white men from seventeen to fifty years in the Army. It stated:

1. That all white men, residents of the Confederate States, between the ages of seventeen and fifty shall be in the military service of the Confederate States during the war.

2. That all between the ages of eighteen and forty-five now in service shall be retained during the present war in the same organisations in which they were serving at the passage of this Act, unless they are regularly discharged or transferred. . .

4. That no person shall be relieved from the operation of this Act by reason of having been discharged where no disability now exists, nor by reason of having furnished a substitute; but no person who has heretofore been exempted on account of religious opinions and paid the required tax, shall be required to render military service.

5. That all between seventeen and eighteen years and forty-five and fifty years of age shall form a reserve corps, not to serve out of the State in which they reside. . . .

7. That any person of the last-named failing to attend at the place of rendezvous within thirty days, as required by the President, without a sufficient reason, shall be made to serve in the field during the war.

The American Civil War had begun in April 1861. At its commencement the people in the North had believed that, owing to their overwhelming superiority in numbers, in wealth, and in resources of every kind, they would be able to subdue the insurgent States by armies raised on the voluntary principle within a reasonable time. However, the war dragged on interminably. Enthusiasm for volunteering diminished, men became cool and indifferent. Owing to the reduced number of workers wages rose very greatly throughout the Union, and men turned rather to the factory than to the Army. Week by week the expenditure in blood and treasure increased. At last the people in the North began to see the necessity of abandoning the voluntary

system and of imitating the Southern States by introducing compulsory service. It will be of interest to see the way in which public opinion veered round. In his Report of March 17, 1866, the Provost-Marshal-General James B. Fry, the head of the great Recruiting Department of the Northern armies, described this change in opinion under the heading 'Public Recognition of the Necessity of a General Conscription,' as follows:

During the latter part of 1862 the necessity for a radical change in the method of raising troops in order to prosecute the war to a successful issue became more and more apparent. The demand for reinforcements from the various armies in the field steadily and largely exceeded the current supply of men. The old agencies for filling the ranks proved more and more ineffective. It was evident that the efforts of the Government for the suppression of the rebellion would fail without resort to the unpopular, but nevertheless truly republican, measure of conscription. The national authorities, no less than the purest and wisest minds in Congress, and intelligent and patriotic citizens throughout the country, perceived that, besides a more reliable, regular, and abundant supply of men, other substantial benefits would be derived from the adoption and enforcement of the principle that every citizen, not incapacitated by physical or mental disability, owes military service to the country in the hour of extremity. It would effectually do away with the unjust and burdensome disproportion in the number of men furnished by different States and localities.

But it was not easy to convince the public mind at once of the justice and wisdom of conscription. It was a novelty, contrary to the traditional military policy of the nation. The people had become more accustomed to the enjoyment of privileges than to the fulfilment of duties under the General Government, and hence beheld the prospect of compulsory service in the Army with an unreasonable dread. Among the labouring classes especially it produced great uneasiness. Fortunately the loyal political leaders and Press early realised the urgency of conscription, and by judicious agitation gradually reconciled the public to it.

When the enrolment Act was introduced in Congress in the following winter the patriotic people of the North were willing to see it become a law.

Early in 1863 the Bill introducing conscription was placed before Congress at Washington, and was discussed by both Houses. The debates were brief and the speeches delivered are most interesting and enlightening at the present moment, when the principle of conscription is still discussed not only in Great Britain but throughout the British Empire. Let us listen to the principal arguments in favour of conscription.

