But there are other methods of devotion to the national being possible
to us through collective action, and I was moved to imagine one, having
once received a letter from a bloodthirsty correspondent--one of that
rather numerous class whose minds are always loaded with ball cartridge,
whose fingers are always on the trigger, and who are always calling
on the authorities not to hesitate to shoot. He wrote to me during a
railway strike, advocating military conscription in order that
railway men who went out on strike could be called up by the military
authorities, as the French railway strikers were, and who were subject
to martial law if they disobeyed. I do not think with those who believe
the venerable remedy of blood-letting is the best cure for social
maladies; and I would have thought no more about that stern
disciplinarian, but my mind went playing about the idea of conscription,
and there came to me some thoughts which I wish to put on record in the
hope that our people in some future, when the social order will create
public spirit and the passion for the State more plentifully than it
does today, may recur to the idea and apply it. Nearly every State in
the world demands from youth a couple of years' service in the army.
There they are trained to defend their country--even, if necessary,
to slay their own countrymen. There is much that is abhorrent to the
imagination in the idea of war, and I am altogether with that noble
body of men who are trying, by means of arbitration treaties, to
solve national differences by reason rather than by force. But we
all recognize something noble in the spirit of the nation where the
community agrees that every man shall give up some years of his life to
the State for the preservation of the State, and may be called upon to
surrender life absolutely in that service. While the manhood of a race
does this on the whole with cheerfulness, there must be something of
high character in the manhood of that nation. A certain gravity attaches
to national decisions which are made, as it were, upon the slopes of
death, because none are exempt from service, and there is no delirious
mob ready to yell for a war in which it does not run the risk of having
its own dirty skin perforated by bullets. In Ireland we have never had
military conscription, for reasons which are well known to all, and
upon which I need not enter. I am well satisfied it should be so, for
it leaves open to us the possibility of a much nobler service, one which
has never yet been attempted by any modern nation, and that is civil
conscription.
I throw out this suggestion, which may hold the imagination of those who
have noble conceptions of what national life should be and what a nation
should work for, in the hope that some time it may fructify. There is a
prohibition laid on the people in this island against conscription
for military purposes. Is there any reason why we should not have
conscription for civil purposes? Why should not every young man in
Ireland give up two years of his life in a comradeship of labor with
other young men, and be employed under skilled direction in great works
of public utility, in the erection of public buildings, the beautifying
of our cities, reclamation of waste lands, afforestation, and other
desirable objects? The principle of service for the State for
military purposes is admitted in every country, even at last by the
English-speaking peoples. It is easy to be seen how this principle of
conscription could be applied to infinitely nobler ends--to the building
up of a beautiful civilization--and might make the country adopting it
in less than half a century as beautiful as ancient Attica or majestic
as ancient Egypt. While other nations take part of the life of young men
for instruction in war, why should not the State in Ireland, more nobly
inspired, ask of its young men that they should give equally of their
lives to the State, not for the destruction of life, but for the
conservation of life? This service might be asked from all--high and
low, well and humbly born--except from those who can plead the reasons
which exempt people abroad from military service. As things stand today,
if the State undertakes any public work, it does it more expensively by
far than it would be if undertaken by private enterprise. Every person
puts up prices for the State or for municipalities. Labor, land, and
materials are all charged at the highest possible rates, whereas if
there was any really high conception of citizenship and of the functions
of the State, the citizens would agree so that works of public utility,
or those which conspired to add to national dignity, should be done at
least cost to the community. Where there is no national sacrifice there
is no national pride. Because there is no national pride our modern
civilizations show meanly compared with the titanic architecture of the
cities and majestic civilizations of the past. We know from the ruins of
these proud cities that he who walked into ancient Rome, Athens, Thebes,
Memphis and Babylon, walked amid grandeurs which must have exalted the
spirit. To walk into Manchester, Sheffield, or Liverpool is to feel a
weight upon the soul. There is no national feeling for beauty in our
industrial civilizations.
Let us suppose Ireland had through industrial conscription about fifty
thousand young men every year at its disposal under a national works
department. What could be done? First of all it would mean that every
young man in the country would have received an industrial training of
some kind. The work of technical instruction could be largely carried on
in connection with this industrial army. People talk of the benefit of
discipline and obedience secured by military service. This and much more
could be secured by a labor conscription. Every man in the island would
have got into the habit of work at a period of life when it is most
necessary, and when too many young men have no serious occupation.
