THE INTERNAL FOE
Britain's autumn of complacency faded unruffled into a winter and spring
of lassitude and bungle. Nothing, no matter how ominous or
catastrophic, seemed capable of rousing the nation to the immensity of
its emergency. The Kingdom was aflame with recruiting posters, in ever
increasingly lurid hues and language, but with amazingly little
red-blooded interest in or enthusiasm for the war. If one commented on
the oppressive and disconcerting nonchalance of the populace, one was
called a "Dismal Jimmy," or a "professional whimperer" whose mind was
poisoned by the "Northcliffe Press." If you remarked that indications
were countless that the enemy was vastly more alive to the
stupendousness of the moment than England seemed to be, you were set
down for a "pro-German," and the patriot whose guest you were when you
ventured that suggestion never invited you to dinner again. If you were
an Englishman, you were simply snubbed henceforth. If you were a
foreigner, your name may have been handed in to Scotland Yard as that of
an "alien" worth watching. Whoever you were, or whatever your views,
unless they represented unadulterated admiration of unshakable British
calm, you were headed straight for a crushing rebuke. Retribution took
the form of branding you either as pitiably ignorant of "British
character" or not knowing history well enough to realize that the
British are "slow starters" and "always muddle through somehow." You
were advised to squander your qualms on a needier cause. The "boys of
the bulldog breed" were "all right."
You wondered, if you were a blithering, neurotic American, for example,
what _would_ stir the British temperament into something faintly
resembling ardor and emotion. Zeppelins came, despite Mr. Churchill's
swagger that a horde of "aeroplane hornets" was ready to greet and sting
them. They came periodically, leaving destruction in their wake, but
the coast towns are one hundred fifty miles away from London, and nobody
cared. They had demonstrated, it was true, that England was no longer
an island, but "they can't reach London--that's one sure thing," and,
"anyway, the time to worry about that was when they tried it." Was not
the metropolis magnificently equipped with searchlights, even if the
sky-pirates should attempt the impossible and try to pick their way up
the Thames in the dark? Then, always, there were those "hornets," and
"British coolness."
"Scarborough Shelled by German Cruisers!" So ran the newspaper posters
in the streets at midday of December 16th, 1914, an announcement grim
with historical import. For the first time in centuries the sacred
shores of these sea-girt isles had felt the impact of bombardment. The
raid extended far along the Yorkshire coast. Whitby and Hartlepool had
been attacked--there were a hundred deaths in the latter alone.
Material damage was extensive; homes, shops, hotels, churches, hospitals
were struck and shattered. Yet England was "calm." It did not matter
in the least that there was a list of seven hundred Britons dead and
injured, or that the Kaiser's "Canal Fleet" apparently _was_ able to
risk a sortie in the North Sea. What mattered most was that the
islanders still alive were _unmoved and immovable_. That the
"baby-killers" by air and water had signally failed to "excite" or
"frighten" the country was the circumstance which made incomparably the
liveliest appeal to the imagination. Kitchener's astute recruiting
advertisers shrieked "Remember Yarmouth!" (where the Zeppelins had been)
and "Avenge Scarborough!" across the top of their newest posters, but
West End London, where the seats of the mighty are, and where the
opinion which gives tone to national thought is molded, remained
Gibraltarian. A flock of British aeroplanes assailed Cuxhaven on
Christmas Day by way of "reprisal" for the intermittent Zeppelin raids
over English territory. The attack was not noteworthy in its results,
but it gave a fresh fillip to British confidence that "everything was
all right."
As a matter of fact, "everything" was about as all wrong as it could be.
Beneath the surface of national life a volcano was boiling and
sputtering, and though it gave early and unmistakable evidence of its
presence, British calm with invincible indifference tossed it off as a
sporadic manifestation unworthy of serious consideration. I refer to
the Labor question--to trade-unionism's revolt against reorganization of
industry for the purposes of war, and to its stubborn opposition to the
introduction of compulsory military service. As long ago as January, the
Labor controversy raised its hydra-head, and yet, in October, despite
nine months of subsequent turmoil, it only began to be recognized for
what it is--the peril which threatens these isles with danger hardly
less gigantic than invasion itself. It is the decade-old British story
of temporizing with impending menace, oblivious of its portent, serenely
conscious only that it, too, can be "muddled through," like everything
else in Britain's glorious past. It is the spirit in which Britain
almost _invited_ war with Germany, the flaming warnings of which the
islands had for years.
