In a recent interview with Lord Wolseley, the visitor states that he
obtained from that officer the following vehement declaration in favour
of enforced and universal military service:—
‘You develop his physical power, you make a man of him in body and in
strength, as the schools he had been at previously had made a man of him
mentally. You teach him habits of cleanliness, tidiness, punctuality,
reverence for superiors, and obedience to those above him, and you do
this in a way that no species of machinery that I have ever been
acquainted with could possibly fulfil. In fact, you give him all the
qualities calculated to make him a thoroughly useful and loyal citizen
when he leaves the colours and returns home to civil life. And of this I
am quite certain, that the nation which has the courage and the
patriotism to insist on all its sons undergoing this species of
education and training for at least two or three generations, will
consist of men and women far better calculated to be the fathers and
mothers of healthy and vigorous children than the nation which allows
its young people to grow up without any physical training although they
may cram their heads with all sorts of scientific knowledge in their
national schools. In other words, the race in two or three generations
will be stronger, more vigorous, and therefore braver, and more
calculated to make the nation to which they belong great and powerful.’
It is obvious that such a rhapsody could only be uttered by one who has
never studied the actual effects of conscription on a population, but
speaks merely of what he has been led to believe is its effect from what
he has watched on the drill-grounds of countries little otherwise known
to him. It is a sweeping assertion, still less grounded on fact than its
corresponding declaration, that school makes a man of its pupil
mentally, which is by no means always or inevitably the case. I could
not, of course, propose to contravene any purely military statement of a
military celebrity, but this composite and wholesale and most amazing
declaration I do dispute, and I think that I know more of the effects of
compulsory service than does its speaker. Lord Wolseley has never
certainly dwelt, even for a short time, in those countries which are
cursed by conscription. He sees that the battalions of conscripted
armies seem to him to march well and manœuvre finely, and he concludes,
with natural military prejudice, that the results, moral and mental, of
conscription on a nation are admirable, and are unattainable in any
other manner.
To begin with, he considers evidently as beyond all dispute that the
soldier is the highest type of humanity, which may be doubted, and that
obedience is the highest human virtue, which may be also doubted. All
the finest freedoms of mankind have been obtained, not by obedient, but
by utterly disobedient, persons; persons who, if they had failed, would
have been thrown into prison or sent to scaffolds. Obedience in the
child is the first and the highest virtue, because the whole well-being
of the child, material and moral, depends on it. But the man, to be a
man, must be courageous enough to disobey if disobedience be needed by
honour, justice, or wisdom. There are moments, even in war and even in a
soldier’s life, when the magnificent daring which disobeys is a more
precious quality than the primmer and more decorous one of unquestioning
deference to commands received. In older times the modes of warfare or
the manner of civil life left much freer scope to idiosyncrasy and
choice, much wider space for the play of spirit and originality. Modern
warfare, like modern education, tends yearly to draw tighter the bonds
with which it buckles down all natural growth of character and
possibility of adventure. Mechanical reproduction is the chief note of
military effort as of civil. The soldier, like the civilian, every year
tends more and more to become only one infinitesimal atom of a rivet in
the enormous and overwhelming engine of the State.
To a young man of genius, or even of merely great talent, it is certain
that the enforced term of military service would be sorely and indelibly
injurious. Genius does not easily obey, and all the harsh, unlovely,
stupid routine of camp and barrack would be so odious to it that a youth
of brilliant gifts and promise might easily be compromised and
condemned, continually and fatally, in his passage through the ranks.
Even were such a youth obedient to his duties, the sheer waste of time,
the dispiriting influences of a long period of tedious, irksome, and
detested occupations, would have the most depressing and dwarfing effect
upon his talent. History teems with instances, which it would be
tiresome to enumerate, in which revolt and refusal have produced for the
world all that we most prize of liberty, of conscience, and of conduct.
Revolt and refusal are disobedience, and they have frequently been quite
as noble and fruitful as the more passive virtue of obedience, which not
seldom has taken the form of timorous submission to, and execution of,
conscious wrong. Would Lord Wolseley have admired or condemned a
_mousquetaire_ of the Louvre who should have refused to fire on the
Huguenots from the windows?
But were obedience the first of virtues, conscription does not teach it:
it enforces it, which is a very different thing. You do not put a
quality into a man because you taught him and forced from him by fear
the simulacrum of it. Because the conscript has for a term of years, to
his bitter hatred and despite, been compelled to obey at the point of
the bayonet, he does not thereby become a more willingly obedient man;
he will, on the contrary, as soon as he is set free, revenge himself by
insubordination to his parents, his employers, his superiors, in all the
ways which may be open to him. The obedience exacted from the soldier is
taken by force: he obeys because he knows that those stronger than
himself will punish him badly if he do not. This is not an ennobling
sentiment, nor is it one which can lend any beauty or nobility to a
character. You are not a better or a kinder master because you have been
a slave, nilly-willy, for three of the best years of your life.
