I would like to underline in the most emphatic way that it i_Social Forces in England and America

to have this Great State, essentially socialistic, owning and running

the land and all the great public services, sustaining everybody in

absolute freedom at a certain minimum of comfort and well-being, and

still leaving most of the interests, amusements, and adornments of the

individual life, and all sorts of collective concerns, social and

political discussion, religious worship, philosophy, and the like to the

free personal initiatives of entirely unofficial people.

This still leaves the problem of systematic knowledge and research, and

all the associated problems of æsthetic, moral, and intellectual

initiative to be worked out in detail; but at least it dispels the

nightmare of a collective mind organised as a branch of the civil

service, with authors, critics, artists, scientific investigators

appointed in a phrensy of wire-pulling—as nowadays the British state

appoints its bishops for the care of its collective soul.

Let me now indicate how these general views affect the problem of family

organisation and the problem of women’s freedom. In the Normal Social

Life the position of women is easily defined. They are subordinated but

important. The citizenship rests with the man, and the woman’s relation

to the community as a whole is through a man. But within that limitation

her functions as mother, wife, and home-maker are cardinal. It is one of

the entirely unforeseen consequences that have arisen from the decay of

the Normal Social Life and its autonomous home that great numbers of

women while still subordinate have become profoundly unimportant. They

have ceased to a very large extent to bear children, they have dropped

most of their home-making arts, they no longer nurse nor educate such

children as they have, and they have taken on no new functions that

compensate for these dwindling activities of the domestic interior. That

subjugation which is a vital condition to the Normal Social Life does

not seem to be necessary to the Great State. It may or it may not be

necessary. And here we enter upon the most difficult of all our

problems. The whole spirit of the Great State is against any avoidable

subjugation; but the whole spirit of that science which will animate the

Great State forbids us to ignore woman’s functional and temperamental

differences. A new status has still to be invented for women, a Feminine

Citizenship differing in certain respects from the normal masculine

citizenship. Its conditions remain to be worked out. We have indeed to

work out an entire new system of relations between men and women, that

will be free from servitude, aggression, provocation, or parasitism. The

public Endowment of Motherhood as such may perhaps be the first broad

suggestion of the quality of this new status. A new type of family, a

mutual alliance in the place of a subjugation, is perhaps the most

startling of all the conceptions which confront us directly we turn

ourselves definitely towards the Great State.

And as our conception of the Great State grows, so we shall begin to

realise the nature of the problem of transition, the problem of what we

may best do in the confusion of the present time to elucidate and render

practicable this new phase of human organisation. Of one thing there can

be no doubt, that whatever increases thought and knowledge moves towards

our goal; and equally certain is it that nothing leads thither that

tampers with the freedom of spirit, the independence of soul in common

men and women. In many directions, therefore, the believer in the Great

State will display a jealous watchfulness of contemporary developments

rather than a premature constructiveness. We must watch wealth; but

quite as necessary it is to watch the legislator, who mistakes

propaganda for progress and class exasperation to satisfy class

vindictiveness for construction. Supremely important is it to keep

discussion open, to tolerate no limitation on the freedom of speech,

writing, art and book distribution, and to sustain the utmost liberty of

criticism upon all contemporary institutions and processes.

This briefly is the programme of problems and effort to which my idea of

the Great State, as the goal of contemporary progress, leads me.

I append a diagram which shows compactly the gist of the preceding

discussion; it gives the view of social development upon which I base

all my political conceptions.

THE NORMAL SOCIAL LIFE

produces an increasing surplus of energy and opportunity, more

particularly under modern conditions of scientific organisation

and power production; and this through the operation of rent and

of usury generally tends to

-------------------------------------

| |

(a) release and (b) expropriate

| |

an increasing proportion of the population to become:

| |

(a) A LEISURE CLASS and (b) A LABOUR CLASS

under no urgent compulsion divorced from the land and living

| | to work upon uncertain wages

|3 |2 1| |1 |2 |3

| | ---------------------- ---------------------- | |

| | ---------------------- |violently resentful | | |

| | \ |and destructive | | |

| | \ |rebel class | | |

| | \ ---------------------- | |

| | \ / | |

| | ---------------- | |

| | ---------------- | |

| | | |

| -------------------- ------------------ |

| -------------------- |SERVILE STATE | |

| ------------------ |

| |

------------------------------ -------------------------

|which may become | |which may be |

|the whole community | |rendered needless |

|of the GREAT STATE | |by a general labour |

|working under various | |conscription |

|motives and inducements, | |together with a |

|but not | |scientific organisation|

|constantly, nor permanently,| |of production, |

|nor unwillingly. | |and so reabsorbed |

------------------------------ |by re-endowment |

|into the Leisure |

|Class of the |

|GREAT STATE |

-------------------------

THE COMMON SENSE OF WARFARE

§ 1—CONSCRIPTION

I want to say as compactly as possible why I do not believe that

conscription would increase the military efficiency of this country, and

why I think it might be a disastrous step for this country to take.