The workmen on the Clyde, the engineers, mechanics and artisans
responsible for the maintenance of British life itself--for in their
hands rests the creation of the ironclads to preserve England from
invasion and the merchantmen to bring food to her shores--were the first
to cause the volcano to rumble. They objected to "overtime." The
process of "speeding up" in every department, due to the iron
necessities of war, was violating the most sacred traditions of
trade-unionism. If not forcibly checked, practises tolerated in the name
of emergency were in imminent peril of becoming fixed rules. The Clyde
workmen struck. They paid no heed to Sir George Askwith, the Chief
Industrial Commissioner, when he declared that "the requirements of the
nation were being seriously endangered." Jellicoe urgently needed those
six new destroyers waiting to be riveted. But the Clyde engineers
wanted the overtime question settled, and settled in their way; and
until it was, the navy could go hang. Englishmen were disappointed when
they read the news from Glasgow and Greenock, but they were not upset.
Matters would "right themselves." Trade-unionists were an "unreasonable
lot." But they always "came around." At any rate, there was no cause
to "worry."
One man, a big man, was "worrying." He was Lloyd-George, whose
specialty is taking bulls by their horns. Being Welsh, it was not
"un-English" for him to dignify an emergency with its intrinsic
importance and act accordingly. He grasped instantly the menace which
the situation on the Clyde conjured up. With decision of Napoleonic
boldness in a politician to whom report ascribed the ambition to hoist
himself into a dictatorship on the shoulders of the "masses,"
Lloyd-George determined to "speed up" industrial England for war by Act
of Parliament. If labor would not voluntarily throw trade-union dogma
to the wind when national existence was at stake, the possibility of
imperiling it should simply be taken from them. Thereupon he introduced
in the House of Commons an amendment to the "Defense of the Realm Act,"
which provided for nothing short of Industrial Conscription. Emerged
later as the Munitions Act, it conferred enormous powers upon the
Government. Reduced to essentials, it robbed Labor of the right to
strike. It forbade lockouts, as well. It provided for compulsory
arbitration of all disputes. It withheld from a workman the right to
leave one employment and take another. It obliterated primarily and
absolutely that holiest of holy trade-union regulations, by which output
is restricted. On the other hand, it provided for the limitation of
employers' profit by establishing a system of "controlled
establishments," _i.e._, works engaged exclusively in the production of
munitions for the Government and whose financial operations could,
therefore, be exactly checked.
The Munitions of War Act was Great Britain's longest step in the
direction of Industrial Socialism. It emanated with singular
appropriateness from Lloyd-George, the father of the German-imported
system of old age pensions and workmen's insurance introduced six years
previous. Trade-unionism was aghast at the radicalism of the new
proposals, which Mr. Balfour rightly described as the "most drastic" for
which British Parliamentary sanction had ever been sought. Lloyd-George
only partially subdued Labor's misgivings by pledging the Government's
word that the scheme applied for the duration of the war only, and that
with peace the old order of things would be automatically reestablished.
The men on the Clyde had no sooner gone back to work, reluctantly and
sullen after a "compromise" settlement, when the dockers of Manchester,
Birkenhead and Liverpool struck on the overtime issue. Lord Kitchener,
while reviewing troops in the district, formally notified the Dock
Laborers' Union that if they "did not do all in their power to help
carry the war to a successful conclusion," he would have to "consider
what steps would be necessary" to hammer patriotism into their souls.
"K.'s" unambiguous language signally failed to impress the dockers.
They remained on strike. A deputation of shipbuilding and shipowning
firms now waited on Lloyd-George. They told him that drink, more truly
the curse of the British working classes than of any other in the world,
was at the bottom of the rebellious, lazy spirit of the men. They urged
prohibition for the period of the war. The deputation declared that
eighty per cent. of avoidable loss of time could be ascribed to drink.
Lloyd-George sympathized with that view. "We are, plainly," he said,
"fighting Germany, Austria and drink, and as far as I can see, the
greatest of these three deadly foes is drink."
