Word: draft
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...Drafting labor is theoretically as sound as drafting an army. Practically it meets with the overwhelming opposition of the nation's entire public opinion. It is for this reason that the Government has diverted labor into more essential channels by means of the military draft, a method devoid of the repulsiveness of more direct labor compulsion and yet equally effective in practice. In threatening immediate military service for those not employed in essential industry, a real incentive is supplied toward securing a more perfect war organization. This measure means the elimination of idlers of all types. It recognizes that while...
...light of impartial judgment, Irish conscription is pre-eminently fair. Depleted English and Irish battalions have been recruited almost entirely through the British draft. It is time that Ireland should, do her share. This war is her war in as great a degree as it is England's. Irish leaders supported the original declaration of hostilities and have since maintained the belief that Ireland is directly and irrevocably concerned. The volunteer system has not brought the desired results. Fair play now demands conscription...
...conscription policy would bring the most efficient results in spite of the opposition that the powerful Labor Party would be bound to make. Conscription is always odious, but it is the only fair method of selection and it would strike rich as well as poor. The man who is drafted for labor has very little ground for objection, compared to the person chosen for trench service and a labor draft is the one and only way to put the workmen, manual and intellectual, in the places where they would do the most good. In the higher intellectual classes a type...
...main difficulty with such a conscription is that it might start labor troubles in the country. It is a delicate proposition and would have to be handled in an extremely tactful way. One feasible method would be to draft these men for military service, give them uniforms, put them under martial law, divide them into regiments of engineers, and just as we have the Railway Engineers in France today we could have shipbuilding and munition regiments, farming regiments scattered in squads or platoons where they are most needed. Such an arrangement would satisfy the pride of the laboring classes...
...liberated world, intellectual, industrial, commercial activity begins again, no place should remain empty. On that day you, who are young, must be ready. And what your country will ask of you then will not be whether you have driven an ambulance or whether you got ahead of the draft by a few weeks or a few months, but whether you are ready to take in hand some indispensable task which must have men prepared and matured by study. You are the workmen who must do the work that has got to be done...