Conscription
In 1812, a new system was introduced, requiring all males between age 20 and 25 to serve in the armed forces twelve days a year, changing in 1858 to four weeks per two years. At the same time, the new allotment system remained in use up until 1901, when mandatory conscription, with 8–9 months of military service, was introduced. The allotment system was finally abolished in 1901. From that time, regiments began to be garrisoned in towns instead of being spread all over the province with a training ground as the only common meeting place. As tenemented soldiers were contracted by the government for as long as they were fit for service, and as they could not be dismissed, some soldiers lived under the allotment system long after 1901, the last one retiring as late as 1961. Through the reform, the regiments' local connections were partially lost, as conscripts were not necessarily from the regiments' respective provinces. Before the reform, soldiers of the same company generally stemmed from the same village and region.
Read more about this topic: Swedish Allotment System
Famous quotes containing the word conscription:
“We have our difficulties, true; but we are a wiser and a tougher nation than we were in 1932. Never have there been six years of such far flung internal preparedness in all of history. And this has been done without any dictator’s power to command, without conscription of labor or confiscation of capital, without concentration camps and without a scratch on freedom of speech, freedom of the press or the rest of the Bill of Rights.”
—Franklin D. Roosevelt (1882–1945)
“No Raven’s wing can stretch the flight so far
As the torn bandrols of Napoleon’s war.
Choose then your climate, fix your best abode,
He’ll make you deserts and he’ll bring you blood.
How could you fear a dearth? have not mankind,
Tho slain by millions, millions left behind?
Has not conscription still the power to weild
Her annual faulchion o’er the human field?
A faithful harvester!”
—Joel Barlow (1754–1812)