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Transcript 2

Dear Mr Lloyd George

I have today been paraded before the troops here and received my third successive sentence of imprisonment with Hard Labour. This time my sentence is for two years.

Before I am removed to prison I think it right to make known to you that, like other men similarly situated, I have recently felt it my duty to consider carefully whether I ought not for the future to refuse all orders to work during imprisonment. I have decided that it is my duty to take this course.

… I am anxious you should understand that I have not arrived at this decision from any lust for martyrdom.

 

… You consider us cowards in that we are at any rate safe and better off in prison than in the trenches. …That is not why we are in prison. Before the Tribunals many of us were offered as a condition of exemption an opportunity of finding ordinary civil work in which we should have been free to live our everyday lives, exempted from every kind of military service. We refused this offer, claiming Absolute Exemption.

 

Then the Government, which included yourself, punished us for this by arresting us and sending us to be soldiers, although we had already proved to the entire satisfaction of the Tribunals that we had a genuine objection to every kind of military service. Naturally we refused to be soldiers and were then… packed off to prison for disobedience to military service.

Next you offered to release us from prison not on condition that we would go to the trenches, but provided we would sign an agreement to engage in safe civil work with other men similarly minded to ourselves. We were nominally transferred to Army Reserve, and if we misbehaved, we should be sent back to our regiments. A recent stipulation has been that those who accept this work should not engage in the public propaganda of their opinions. Again we refused this ostensibly attractive offer and chose to remain in prison in Hard Labour.

 

… I think this shows that – mad or insane- we are at least not cowards. It is not the fear of physical death in the trenches that has led to our remaining in prison, but rather a fear of spiritual death which we believe must follow our assent to any Conscription Scheme, military or civil.

… When we say we can only accept Absolute Exemption, we mean this. ... we believe war to be wrong. Thus we believe the same of Militarism, and thus we believe the same of Conscription, which is designed to equip the nation in its military and civil spheres for war. And so we say nothing in the world will induce us to accept any compromise or enter into any bargain with a Conscription Act.

Our repeated refusal of all these offers does not, however, signify unwillingness to render life service either to our fellow-countrymen or to our fellow-men in other nations. This duty of citizenship we have always welcomed … it is not the act of service to which we object but service imposed in such a way as to make us condone Conscription; and if we were released tomorrow with Absolute Exemption we should feel the obligations of citizenship more insistently than ever before.

 

But forced service under Conscription is morally worthless. Once allow that the State has the right to interfere in the lives of its members to the extent of demanding the taking or the sacrifice of life against their moral convictions, or the absolute disposal of their service without their consent, and you have embarked on a system of oppression that a hundred Russian Revolutions or American high-minded interventions will never compensate.

We are then so resolutely opposed to war and militarism, and so conscious of the value of liberty, that we will not condone conscription in any shape or form. We so prize the right of free service that we will not acquiesce in any variety of state slavery. That is why we refuse all these offers.