All these fifty-year-old guys wearing baseball caps and shorts and acting like children. It winds me up. Men don't have to take responsibility anymore. Most of the guys I know would punch me on the nose for saying this, but maybe we do have to bring back conscription.
Obviously all of us have thought about Vietnam, particularly in my generation in Australia that were part of conscription and fought there. Our friends came back, forever changed. So there were a lot of questions.
I regard the principle of conscription of life as a flat contradiction of all our cherished ideals of individual freedom, democratic liberty and Christian teaching.
Conscription if necessary, but not necessarily conscription.
Government acquisition of food supplies in time of war is no less important than conscription. Equity is the fundamental principle applicable to both these essential phases of war administration.
Justifying conscription to promote the cause of liberty is one of the most bizarre notions ever conceived by man! Forced servitude, with the risk of death and serious injury as a price to live free, makes no sense.
The mere dates of my existence do not interest me, except in one connection. When the Great War started I was too old to be acceptable as a volunteer; when conscription followed I was too old to be conscripted.
I am an opponent of war and of war preparations and an opponent of universal military training and conscription; but entirely apart from that issue, I hold that segregation in any part of the body politic is an act of slavery and an act of war.
War is wrong. Conscription for war is inconsistent with freedom of conscience, which is not merely the right to believe but to act on the degree of truth that one receives, to follow a vocation which is God-inspired and God-directed.