Mr. Dunn, representative of Indiana, urged the necessity of conscription in the following words:

The necessity is upon us to pass a Bill of this character. We have many regiments in the field greatly reduced in numbers. . . . It is due to the gallant men remaining in these regiments that their numbers should be promptly filled up. This cannot be done by voluntary enlistment, on account of the influence of just such speeches as are made here and elsewhere denouncing the war; many make a clamour against the war as an excuse for not volunteering. Moreover, a draft is the cheapest, fairest, and best mode of raising troops. It is to be regretted this mode was not adopted at first. Then all would have shared alike in the perils and glories of the war. Every family would have been represented in the field, and every soldier would have had sympathy and support from his friends at home. The passage of this Bill will give evidence to the rebels that the nation is summoning all its energies to the conflict, and it will be proof to foreign nations that we are prepared to meet promptly any intermeddling in our domestic strife. The Government has a right in war to command the services of its citizens, whom it protects in war as well as in peace. We, as legislators, must not shrink from the discharge of our high responsibility.

Mr. Thomas, Representative of Massachusetts, stated: For the last six or nine months a whole party-a strong party-has deliberately entered into a combination to dis

courage, to prevent, and as far as in it lay to prohibit, the volunteering of the people of the country as soldiers in our army. Members of that party have gone from house to house, from town to town, and from city to city urging their brethren not to enlist in the armies of the nation, and giving them all sorts of reasons for that advice. . .

Mr. Speaker, this is a terrible Bill; terrible in the powers it confers upon the executive, terrible in the duty and burden it imposes upon the citizen. I meet the suggestion by one as obvious and cogent, and that is that the exigency is a terrible one and calls for all the powers with which the Government is invested. . .

The powers of Congress, within the scope of the Constitution, are supreme and strike directly to the subject and hold him in its firm, its iron grasp. I repeat what at an early day I asserted upon this floor, that there is not a human being within the territory of the United States, black or white, bond or free, whom this Government is not capable of taking in its right hand and using for its military service whenever the defence of the country requires, and of this Congress alone must judge. The question of use is a question of policy only.. It is, in effect, a question to this nation of life or death. We literally have no choice.

Mr. Wilson, Senator for Massachusetts, said:

We are now engaged in a gigantic struggle for the preservation of the life of the nation. . . . If we mean to maintain the supremacy of the Constitution and the laws, if we mean to preserve the unity of the Republic, if we mean that America shall live and have a position and name among the nations, we must fill the broken and thinned ranks of our wasted battalions.

The issue is now clearly represented to the country for the acceptance or rejection of the American people: an inglorious peace with a dismembered Union and a broken nation, on the one hand, or war fought out until the rebellion is crushed beneath its iron heel. Patriotism accepts the bloody issues of war, rather than peace purchased with the dismemberment of the Republic and the death of the nation.

If we accept peace, disunion, death, then we may speedily

summon home again our armies; if we accept war, until the flag of the Republic waves over every foot of our united country, then we must see to it that the ranks of our armies, broken by toil, disease, and death, are filled again with the health and vigour of life. To fill the thinned ranks of our battalions we must again call upon the people. The immense numbers already summoned to the field, the scarcity and high rewards of labour, press upon all of us the conviction that the ranks of our wasted regiments cannot be filled again by the old system of volunteering. If volunteers will not respond to the call of the country, then we must resort to the involuntary system. . . .

Senator MacDougall of California stated:

I regretted much, when the war was first organised, that the conscription rule did not obtain. I went from the extreme east to the extreme west of the loyal States. I found some districts where some bold leaders brought out all the young men and sent them or led them to the field. In other districts, and they were the most numerous, the people made no movement towards the maintenance of the war; there were whole towns and cities, I may say, where no one volunteered to shoulder a musket and no one offered to lead them into the service. The whole business has been unequal and wrong from the first. The rule of conscription should have been the rule to bring out men of all classes and make it equal throughout the country. . . .

Mr. Sargent, Representative of California, said:

For a want of a general enrolment of the forces of the United States and a systematic calling out of those forces, we have experienced all the inconveniences of a volunteer system, with its enormous expense, ill discipline and irregular efforts, and have depended upon spasmodic efforts of the people, elated or depressed by the varying fortunes of war or the rise or fall of popular favourites in the Army. I believe I hazard nothing in saying that we should have lost fewer men in the field and from disease and been much nearer the end of this destructive war had we earlier availed