- National Service League
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The National Service League was a British pressure group founded in February 1902 to alert the country to the inadequacy of the British Army to fight a major war and to propose the solution of national service.
The League argued for four years of compulsory military training for home defence for every men aged between eighteen and thirty.[1] Compulsory military service—conscription—was not popular and "aroused the long-standing antipathy toward standing armies and smacked of continental-style militarism".[2] By October 1904 it had only 1,725 members[3] but membership grew to 21,500 in December 1908 and it claimed a further 30,000 "adherents".[4] The circulation of the League's journal, The Nation in Arms, grew to 17,500.[4] Fear of Germany and a possible German invasion of Britain, coupled with the belief that the Army and not the Navy could stop an invasion underlay many of the League's proposals.[5]
Its first president was Lord Raglan, who then offered the presidency to Lord Roberts in 1905, who agreed.
Notes
- ^ Gregory D. Phillips, The Diehards. Aristocratic Society and Politics in Edwardian England (Cambridge, Massachusetts: Harvard University Press, 1979), pp. 99-100.
- ^ Frans Coetzee, For Party or Country. Nationalism and the Dilemmas of Popular Conservatism in Edwardian England (New York: Oxford University Press, 1990), p. 39.
- ^ Coetzee, p. 41.
- ^ a b Coetzee, p. 115.
- ^ Phillips, pp. 100-101.
See also
Categories:- 1902 establishments in the United Kingdom
- Political pressure groups of the United Kingdom
- Conscription in the United Kingdom
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