By conscription I mean the compulsory enlistment for a term of service

in the Army of the whole manhood of the country. And I am writing now

from the point of view merely of military effectiveness. The educational

value of a universal national service, the idea which as a Socialist I

support very heartily, of making every citizen give a year or so of his

life to our public needs, are matters quite outside my present

discussion. What I am writing about now is this idea that the country

can be strengthened for war by making every man in it a bit of a

soldier.

And I want the reader to be perfectly clear about the position I assume

with regard to war preparations generally. I am not pleading for peace

when there is no peace; this country has been constantly threatened

during the past decade, and is threatened now by gigantic hostile

preparations; it is our common interest to be and to keep at the maximum

of military efficiency possible to us. My case is not merely that

conscription will not contribute to that, but that it would be a

monstrous diversion of our energy and emotion and material resources

from the things that need urgently to be done. It would be like a boxer

filling his arms with empty boxing-gloves and then rushing—his face

protruding over the armful—into the fray.

Let me make my attack on this prevalent and increasing superstition of

the British need for conscription in two lines, one following the other.

For, firstly, it is true that Britain at the present time is no more

capable of creating such a conscript army as France or Germany possesses

in the next ten years than she is of covering her soil with a tropical

forest, and, secondly, it is equally true that if she had such an army

it would not be of the slightest use to her. For the conscript armies in

which Europe still so largely believes are only of use against conscript

armies and adversaries who will consent to play the rules of the German

war game; they are, if we chose to determine they shall be, if we chose

to deal with them as they should be dealt with, as out of date as a

Roman legion or a Zulu impi.

Now, first, as to the impossibility of getting our great army into

existence. All those people who write and talk so glibly in favour of

conscription seem to forget that to take a common man, and more

particularly a townsman, clap him into a uniform and put a rifle in his

hand does not make a soldier. He has to be taught not only the use of

his weapons, but the methods of a strange and unfamiliar life out of

doors; he has to be not simply drilled, but accustomed to the difficult

modern necessities of open order fighting, of taking cover, of

entrenchment, and he has to have created within him, so that it will

stand the shock of seeing men killed round about him, confidence in

himself, in his officers, and the methods and weapons of his side. Body,

mind, and imagination have all to be trained—and they need trainers. The

conversion of a thousand citizens into anything better than a sheep-like

militia demands the enthusiastic services of scores of able and

experienced instructors who know what war is; the creation of a

universal army demands the services of many scores of thousands of not

simply “old soldiers,” but keen, expert, modern-minded _officers_.

Without these officers our citizen army would be a hydra without heads.

And we haven’t these officers. We haven’t a tithe of them.

We haven’t these officers, and we can’t make them in a hurry. It takes

at least five years to make an officer who knows his trade. It needs a

special gift, in addition to that knowledge, to make a man able to

impart it. And our Empire is at a peculiar disadvantage in the matter,

because India and our other vast areas of service and opportunity

overseas drain away a large proportion of just those able and educated

men who would in other countries gravitate towards the army. Such small

wealth of officers as we have—and I am quite prepared to believe that

the officers we have are among the very best in the world—are scarcely

enough to go round our present supply of private soldiers. And the best

and most brilliant among this scanty supply are being drawn upon more

and more for aerial work, and for all that increasing quantity of highly

specialised services which are manifestly destined to be the real

fighting forces of the future. We cannot spare the best of our officers

for training conscripts; we shall get the dismalest results from the

worst of them; and so even if it were a vital necessity for our country

to have an army of all its manhood now, we could not have it, and it

would be a mere last convulsion to attempt to make it with the means at

our disposal.

But that brings me to my second contention, which is that we do not want

such an army. I believe that the vast masses of men in uniform

maintained by the Continental Powers at the present time are enormously

overrated as fighting machines. I see Germany in the likeness of a boxer

with a mailed fist as big as and rather heavier than its body, and I am

convinced that when the moment comes for that mailed fist to be lifted,

the whole disproportionate system will topple over. The military

ascendancy of the future lies with the country that dares to experiment

most, that experiments best, and meanwhile keeps its actual fighting

force fit and admirable and small and flexible. The experience of war

during the last fifteen years has been to show repeatedly the enormous

defensive power of small, scientifically handled bodies of men. These

huge conscript armies are made up not of masses of military muscle, but

of a huge proportion of military fat. Their one way of fighting will be

to fall upon an antagonist with all their available weight, and if he is

mobile and dexterous enough to decline that issue of adiposity they will

become a mere embarrassment to their own people. Modern weapons and

modern contrivance are continually decreasing the number of men who can

be employed efficiently upon a length of front. I doubt if there is any

use for more than 400,000 men upon the whole Franco-Belgian frontier at

the present time. Such an army, properly supplied, could—so far as

terrestrial forces are concerned—hold that frontier against any number

of assailants. The bigger the forces brought against it the sooner the

exhaustion of the attacking power. Now, it is for employment upon that

frontier, and for no other conceivable purpose in the world, that Great

Britain is asked to create a gigantic conscript army.