Now the miners became restless. They demanded a revision of the wage
scale in accordance with the mine-owners' notoriously swollen war
profits. Their Federation decided that notice should be given on April
1st to terminate all existing agreements at the end of June. There were
hints that the miners intended pressing not only for a "war bonus," but
for an advance of twenty per cent. on current wages. From the pits of
South Wales comes the coal which is the navy's black breath of life. A
week's idleness meant one million tons unproduced. The Government
summoned the Miners' Federation for conference. Coal prices were
already soaring. Here and there there was a shortage of supply.
Germany was jubilant. Labor's temper in the Clyde country, the docker
districts and in the colliery regions was far from improved by
Lloyd-George's support of the suggestion that drink was the root of the
industrial evil. The Chancellor of the Exchequer essayed to play a
trump card. He announced that King George, "deeply concerned over a
state of affairs which must inevitably result in the prolongation of the
horrors and burdens of this terrible war," was himself prepared to set
an august example to Labor by giving up all alcoholic liquor, "so that
no difference should be made as far as His Majesty is concerned between
the treatment of rich and poor in this question." Working-class Britain
committed wholesale _lese-majeste_ by paying no attention to the King's
decree of self-denial.
The sequel, though not, of course, the immediate result of King George's
total abstinence proclamation, was the outbreak of the South Wales
miners' dispute in full fury a few weeks later. Joint conference
between the Federation, the owners and the Government ended in hopeless
deadlock. The miners stubbornly refused to accept the principle of
compulsory arbitration provided by Lloyd-George's now enacted Munitions
Law. Two hundred thousand men stopped work. Threats to enforce the
punitive provisions of the law did not terrify them. The establishment
in Wales and Monmouthshire of a "Munitions Tribunal," before which they
could be haled, only made them more defiant. In London one heard
irresponsible mutterings that "a few leaders of the Federation" might
usefully be shot, and it was suggested that if England were Germany,
they would be. More than one voice advocated lynching "a few owners,"
too. The country waited dutifully for the Government to employ the
"drastic powers" it had arrogated to itself only a few short weeks
before. Instead of anything so heroic, it flung Lloyd-George into the
breach. It sent him to South Wales, and in his entourage went Arthur
Henderson, the new Labor member of the Cabinet, and Mr. Runciman, the
President of the Board of Trade (the government department which deals
with industry). The little Welshman drew forth from his inexhaustible
arsenal the weapon he seldom unsheathes in vain--his persuasively silver
tongue. New terms were drawn up between the miners and the colliery
owners. The men got about everything they wanted. "Fill the bunkers,"
Lloyd-George cried to them amid their cheers in a farewell speech at
Cardiff. "It means defense. It means protection. It means an
inviolate Britain." The miners went back to work. But peace had been
dearly bought by the Government. It had not dared to enforce the
coercive paragraphs of the vaunted Munitions Law. The Act, it was now
painfully evident, might do very well to discipline a handful of
"shirking-men" at some shell works or shipyard, but to invoke its
machinery to browbeat two hundred thousand organized miners was
manifestly a horse of a different color. And one which the British
Government was not prepared to back. Industrial Conscription was
magnificent in theory. In its first great test in practise it had
proved to be fire with which the authorities preferred not to play.
Some one (I think it was Price Collier) called England the Land of
Compromise. The Welsh miners seem to have shown that he was right.
Events were not long in forthcoming to demonstrate that neither forceful
persuasion by a popular Cabinet Minister nor "drastic" Acts of
Parliament were in themselves capable of regenerating the British
working man or inspiring him with full and patriotic realization of the
national emergency. Shortly after becoming Minister of Munitions in
May, Lloyd-George began a speech-making tour of the industrial
districts. He pleaded eloquently to Labor to forget its "isms" and its
"rules" and throw the full weight of its Titan strength into the balance
for the winning of the war. He addressed his appeal alike to masters
and men. Passionately he begged both to relegate traditions, suspicions
and prejudices and join hands for the common cause. He did not mince
words as to the national consequences if either of them permitted
ancient antagonisms to restrict their producing power at a moment when
nothing short of the Empire's existence was trembling in the balance.
