The daily Nome industrial worker., 1917-04-21
CONSCRPTlON.


 at the out set of the enforcement of cons,riptiou many workingmen would be drafted They will be utl- Ilzca in the industries which are subsidiary to the war, and will he none too numerous at that
 As ii is uow the productive capa- city oI the nation is 10 pe taxed to tbe utmost for the United States win hereafter have to fulfil the role ct general provider for the Entente in which Great Britain heretofore has. functioned almost to the point of eX- haustion.
 This will take up the energy Of all the available labor supply. and II inc extensive plans of the admln!S- tration are to be carried out, there will be little available surplus for re cruiting.
 But there is another field which will prove fertile enough for the en- listment of men for the army. These are the salaried employees as con trasted with the wage workers, and those smaller businessmen and mariners who can be very easily ais. pensed with in the social scheme.
 In this We can see an analogy a' to what will take place, actually accomplished in Great Britain Con scription affected very tew O. he working class. All who were oi military age were denied work Their places were taken by men ot mon military age where they could be dispensed with, an! where such superannuates could not be obtainto women and boys were utilized. 50 to affect them. no law was necessary A man who could not get work had to join the army and usually i'll nincty-niue cases out of a hundre he did so.
 But in Great Britain there was ar enormous number of clerks, counter. jumpers. petty bosses, teachers, civil service nondescrpts, businessmen $ sons or youthful partners, lower and upper middle clas men, whc scorned 10 realize themselves as working men, who were available They were also the comic supple ment sports. the nuts, the fniest- CTS ot the public house, the bettina ring. the race course, the athletic meetings. the foot ball ma, hes. Es sentially parasites they had usually enough education to get an easy jo' or enough money to live in enjoy ment without soilins their hands some of them enlisted at the start of the war, either through genuine patriotic feeling or through shame Many of them remained slackers and it was these that the draft act hl' hardest. COnscript officials made raids on football games, race meet ings. shows and even war dcmonst1a- tions and there they made their greatest haul of human fotsam of this kind ana made soldiers out ot them.
 It is the irony of fate that this useless and parasitic class had been the most demoustrative over the war. They cheercd at the war meet -ings. wore flags conspicuous'y shouted their desperate determina- lion and on paper and in words laid their precious persons on the altars of their country, They were de- lighted with the war when they did no fighting, and they loved nothing better than chorus about Soldiers of the King and the Bull Dog Breed. Several writers have bitterly ex- posed these noisy patriots. But il anyone thinks that war is going to change the ways of the lip servers and paper patriots or hypocritical fagomaniacs they have another guess coming
 The opposition to conscription is not likely to come very intensively from the working man. He Is con- scripted industrially year in and year out. The necessity of having to provide himself with the ways and means of living compels him to sell his labor. and political law compelling him to accept conscrip- tion will not change very much his position.
 Hence we think that much of this