And if too big an army is likely to be a mere encumbrance in war, it is

perhaps even a still graver blunder to maintain one during that conflict

of preparation which is at present the European substitute for actual

hostilities. It consumes. It produces nothing. It not only eats and

drinks and wears out its clothes and withdraws men from industry, but

under the stress of invention it needs constantly to be rearmed and

freshly equipped at an expenditure proportionate to its size. So long as

the conflict of preparation goes on, then the bigger the army your

adversary maintains under arms the bigger is his expenditure and the

less his earning power. The less the force you employ to keep your

adversary overarmed, and the longer you remain at peace with him while

he is overarmed, the greater is your advantage. There is only one

profitable use for any army, and that is victorious conflict. Every army

that is not engaged in victorious conflict is an organ of national

expenditure, an exhausting growth in the national body. And for Great

Britain an attempt to create a conscript army would involve the very

maximum of moral and material exhaustion with the minimum of military

efficiency. It would be a disastrous waste of resources that we need

most urgently for other things.

§ 2

In the popular imagination the Dreadnought is still the one instrument

of naval war. We count our strength in Dreadnoughts and

super-Dreadnoughts, and so long as we are spending our national

resources upon them faster than any other country, if we sink at least

£160 for every £100 sunk in these obsolescent monsters by Germany, we

have a reassuring sense of keeping ahead and being thoroughly safe. This

confidence in big, very expensive battleships is, I believe and hope,

shared by the German Government and by Europe generally, but it is,

nevertheless, a very unreasonable confidence, and it may easily lead us

into the most tragic of national disillusionments.

We of the general public are led to suppose that the next naval war—if

ever we engage in another naval war—will begin with a decisive fleet

action. The plan of action is presented with an alluring simplicity. Our

adversary will come out to us, in a ratio of 10 to 16, or in some ratio

still more advantageous to us, according as our adversary happens to be

this Power or that Power, there will be some tremendous business with

guns and torpedoes, and our admirals will return victorious to discuss

the discipline and details of the battle and each other’s little

weaknesses in the monthly magazines. This is a desirable but improbable

anticipation. No hostile Power is in the least likely to send out any

battleships at all against our invincible Dreadnoughts. They will

promenade the seas, always in the ratio of 16 or more to 10, looking for

fleets securely tucked away out of reach. They will not, of course, go

too near the enemy’s coast, on account of mines, and, meanwhile, our

cruisers will hunt the enemy’s commerce into port.

Then other things will happen.

The enemy we shall discover using unsportsmanlike devices against our

capital ships. Unless he is a lunatic he will prove to be much stronger

in reality than he is on paper in the matter of submarines,

torpedo-boats, waterplanes and aeroplanes. These are things cheap to

make and easy to conceal. He will be richly stocked with ingenious

devices for getting explosives up to these two-million-pound triumphs of

our naval engineering. On the cloudy and foggy nights so frequent about

these islands he will have extraordinary chances, and sooner or later,

unless we beat him thoroughly in the air above and in the waters

beneath, for neither of which proceedings we are prepared, some of these

chances will come off, and we shall lose a Dreadnought.

It will be a poor consolation if an ill-advised and stranded Zeppelin or

so enlivens the quiet of the English countryside by coming down and

capitulating. It will be a trifling countershock to wing an aeroplane or

so, or blow a torpedo-boat out of the water. Our Dreadnoughts will cease

to be a source of unmitigated confidence. A second battleship disaster

will excite the Press extremely. A third will probably lead to a

retirement of the battle fleet to some east-coast harbour, a refuge

liable to aeroplanes, or to the west coast of Ireland—and the real naval

war, which, as I have argued in an earlier chapter, will be a war of

destroyers, submarines and hydroplanes, will begin. Incidentally a

commerce destroyer may take advantage of the retirement of our fleet to

raid our trade routes.

