From ‘Education and Honour’, The Spectator, 17 July 1915:
Under a voluntary system—which indeed takes off the lid, as General Baden-Powell would say—service rendered to the country depends entirely upon a man’s own feelings as to what he ought to do. In other words, his service will be in proportion to his recognition of personal obligation—in proportion to his honour. In what are called the upper classes the war has shown this sense of honour to be extremely high. The young man who has been to a Public School or to one of the Universities and who remains at home without adequate excuse doing nothing is so rare as to be very conspicuous.
In other classes it is otherwise. Among the so-called lowest class men have responded pretty freely to the call. The so-called lower middle class, though in this there are of course brilliant exceptions, has perhaps answered less freely than any other class. In this class may be found, we fancy, most of the smug complacency which assumes that the fighting has necessarily to be done by other people, and that the Empire and the home will somehow be saved by efforts in which it is not necessary to take any part. It is an outlook upon life very curious and unlovely in its egotism and detachment. It would be preposterous, however, to claim a much higher degree of virtue for the so-called upper classes than for those below. In many respects their vices exceed those of other classes. But now that the lid has been taken off, and we can look inside and see active patriotism arranged, as it were, in its various strata, it would be untruthful to deny that the sense of honourable obligation to serve is highest in the highest classes. We have no doubt that if an impartial Radical statistician were appointed to state the amount of service rendered according to classes, he would have to admit that the palm was carried off by the effete families whose heads sit in the House of Lords.
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