The subject of this thesis is the conscription debate in Great Britain in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, defined in a social-cultural context. The basic assumption is that a process of cultural conditioning works to determine human actions; actions therefore can be understood by examining cultural conditioning. That examination in this thesis is limited to a study of social and intellectual influences relating to conscription as they acted upon various groups in the English community prior to the Great War. The thesis also discusses the 1915-1916 crisis over actual adoption of conscription, in light of these influences.