"Pile up the shells!" was the burden of his plea. Bristol, Birmingham,
Sheffield, Coventry, Leeds, Nottingham, Manchester, all the great
industrial centers of the Kingdom, listened, and promised. By the
beginning of autumn Lloyd-George had pledged nearly one thousand
establishments, hitherto engaged in the peaceful arts, to devote their
plants exclusively to the manufacture of sinews of war, and employers
and workmen passed automatically under the "control" of the Ministry of
Munitions. The country seemed to be yielding effectively to
Lloyd-George's project for "speeding up" war industry.
Yet, as sporadic announcements in the newspapers presently indicated,
the system was by no means producing desired results. Dogmatic
trade-unionism was dying hard. The Government's call to men and women
to do their "bit" for the war, either by enlisting in the fighting
forces or engaging in munitions work, naturally sent tens of thousands
of people to the factories who never possessed a "union card" in their
lives. Organized Labor was horrified by the deluge of "scabs" thus
created. It saw the results of decades of crusade for "union shops" and
for privilege for skilled hands swept away like chaff in the wind.
Another phenomenon of no less disagreeable omen was making its
appearance. Marvelous American automatic lathes for shell-making were
being installed on a prodigious scale--machinery so simple in
construction that one man, or even a woman or girl, might learn to keep
five lathes running at one time. This conjured up disquieting visions
for the devotees of a system which looks upon arbitrary limitation of
output and minimum employment of maximum numbers of skilled men as an
inalienable heritage of Organized Labor. War might be war, national
existence might be at stake, nothing else might count except victory, to
say nothing of a dozen other shibboleths dinned incessantly into their
ears, but trade-unionists had "rights" and "necessities," too. It had
cost them years of blood and tears, and strikes and lockouts galore, to
enforce them. Was Labor supinely to permit them to be snatched away
bodily under cover of war, which Labor had always opposed? Were sainted
rules about Sunday work and other "overtime," about apprentices, about
female labor, and a dozen other trophies of triumphant trade-unionism to
be renounced? Could Governments, from which hard-won prerogatives had
had to be extorted almost by violence, be trusted voluntarily to restore
them, once Labor had been cowed into surrendering them, and comfortable
precedents established? Was the British proletariat, now only on the
threshold of its liberties, to be hurled back at one fell swoop into the
abyss of inglorious mid-Victorian "slavery"? Let the nation rant itself
blue in the face over Labor's "disgraceful lack of patriotism." Let
Germany find comfort, if it could, in the spectacle of British working
men refusing to relinquish their holiest privileges on the blood-smeared
altar of Militarism. "Patriotism begins at home," said the
trade-unionist. "The Government is looking after its own interests. I
am looking after mine," he explained.
With such recalcitrant and explosive conditions prevailing, the public
was not surprised, though profoundly chagrined, to learn at the end of
September--I choose the case as typical, and by no means because it was
an isolated instance--that the Liverpool Munitions Tribunal had fined
hundreds of workmen employed by Messrs. Cammell, Laird & Company, one of
the most important firms of armament manufacturers in the country. It
was testified that owing to shirking during the period of the preceding
twenty weeks, there had been a loss of 1,500,000 hours' time. The
evidence is so characteristic that I reproduce it textually:
"The average daily number of men employed was 10,349, and the average
number of men out on each day of the week was: Monday, first quarter,
2,135, and the whole day, 1,156; Tuesday, 1,421 and 1,030; Wednesday,
1,439 and 1,231; Thursday, 1,764 and 1,126; Friday, 1,492 and 984; and
Saturday, 1,057 and 1,015. The average number out per day for the whole
period was 1,552 who lost a quarter, and 1,090 losing the whole day. In
other words, fifteen per cent. lost a quarter, and about ten and
one-half per cent. did not go into work at all on every day of the whole
twenty weeks. The loss of working hours on ordinary working days was a
million and a half, and represented a full week's work for nearly thirty
thousand men; or, alternatively, the time lost practically represented a
complete shutting down of the whole establishment for three working
weeks. Neither the men themselves nor their societies could plead
ignorance of what was going on. Frequent appeals had been made to
representative deputations of the men in the works by the managing
director of the company, also to the local representatives of the men's
unions, pointing out this most discreditable state of affairs. Seeing
that the men had proved deaf to all persuasion, and had shown no
improvement in response to appeals either from Ministers of the Crown,
their own trade unions, or their employers, the only course was to
prosecute them before that tribunal."