Parents should welcome the training and discipline for their children,
and certificates of character and intelligence given by the department
of national works should open up prospects of rapid employment in
the ordinary industrial life of the country when the period of public
service was closed. For those engaged there would be a true comradeship
in labor, and the phrase, "the dignity of labor," about which so much
cant has been written, would have a real significance where young men
were working together for the public benefit with the knowledge that any
completed work would add to the health, beauty, dignity, and prosperity
of the State. In return for this labor the State should feed and clothe
its industrial army, educate them, and familiarize them with some branch
of employment, and make them more competent after this period of service
was over to engage in private enterprise. Two years of such training
would dissipate all the slackness, lack of precision, and laziness
which are so often apparent in young men who have never had any strict
discipline in their homes, and whom parental weakness has rendered unfit
for the hard business of life.
The benefit to those undergoing such a training would of itself justify
civil conscription; but when we come to think of the nation--what might
not be done by a State with a national labor army under its control?
Public works might be undertaken at a cost greatly below that which
would otherwise be incurred, and the estimates which now paralyze the
State, when it considers this really needed service or that, would
assume a different appearance, as it would be embracing in one
enterprise technical education and the accomplishment of beneficial
works. With such an army under skilled control the big cities could
have playgrounds for the children of the cities; public gardens, baths,
gymnasiums, recreation rooms, hospitals, and sanatoriums might be built;
waste land reclaimed and afforested, and the roadsides might be planted
with fruit trees. National schools, picture-galleries, public halls,
libraries, and a thousand enterprises which now hang fire because at
present labor for public service is the most expensive labor, all could
be undertaken. If the State becomes very poor, as indeed it is certain
to be, it may be forced into some such method of fulfilling its
functions. Are we, with enormous burdens of debt, to hang up every
useful public work because of the expense, and spend our lives in paying
State debts while the body for whom we work is unable, on account of the
expense, to do anything for us in return? If the State is to continue
its functions we shall have to commandeer people for its service in
times of peace as is done in times of war. There is hardly an argument
which could be used to defend military conscription which could not be
equaled with as powerful an argument for civil conscription. I am not
at all sure that if the State in Ireland decided to utilize two years of
every young man's life for State purposes that we could not disband
most of our expensive constabulary and make certain squads of our civil
recruits responsible for the keeping of public law and order, leaving
only the officers as permanent professionals, for of course there must
be expert control of the conscripts. The postal service might also be
carried on largely by conscripted civilians.
This may appear a fantastic programme, but I would like to see it
argued out. It would create a real brotherhood in work, just as the army
creates in its own way a brotherhood between men in the same regiments.
The nation adopting civil conscription could clean itself up in a
couple of generations, so that in respect of public services it would be
incomparable. The alternative to this is to starve all public services,
to make the State simply the tax-collector, to pay the interest on a
huge debt, and so get it hated because it can do nothing except collect
money to pay the interest on a colossal national debt. Obviously the
State as an agency to bring about civilization cannot perform both
services--pay interest on huge public loans, and continue an expensive
service. It must find out some way in which public services can be
continued, and if possible improved, and the open way to that is civil
conscription and the assertion of a claim to two or three years of the
work of every citizen for civil purposes, just as it now asserts a claim
on the services of citizens for the defense of the State. As national
debts are more and more piled up, it has seemed to many that here must
be an end to what was called social reform, that we were entering on a
black era, and no dawn would show over Europe for another century. There
is always a way out of troubles if people are imaginative enough and
brotherly enough to conceive of it and bold enough to take action when
they have found the way. The real danger for society is that it may
become spiritless and hidebound and tamed, and have none of those high
qualities necessary in face of peril, and the more people get accustomed
to thinking of bold schemes the better. They will get over the first
shock, and may be ready when the time comes to put them into action.
When a country is poor like Ireland and yet is ambitious of greatness;
when the aspect of its civilization is mean and when it yet aspires to
beauty; when its people are living under unsanitary conditions and yet
the longing is there to give health to all; when Ireland is like this,
its public men and its citizens might do much worse than brood over the
possibilities of industrial conscription, and of revising the character
of the purposes for which nations have hitherto claimed service from
their young citizens on behalf of the State. Debarred by a fate not
altogether unkind from training every citizen in the arts of war Ireland
might--if the love of country and the desire for service are really so
strong as we are told--suddenly become eminent among the nations of the
world by adopting a policy which in half a century would make our mean
cities and our backward countryside the most beautiful in the modern
world.