them the essentialness of their mission and assured them without cease that all the wisdom of this earth is as nothing unless served, covered and protected by force, that the mild goddess of peace cannot move unless accompanied by the god of war, and that every great act of peace must be pro¬ tected and helped by force. In this way the idea of military service came to them in a far more living form —not in the petrified sense of the souls of superannuated officials serving the dead authority of a dead State, but in the living realization of the duty of each man to offer his life that his nation might live, at all times and everywhere.
How those young men came up to the scratch ! Like a swarm of hornets they rushed forth upon the disturbers of our meetings, regardless of superiority of numbers, however great, careless of wounds and bloody sacrifice, filled to the brim with the great idea, the holy mission to clear the way for our Movement.
As early as the summer of 1920 the troops for main¬ tenance of order were gradually assuming definite form, and by the spring of 1921 they were divided by degrees into companies, which again were divided into smaller sections.
This had become urgently necessary, since in the meantime our activities as regards meetings had been continuously increasing.
The organization of our bodies of men for keeping order at meetings was the means of clearing up a very difficult question. Up till then the movement had possessed no Party token and no flag. The lack of these symbols was not only a disadvantage then, but it was intolerable in view of the future, since members of the Party had no distinctive token of membership, and for the future it was intolerable to be without some token in the nature of a symbol of the Movement which might be set against that of the Internationals.
More than once in my youth the psychological importance of such a symbol had been clearly evident to me from the point of view of