The announcement of the sentences on the shirkers caused an outbreak of
dissatisfaction, and the chairman of the Tribunal was interrupted
several times by the men as he was giving the judgments. Half a dozen
or more of the men all attempting to speak at once caused great
confusion. "There'll be a revolution in this country," cried one, and
such phrases as, "It's time the Germans were here if we are to be
treated like this," "What did South Wales do? Defy them!" "We are not
here as slaves" were shouted from various quarters. The disturbers were
asked to leave the Court. "Let's all go," called one of the men--and
they all went, giving "three cheers for the British workman."
Labor pleads in extenuation of its seemingly treasonable disregard of
national interests that it is not merely reluctance to yield ground on
fixed trade-union principles which inspires a spirit of revolt in the
"munition areas." It is only fair to record that the attitude of Union
leaders throughout has generally been above reproach. Their counsel to
the men to forget "rules" and give the best that is in them has in many
cases fallen on deaf ears. What particularly gnawed at the men's hearts
was a conviction that they were not getting even an approximately
"square deal" under the abnormal conditions of "war industry." They
insisted that while employers' profits had risen inordinately in almost
every branch--shipping, collieries, the steel and iron trades, and
primarily, of course, in the armaments industries--the wages of the men
who were doing the actual producing lamentably failed to keep step with
the masters' swollen revenue. The men assert, indeed, that such advance
in wages as has taken place does not remotely correspond to the
increased cost of living, which averaged forty per cent. up to the end
of the summer of 1915, with a further rise in almost inevitable
prospect. Labor, in other words, so the working classes claimed, was
being "sweated" in order that the coffers of the "profiteers" might
continue to overflow. If British trade-unionism had an epigrammatist as
inventive as Mr. Bryan, it would no doubt have adopted as its war-time
slogan the aphorism that Capital was determined to press down a crown of
thorns upon Labor's brow, and crucify working mankind upon a cross of
gold. Those, at any rate, were precisely the sentiments which fired
British Labor's soul.
But if revolt on the old-time issues of output, overtime and Unionism
was bitter and menacing, it was destined to be a mere whisper compared
to Labor's rebellious hostility to Conscription. The "controlled
establishment" system evoked more or less continuous opposition. Almost
every day batches of workmen, ranging from twos and threes to troops of
fifty or a hundred, were dragged before Munition Tribunals, and fined a
week's pay for shirking. In one or two cases they preferred the
martyrdom of imprisonment to money punishment. But on the whole,
notwithstanding the ceaseless howl of Ramsay Macdonald's _Labor Leader_
and George Lansbury's Socialist _Herald_ against the "tyranny" and
"slavery" of the Munitions Act and the "unchecked piracy of the
employer-profiters," the ambitions of Lloyd-George to "speed up" war
industry were satisfactorily realized. He was able to state that
"taking the figure one as representing the output of shells in
September, 1914, the figure for July, 1915, was fifty times greater. It
was a hundred times greater in August, and thenceforward production
would continue to rise in a surprisingly rapid crescendo."
By midsummer of 1915 Britain was faced by an emergency not a whit less
urgent than shells. She had effectively organized her facilities for
turning out a maximum of high-explosives. She had now to confront and
solve the insistent problem of manning her decimated armies. Kitchener
and the voluntary system had worked wonders. The actual figures, for
some unaccountably censorious reason, were never disclosed, except in
the case of Ireland, which up to October 1 had furnished 81,000
recruits; but the authorities allowed to pass uncontradicted the
statement that the United Kingdom and the Colonies between them had
raised a volunteer army of approximately 3,000,000 men. Had it turned
out to be anything except a War of Miscalculations, this gigantic
contribution of British military force might have sufficed, but with
500,000 British casualties after fourteen months of fighting--roundly,
400,000 in France and Flanders and 100,000 in the Dardanelles--and with
the Germans not only not yet expelled from Belgium or France, but in
undisputed possession of Poland and about to pound through Serbia on
"the road to Constantinople, Egypt and India," it was apparent that
probably twice 3,000,000 British soldiers would be required. Two
spectacular attempts to "break through" the wall of concrete and iron
Germany had erected in the West had been made. Both failed, however
gloriously. Neuve Chapelle and Artois inscribed fresh and imperishable
deeds of valor on the scroll of the British army, but each was
strategically valueless. Results attained were frightfully out of
proportion to the price they cost in blood and treasure.