Obedience which is rendered out of true veneration may be a tonic to the
nature which is bent by it; but the obedience which is merely rendered,
as all conscripts’ obedience is, because if it be not given the irons
and the cell will follow, does no one any moral good, teaches no virtue
which can be productive hereafter. There is no servant, groom, artisan,
farm-labourer, or hireling of any kind so lazy, so impudent, so
insubordinate, and so useless as the young man who has recently come out
from his term of compulsory service. It is natural that it should be so.
As we cannot create morality by Act of Parliament, so we cannot create
character by the knapsack and the cross-belts. Family education, even
school education, can in a measure mould character, because it is the
long, free, malleable, tender years of childhood and boyhood upon which
it works; but after twenty-one, the character does not vitally alter
much, though it will assimilate vice and vanity with fatal quickness.
When Lord Wolseley utters the preposterous declaration that the
education given by conscription teaches a lad ‘all the qualities
calculated to make him a thoroughly useful and loyal citizen,’ has he
the least idea of what is the actual moral state of the barrack-yards
and barrack-rooms of the armies of the continent? Has he ever reflected
on the inevitable results of the pell-mell confusion with which the
clean-living young sons of gentle-people and commercial people are flung
together with the lowest ruffians from the cellars of the cities and the
caves of the mountains? Will he even credit how constantly the healthy,
hard-working, obedient lad from the farmside or the counting-house, who
left his people, happy in his duties and clean in body and mind, comes
back to them, when his time is over, cankered body and soul, eaten up by
disease, scornful of simple ways, too useless to work, too depraved to
wed, too puffed up with foul desires and braggart conceits to earn the
bread which he considers his father and brothers bound to labour to
provide for him?
When the youth has had purity and strength of character and of mind
enough to resist the contagion in which he has been steeped, he will in
nine instances out of ten be a spoilt agriculturist, artisan, student,
labourer. He has been torn from his chosen pursuit at the moment when he
had begun to fairly master it, and he is spoilt for it, he is out of
joint with it, he forgets its cunning. If he were engaged in any of
those arts which require the utmost delicacy of touch, the ends of his
fingers have become coarse, rough, blunted, and have lost all their
sensitiveness; the porcelain-painters, the jewellers’ artificers, the
makers of the inimitable _articles de Paris_, suffer immeasurably from
the injury done to their finger-tips by barrack work; whilst on the
other hand the horny palms of the lads who push the plough and use the
spade have grown so softened by what is to them the lighter work of the
barracks, that they writhe with pain when they go out on their farms and
the skin soon is stripped off the raw flesh.
To a military commander it is natural that the diffusion of the military
temper should appear the beau ideal of improvement. Every class has its
own intrinsic vanity, and sees in itself the salt and savour of society.
But in truth there is a distinct menace to the world, in the present
generalisation of the military temper, which is and must always be
accompanied by narrowness and domination. What the young man acquires
from his years of enforced service is much more often the hectoring and
bullying temper characteristic of the soldier to the civilian, than it
is the obedience, humility and loyalty which Lord Wolseley believes that
he brings away with him. It is certainly most unjust that the soldier
should be regarded, as in England, inferior to the civilian, and hustled
out of theatres and concert-rooms; but it is still worse for the
community when the soldier can fire on citizens, slash at greybeards,
and run through children with impunity, as he can do in Germany, at his
will and pleasure.
The very rules and qualities which are inevitable for the well-being of
the soldier are injurious to the character of the civilian: mill-like
routine, and unquestioning acceptance of orders, are not the makers of
virile or high-minded men in civil life, however necessary they may be
in battalions. Linesmen and gunners are admirable and useful persons,
but they are not the supreme salt of the earth that we should endeavour
to make all humanity in their likeness. The military education creates a
certain sort of man, an excellent sort of man in his way, and for his
purpose; but not the man who is the best product of the human race.
The story of Tell may be a myth or a fact, but whichever it be, the
refusal to bow to the cap on the pole represents a heroism and a temper
finer than any which militarism can teach, and which are, indeed,
altogether opposed to it Even were the regiment the school which Lord
Wolseley is pleased to believe it, why should he suppose that there are
no others as good or better? The old apprenticeships, which have been
done away with, were strict in discipline and insistent on obedience,
and they are now considered too severe in consequence. Yet they were
schools which kept a youth constantly within the practice of his art or
trade. Conscription takes him away from it. It unsettles a young man at
the precise moment in his life when it is most necessary that he should
be confirmed in his tastes for and practice of his chosen occupation. It
sends him from his village to some city, perchance hundreds of miles
away, and keeps shifting him from place to place, imbuing him with the
sickly fever of unrest, which is the malady of the age, and rendering
his old, quiet, home-rooted life impossible to him. There can be nothing
worse for him than the barrack life; at times very harsh and onerous and
cruel, but with long, lazy pauses in it of absolute idleness, when the
lad, lying in the sun on the stone benches, dozes and boozes his hours
away, and the vicious rogue can poison at will the ear of the simple
fool.
