form for a certain number of years a part of the army enlisted
against _nature_, the injustice would tend to be evened out, and
numerous other benefits to the commonwealth would follow.
The military ideals of hardihood and discipline would be wrought
into the growing fibre of the people; no one would remain
blind, as the luxurious classes now are blind, to man's real
relations to the globe he lives on, and to the permanently solid
and hard foundations of his higher life. To coal and iron mines,
to freight trains, to fishing fleets in December, to dish-washing,
clothes-washing, and window-washing, to road-building and
tunnel-making, to foundries and stoke-holes, and to the frames
of skyscrapers, would our gilded youths be drafted off, according
to their choice, to get the childishness knocked out of them, and
to come back into society with healthier sympathies and soberer
ideas."

Here, indeed, is a vision more tempting than ever conscription was. To
be sure, it is not new, for Ruskin had a glimpse of it, and that was why
he induced the Oxford undergraduates to vary their comfortable Greek
studies and games at ball with a little honest work upon the Hinksey
road. But the vision is irresistible. There cannot be the smallest doubt
it will be realised, and when the young dukes, landed proprietors,
financiers, motorists, officers in the Guards, barristers, and curates
are marched off in gangs to their apportioned labour in the stoke-holes,
coal-mines, and December fishing fleets, how the workmen will laugh, how