Succeeding events of the war of stalemate in the West and fiasco in the
Dardanelles--dreary and weary months of fighting accounted "victorious"
if it took three hundred yards of trenches, or a hill, or a cemetery, or
a sugar-factory, or a strip of beach, or if it advanced the British line
a mile and a half over a front of twelve miles--every "gain" entailing a
terrible toll in killed and maimed and fabulous expenditure of
shells--all demonstrated one outstanding, immutable fact: that nothing
but sheer preponderance of man-power weight would or could "cleave the
way to victory." If it cost 25,000 or 30,000 young British lives to win
Neuve Chapelle, probably twice that many to carry out the trial push of
the great offensive at the end of September, and 100,000 casualties to
fail in Gallipoli, what rivers of blood would not have to be spilled
along that once-vaunted "march to Berlin"?
Britain's volunteers had done nobly. But they manifestly did not do
enough. Mighty as was their response, Britons must yet come, or be
brought, forward in their millions if the Empire was to be saved. The
specter of Conscription became more of a tangible reality from day to
day. Voluntaryism had received a fair and a long and patient trial. It
accomplished far more, probably, than its most sanguine supporters hoped
for. It outstripped any record approximated by Lincoln in our Civil
War, but now, like him, England was plainly compelled to resort to more
heroic measures if the overthrow of Germany was to be anything more than
a pious aspiration. "Mahanism" had given Britannia control of the sea,
but "Moltkeism" was still unbeaten on the Continent.
[Illustration: Soldiers in the making--11th Battalion cook-house.]
Now Organized Labor revolted afresh. It would not hear of the
"Prussianization" of England by Conscription. It had already
"surrendered" its "industrial liberty." It did not propose to part with
whatever vestige of "personal freedom" remained. It pilloried
Conscription as "Compulsion" and, as brazenly as they dared, certain
leaders threatened any Government which essayed to fasten it upon the
"British Democracy" with political ruin for itself and gory revolution
for the country. The Conscriptionists were accused of wanting, instead
of an army of volunteer freemen, "a servile, cheap and sweated army."
They aspired to "something which would imperil the civic basis of
British liberty and degrade the nation." Conscription was "desired for
the war and for after the war, in order that its advocates might better
be able to promote their Imperialistic schemes abroad and their class
vanity and political interests at home." In the midst of a war to
"crush militarism," it was now plotted to impose that monster on
Englishmen themselves. Shrieked Bruce Glasier, for example, a paladin of
the Socialist-Labor phalanx:
"Compulsion, especially with regard to personal service, to one's choice
of occupation and way of life, is of the essence of slavery and
oppression. Nothing but actual extremity of life and death ought to
justify us in resorting to it even temporarily. No such extremity has
arisen, or is, happily, likely to arise. The voluntary principle has
not failed either in the Army or any other profession. What has failed,
what does fail, is the political policy and administration of the
Government.
"_Since the days of Feudal slavery in Great Britain no man or woman,
except he be a criminal, a lunatic, or a pauper, has been compelled
personally to serve any master or Government, or engage in any
occupation or task by legal compulsion_.
"Shall we allow the old-world tyranny to return?"
Glasier, unwittingly, tapped the very root of the problem, as far as his
own particular cohorts, "downtrodden labor," are concerned. _The
British masses, in their preponderant majority, have not been brought to
comprehend what Germany's war is--that it involves for Britain "nothing
but actual extremity of life and death._" Although leaders of public
opinion, from the highest to the lowest, never ceased to emphasize the
true inwardness of the struggle, Organized Labor was not convinced that
Voluntary Service was unequal to the emergency. At Bristol, in the
first week of September, 610 delegates to the annual Trade Union
Congress, representing nearly 3,000,000 workers, placed themselves on
record flat-footedly against Conscription. With British military
failure in the war crying to Heaven, the following "anti-Compulsion"
resolutions were adopted:
"We, the delegates to this congress, representing nearly three millions
organized workers, record our hearty appreciation of the magnificent
response made to the call for volunteers to fight against the tyranny of
militarism. We emphatically protest against the sinister efforts of a
section of the reactionary press in formulating newspaper policies for
party purposes and attempting to foist on this country Conscription,
which always proves a burden to workers and will divide the nation at a
time when absolute unanimity is essential.
