that Ralston also gave his approval. Ralston was still in the United States and from his hotel in Los Angeles telephoned Crerar for his advice and learned that he still favored acceptance. Crerar then submitted to the cabinet a memo stating his professional opinion as a soldier that there was "no military risk" to sending a force to Hong Kong as he optimistically concluded that sending two battalions to Hong Kong would deter Japan from war. Largely for domestic political reasons, the Liberal Mackenzie King accepted the request on 29 September 1941. In 1917, the issue of conscription had caused the Liberal Party to split between its English-Canadian wing who supported conscription and its French-Canadian wing opposed to conscription. In 1917, the Canadian Corps had taken such heavy losses that the government of Robert Borden had the stark choice of either pulling out the Canadian Corps out of action, which was tantamount to dropping out of the war or bringing in conscription to provide sufficient manpower to keep the Canadian Corps fighting. By opting for the second option, it led to the Conscription crisis of 1917, which posed the gravest threat to national unity yet seen as the policy of conscription led to the first demands that Quebec secede from Canada. Mackenzie King was determined that in the Second World War that his Liberal Party would not be likewise broken into two by the conscription issue as it had been in 1917. Mackenzie King seems to have genuinely believed if his government followed the same policies that Borden had in 1917-18 that it would cause a civil war. To avoid dealing with the issue of conscription, Mackenzie King tried to keep the Canadian Army from seeing action, reasoning that if the Army fought no battles, it would take no losses, and thus there would be no need for conscription. For much of the Second World War, King preferred to limit Canada's contributions to the war to the struggle in the air and on the sea as the best way to avoid the level of casualties that would lead to demands for overseas conscription. By 1941, the fact that after two years of war that the Canadian Army had not seen action once while the armies of the other nations of the "Commonwealth family" had all seen extensive action was leading to domestic criticism of Mackenzie King. By September 1941, many