d in their operation to a year at a time, and were passed under incessant protest. Grants to maintain the army were similarly restricted. Every interval of peace witnessed the rapid reduction o

election was to be made by ballot, to the complete exclusion of the voluntary principle. During the Napoleonic war, when invasion seemed imminent, the militia was several times called out and embodied. In 1803 an actual levy en masse of all men between the ages of seventeen

e militia declined. An effort was made in 1852 to revive it, and again the underlying principle of compulsion was explicitly recognized. The Militia Act of that year[22] contains the provision: "In case it appears to H.M. -- that the number of men required ... cannot be raised by voluntary enlistment ... or in case of actual invasion or imminent danger thereof, it shall be lawful for H.M. -- to order and direct that the number of men so required ... shall be raised by ballot as herein provide

not expressly reaffirm the continued validity of the compulsory principle of service which from the earliest times had been the basis of the militia. But, though it did not expressly reaffirm it, it left it absolutely

TNO

Geo. I

iamentary Debates,

6 Vict. c

ers from sixteenth century onwards, s

Ed. VII