"No reliable evidence has been produced to show that the voluntary
system of enlistment is not adequate to meet all the empire's
requirements. We believe that all the men necessary can and will be
obtained through a voluntary system properly organized, and we heartily
support and will give every aid to the Government in its present efforts
to secure the men necessary to prosecute the war to a successful issue."
When the cheers following the unanimous adoption of these resolutions
subsided, Robert Smillie, the miners' leader and one of the most
respected Labor chieftains in Britain, received the heartiest applause
of the whole debate when he rapped out: "Now that this congress has
declared, on behalf of organized labor, that it is against Conscription,
it will be the duty of organized labor to prevent Conscription taking
place."
It was not long after the Bristol Trade Union Congress defied the
Government to establish Conscription that Vernon Hartshorn, the
Socialist miners' leader, declaimed in the _Christian Commonwealth_ that
"a golden opportunity for Labor" had arrived, asked "whether
trade-unions shall now not be successfully recognized as the controlling
authority in a new industrial democracy," and set up "the irresistible
claim of Labor to control its own destinies and those of the country."
The Bristol and Hartshorn manifestoes were followed by the most
extraordinary outburst of all--the formal declaration on the official
premises of the British House of Commons by J. H. Thomas, a Member of
Parliament for Derby and Organizing Secretary of the Amalgamated Society
of Railway Workmen, that if the Government attempted to enforce
Conscription, 3,000,000 employees of the national transportation lines
of the country would not shrink from precipitating "industrial
revolution!"
Interesting to the foreign observer as are all these manifestations of
the British masses' opposition to war-time "control" and universal
military service, the pathological causes of it are no less absorbing.
They are not, in my judgment, far to seek. I thought I gained a
composite glimpse of them one day at Shepherd's Bush, by no means the
most squalid section of London, for it lies in the west, far from the
putrid east. I had gone to watch a great "recruiting-rally"--an attempt
to inject some patriotism into regions where it was sadly lacking. I
found myself in the midst of a huge typically lower-class and lower
middle-class multitude. Scattered throughout it were countless hundreds
of what should have been young men fit for military service. It was for
the most part a motley throng of blear-eyed men and women of all sorts,
sizes and conditions of mental and physical deterioration. Nearly
everybody, particularly children, was unkempt and seemed underfed. In
the wide-open doors of odoriferous saloons stood hatless, slovenly
females, balancing with one hand a half-emptied mug of beer, while the
other shepherded a cluster of wretched youngsters with dirty faces,
tattered clothing and shredded shoes. Collarless men slouched along,
filthy of attire and language alike. The remarks one overheard, as the
troops trudged by and the bands blared _Rule, Britannia_, were usually
purely ribald, and the cheering, when a taxi full of wounded Tommies,
shoved into the procession to lend corroborative detail to what Sir W.
S. Gilbert would have called an otherwise bald and unconvincing
spectacle, was desultory and short-lived. The parade had been assigned
a line of march through several miles of district precisely like
Shepherd's Bush. I could hardly imagine that the scenes anywhere were
considerably different from those of which I was an astonished and
chagrined witness. There were very few recruits.
I could not resist a reminiscent soliloquy. I had stood in the midst of
German crowds in Berlin and elsewhere times without number. But I was
quite sure that nowhere in the Fatherland had I ever been in contact
with such concentrated, omnipresent, apparently inconquerable squalor
and proletarian apathy. It was manifestly not this stratum of English
society which was to perpetuate Britannia's rule of the waves.