We shall then realise that the actual naval weapons are these smaller

weapons, and especially the destroyer, the submarine, and the

waterplane—the waterplane most of all, because of its possibilities of a

comparative bigness—in the hands of competent and daring men. And I find

myself, as a patriotic Englishman, more and more troubled by doubts

whether we are as certainly superior to any possible adversary in these

essential things as we are in the matter of Dreadnoughts. I find myself

awake at nights, after a day much agitated by a belligerent Press,

wondering whether the real Empire of the Sea may not even now have

slipped out of our hands while our attention has been fixed on our

stately procession of giant warships, while our country has been in a

dream, hypnotised by the Dreadnought idea.

For some years there seems to have been a complete arrest of the British

imagination in naval and military matters. That declining faculty, never

a very active or well-exercised one, staggered up to the conception of a

Dreadnought, and seems now to have sat down for good. Its reply to every

demand upon it has been “more Dreadnoughts.” The future, as we British

seem to see it, is an avenue of Dreadnoughts, and super-Dreadnoughts and

super-super-Dreadnoughts, getting bigger and bigger in a kind of

inverted perspective. But the ascendancy of fleets of great battleships

in naval warfare, like the phase of huge conscript armies upon land,

draws to its close. The progress of invention makes both the big ship

and the army crowd more and more vulnerable and less and less effective.

A new phase of warfare opens beyond the vista of our current programmes.

Smaller, more numerous and various and mobile weapons and craft and

contrivances, manned by daring and highly skilled men, must ultimately

take the place of those massivenesses. We are entering upon a period in

which the invention of methods and material for war is likely to be more

rapid and diversified than it has ever been before, and the question of

what we have been doing behind the splendid line of our Dreadnoughts to

meet the demands of this new phase is one of supreme importance.

Knowing, as I do, the imaginative indolence of my countrymen, it is a

question I face with something very near to dismay.

But it is one that has to be faced. The question that should occupy our

directing minds now is no longer “How can we get more Dreadnoughts?” but

“What have we to follow the Dreadnought?”

To the Power that has most nearly guessed the answer to that riddle

belongs the future Empire of the Seas. It is interesting to guess for

oneself and to speculate upon the possibility of a kind of armoured

mother-ship for waterplanes and submarines and torpedo craft, but

necessarily that would be a mere journalistic and amateurish guessing. I

am not guessing, but asking urgent questions. What force, what council,

how many imaginative and inventive men has the country got at the

present time employed not casually but professionally in anticipating

the new strategy, the new tactics, the new material, the new training

that invention is so rapidly rendering necessary? I have the gravest

doubts whether we are doing anything systematic at all in this way.

Now, it is the tremendous seriousness of this deficiency to which I want

to call attention. Great Britain has in her armour a gap more dangerous

and vital than any mere numerical insufficiency of men or ships. She is

short of minds. Behind its strength of current armaments to-day, a

strength that begins to evaporate and grow obsolete from the very moment

it comes into being, a country needs more and more this profounder

strength of intellectual and creative activity.

This country most of all, which was left so far behind in the production

of submarines, airships and aeroplanes, must be made to realise the

folly of its trust in established things. Each new thing we take up more

belatedly and reluctantly than its predecessor. The time is not far

distant when we shall be “caught” lagging unless we change all this.

We need a new arm to our service; we need it urgently, and we shall need

it more and more, and that arm is Research. We need to place inquiry and

experiment upon a new footing altogether, to enlist for them and

organise them, to secure the pick of our young chemists and physicists

and engineers, and to get them to work systematically upon the

anticipation and preparation of our future war equipment. We need a

service of invention to recover our lost lead in these matters.

And it is because I feel so keenly the want of such a service, and the

want of great sums of money for it, that I deplore the disposition to

waste millions upon the hasty creation of a universal service army and

upon excessive Dreadnoughting. I am convinced that we are spending upon

the things of yesterday the money that is sorely needed for the things

of to-morrow.

With our eyes averted obstinately from the future we are backing towards

disaster.

§ 3

In the present armament competition there are certain considerations

that appear to be almost universally overlooked, and which tend to

modify our views profoundly of what should be done. Ultimately they will

affect our entire expenditure upon war preparation.

Expenditure upon preparation for war falls, roughly, into two classes;

there is expenditure upon things that have a diminishing value, things

that grow old-fashioned and wear out, such as fortifications, ships,

guns, and ammunition, and expenditure upon things that have a permanent

and even growing value, such as organised technical research, military

and naval experiment, and the education and increase of a highly trained

class of war experts.

I want to suggest that we are spending too much money in the former and

not enough in the latter direction. We are buying enormous quantities of

stuff that will be old iron in twenty years’ time, and we are starving

ourselves of that which cannot be bought or made in a hurry, and upon

which the strength of nations ultimately rests altogether; we are

failing to get and maintain a sufficiency of highly educated and

developed men inspired by a tradition of service and efficiency.

I would like to underline in the most emphatic way that it is possible