Lord Wolseley considers it an admirable machinery for creating citizens;
it is not so, because the individual it creates is a mere machine, with
no will of his own, with all virility and spirit beaten and cursed out
of him, with no ideal set before him but to wait on the will of his
corporal or captain. A soldier is at no time a good ‘all round’ man; the
military temper and standard are, and must be, always narrow. In its
most odious and offensive forms, as in Germany, it amounts to a brutal
and most dangerous tyranny, overbearing in its intolerable vanity, and
holding civilian life of no more account than dust.
Lord Wolseley seems to imagine that where conscription exists every man
serves. In no country does every man serve. Even in Germany a very large
proportion escape through physique or through circumstances, through
voluntary mutilation or emigration. It is fortunate that it is so, for I
can conceive nothing so appalling to the world as would be the forcing
of the military temper down the throats of its entire multitudes.
Militarism is the negation of individuality, of originality, and of true
liberty. Its sombre shadow is spread over Europe; its garotting collar
of steel is on the throat of the people. ’Forty-eight has produced
nothing better than the universal rule of the tax-gatherer and the
gendarme. The French Republic has the same corruption, the same
tyrannies, and the same coercion by bayonets for which the two Empires
were reviled. Germany is a hell of despotism, prosecution and espionage.
Russia, a purely military nation, is given up to torture, corruption,
filth, and drunkenness. Italy has recovered political freedom only to
fall prostrate at the feet of her old foe, who has ‘the double beak to
more devour.’ This is all that militarism and its offspring,
conscription, has done for the three nations who most loudly protested
their free principles. In the latter, at least, the whole people sweat,
groan, perish under the burdens laid upon them for the maintenance of
the vast battalions of young men imprisoned in barrack-yards in enforced
idleness and semi-starvation, whilst the fruitful lands of the Veneto,
of Apulia, of the Emilia, of Sardinia, and of Calabria lie untilled
under the blue skies, the soil crying for its sons, the spade and the
scythe rusting whilst the accursed sabre and musket shine.
When the gain of what is termed a whole nation under arms is estimated,
the exaggeration of the pompous phrase hides the nakedness of the fact
that large numbers of young men are lost to their country by the means
to which they resort to escape military service. In Italy and Germany
these may be counted by legions: in France fugitives from the military
law are less numerous, because in France men are more wedded to the
native soil, and take to service more gaily and more naturally, but in
Italy and Germany thousands flock to emigrant ships, thus choosing
lifelong self-expatriation; and every year, as the military and fiscal
burdens grow heavier, will lads go away by preference to lands where,
however hard be the work, the dreaded voice of the drill-sergeant cannot
reach them, and they can ‘call their soul their own.’ Patriotism is a
fine quality, no doubt, but it does not accord with the chill and
supercilious apathy which characterises the general teaching and temper
of this age, and a young man may be pardoned if he deem that his country
is less a mother worthy of love than a cruel and unworthy stepmother,
when she demands three of the fairest years of his life to be spent in a
barrack-yard, and wrings his ears till the blood drops from them, or
beats him about the head with the butt of a musket, because he does not
hold his chin high enough, or shift his feet quickly enough.
For a hundred years humanity in this generation has been shouting,
screaming, fighting, weeping, chaunting, bleeding in search and struggle
for various forms of what has been called liberty. The only result
hitherto deducible from this is the present fact that the nations of
Europe are all watching each other like a number of sullen and
suspicious dogs. We are told that this is peace. It is such excellent
and perfect peace that it is merely their mutual uncertainty of each
other’s strength which keeps them from flying at each other’s throats.
It is not peace which Europe enjoys; it is an armed truce, with all the
exhausting strain on the body politic and on the exchequer which must
accompany such a state of things. Conscription enables this state of
tension to exist, and the impatience which conscription excites in the
people renders them perpetually thirsty and feverish for war. They fancy
that war would end it; would give them some good in return for all their
sufferings. ‘We cannot go on like this,’ is the universal feeling on the
Continent; it is the feeling created by conscription. Conscription is
the pole-axe with which the patient labourer or citizen is brained, and
it is cut from the wood of his own roof-tree. It is possible, probable,
that conscription will be enforced in England also, with the many other
forms of servitude which democracy assures us is liberty; but it is
certain that when it is so, the country will be no longer the England
which we have known in history.