Lamentably little of the "bulldog breed" was visible here. It was more
like the starved cur type. Starved! That was the word. Starved for
generations of the nourishment on which health, education, ideals and
patriotism must be developed, if they are to stand the test in the hour
of supreme trial! Why, I asked myself, was such a disheartening picture
as good as physically impossible in Berlin or Hamburg or Duesseldorf or
Breslau? I may be wrong, but the answer seemed to me to be that
paternalistic Government in Germany had produced a race of men and women
who, because better educated, better housed, better fed and generally
better cared for--even under the relentless jackboot of
Militarism--looked upon a war for national existence through entirely
different-colored spectacles than this slipshod composite of British
illiteracy and nonchalance. I seriously doubted if Shepherd's Bush
understood the meaning of Patriotism as the Germans know it; understood
that _Service_ and _Sacrifice_ are necessary in the hour of the nation's
jeopardy, and, because necessary, must be lavishly, unquestioningly
rendered. I found myself excusing the British proletariat. I felt that
they were what they were, and acting as they were, or, rather, failing
to act as they ought, because _they knew no better_. Patriotism is not
altogether instinct. It is largely a cultivated virtue. That is why we
teach immigrant children from Russia and Italy and Hungary to sing "My
Country, 'Tis of Thee" as the rudiment of their American schooling.
Education has been compulsory in Britain for many years, but drink has
been traditionally universal, and housing of the poor and the working
classes was only in comparatively recent years deemed a subject worthy
of vast national effort. Public hygiene is no longer a neglected theme,
and playgrounds and parks are numerous. But illiteracy, intemperance
and disease can not be eradicated in a generation. Masses which have
for decades been neglected and held in subjection and contempt by an
unrelenting class-distinction system heavily charged with arrant
snobbishness can not be churned, by the turning of a crank, into a
community of enlightened, high-minded or able-bodied patriots and
war-makers. Britain has sown the wind. She is reaping the whirlwind.
That has been said before, but never has it applied with such grim
significance as at this hour.
Recruiting "rallies," recruiting advertisements, reproaches of the
"slacker" and the "shirker" in the press, on the platform, in the parks
and from the pulpit, have signally failed to shame lower-class Britain
into doing its duty as the upper and middle classes have so gloriously
done. In consequence, the Voluntary system is on its last legs. Early
in October Lord Kitchener appointed Lord Derby "Director of Recruiting."
In assuming the thankless job, Derby said he felt like taking over the
receivership of a bankrupt concern. He proposed granting Voluntaryism a
six weeks' respite. He would give the stay-at-homes one more chance.
The Government (which enacted the National Register for the
purpose--hated Prussian system which card-indexed every male and female
in the realm between fifteen and fifty-five!) knew exactly who and where
they were. "Push and Go," said one of the last-ditch poster appeals,
"But It's Better to Go than Be Pushed." Lord Derby intimated that
"pushing" would set in on December 1. It was estimated that, by hook or
crook, not less than thirty thousand fresh men a week would be needed to
keep the British armies in Europe and Africa at effective strength in
1916, and, if they did not come forward voluntarily, Kitchener was
determined to "fetch" them. That means Conscription. Northcliffe calls
it National Service. Shepherd's Bush calls it National Servility. If
Labor means what it says, "Compulsion" will not be established until
Trafalgar Square and Whitechapel, Clydebank and South Wales, have run
red with the organized proletariat's "freeman" blood. On Britain's
recreant past, then, rather than on her embattled present, will lie, in
my judgment, the real responsibility for that dread triumph of ignorance
and indolence over the elementary dictates of patriotism and
self-preservation.
If I have emphasized British Labor's influence in blocking National
Service, I must, in all fairness, point out that brows not accustomed to
sweat and hands never grimy from toil have joined their frowns and their
strength with Trade-Unionism and Socialism against Conscription. The
professional pacifists, the "anti-militarists," the statesmen and the
newspapers which for years prior to 1914, and even during the weeks
immediately preceding August of that year, ridiculed the idea of "war
with Germany," were all mobilized against the revolutionary idea of
converting able-bodied Britons by law into defenders of the realm. From
these quarters the men who have dared to advocate Conscription have been
besmirched with abuse no less torrential than that which was heaped upon
them at the Trade-Union Congress in Bristol or from week to week in the
columns of Socialist-Labor organs. It will not be only certain famous
proletariat leaders who prevented Britain from rising in the great war
to her full military stature--if prevented she be--but the party-hack
editors, authors and anything-for-office politicians who preferred the
fetish of "our unenslaved Democracy" and "Voluntaryism" to the system
under which _every other single one of Britain's Allies_ is fighting and
under which, if the opinion of professional soldiers is to be trusted,
victory alone can be made to perch on the Union Jack.