If 'National Service,' or 'Conscription,' has actually become necessary already, or may conceivably become so before long, it seems worth while to glance at some of the considerations which have been urged in favour of this system in the past, and also to examine some of the causes and conditions which have hitherto led public opinion in the United Kingdom, as well as in several of the Dominions, to regard the principle of compulsion with hostility and distrust. The true nature of what we call the 'Voluntary System,' and the reasons which have induced a large section of our fellow-countrymen to regard it as one of our most sacred institutions, are worth looking into, now that circumstances may force us to abandon it in the near future.
Beyond the question, whether the system of recruiting, which has been employed during the present war, can correctly be described as 'voluntary,' there is the further question, whether the system, which is in use at ordinary times, and which produces some 35,000 men per annum, can be so described. Lord Roberts always maintained that it could not, and that its true title was 'the Conscription of Hunger.'
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NORMAL RECRUITING METHODS
Any one who has watched the recruiting-sergeant at work, on a raw cold day of winter or early spring, will be inclined to agree with Lord Roberts. A fine, good-humoured, well-fed, well-set-up fellow, in a handsome uniform, with rows of medals which light up the mean and dingy street, lays himself alongside some half-starved poor devil, down in his luck, with not a rag to his back that the north wind doesn't blow through. The appetites and vanities of the latter are all of them morbidly alert—hunger, thirst, the desire for warmth, and to cut a smart figure in the world. The astute sergeant, though no professor of psychology, understands the case thoroughly, as he marks down his man. He greets him heartily with a 'good day' that sends a glow through him, even before the drink at the Goat and Compasses, or Green Dragon has been tossed off, and the King's shilling accepted.
Not that there is any need for pity or regret. These young men with empty bellies, and no very obvious way of filling them, except by violence—these lads with gloom at their hearts, in many cases with a burden of shame weighing on them at having come into such a forlorn pass—in nine cases out of ten enlistment saves them; perhaps in more even than that.
But talk about compulsion and the voluntary principle! What strikes the observer most about such a scene as this is certainly not anything which can be truly termed 'voluntary.' If one chooses to put things into ugly words—which is sometimes useful, in order to give a shock to good people who are tending towards self-righteousness in their worship of phrases—this is the compulsion of hunger and {384} misery. It might even be contended that it was not only compulsion, but a mean, sniggling kind of compulsion, taking advantage of a starving man.
The law is very chary of enforcing promises made under duress. If a man dying of thirst signs his birthright away, or binds himself in service for a term of years, in exchange for a glass of water, the ink and paper have no validity. But the recruit is firmly bound. He has made a contract to give his labour, and to risk his life for a long period of years, at a wage which is certainly below the market rate; and he is held to it. Things much more 'voluntary' than this have been dubbed 'slavery,' and denounced as 'tainted with servile conditions.' And the loudest denunciators have been precisely those anti-militarists, who uphold our 'voluntary' system with the hottest fervour, while reprobating 'compulsion' with the utmost horror.
MORAL AND ECONOMIC ASPECTS
We have heard much caustic abuse of the National Service League. It has been accused of talking 'the cant of compulsion'; by which has been meant that certain of its members have put in the forefront of their argument the moral and physical advantages which they imagine universal military training would confer upon the nation. Some may possibly have gone too far, and lost sight of the need of the nation, in their enthusiasm for the improvement of the individual. But if occasionally their arguments assume the form of cant, can their lapse be compared with the cant which tells the world smugly that the British Army is recruited on the voluntary principle?
The 'economic argument,' as it is called, is another example. The country would be faced with {385} ruin, we are told, if every able-bodied man had to give 'two of the best years of his life,'[1] and a week or two out of each of the ensuing seven, to 'unproductive' labour. Sums have been worked out the to hundreds of millions sterling, with the object of showing that the national loss, during a single generation, would make the national debt appear insignificant. How could Britain maintain her industrial pre-eminence weighted with such a handicap?
One answer is that Britain, buoyed up though she has been by her voluntary system, has not lately been outstripping those of her competitors who carried this very handicap which it is now proposed that she should carry; that she has not even been maintaining her relative position in the industrial world in comparison, for example, with Germany.
But there is also another answer. If you take a youth at the plastic age when he has reached manhood, feed him on wholesome food, subject him to vigorous and varied exercise, mainly in the open air, discipline him, train him to co-operation with his fellows, make him smart and swift in falling-to at whatever work comes under his hand, you are thereby giving him precisely what, for his own sake and that of the country, is most needed at the present time. You are giving him the chance of developing his bodily strength under healthy conditions, and you are giving him a general education and moral training which, in the great majority of cases, will be of great value to him in all his after life.
It is the regret of every one, who has studied our industrial system from within, that men wear out too {386} soon. By the time a man reaches his fortieth year—often earlier—he is too apt, in many vocations, to be an old man; and for that reason he is in danger of being shoved out of his place by a younger generation.
This premature and, for the most part, unnecessary ageing is the real economic loss. If by taking two years out of a man's life as he enters manhood, if by improving his physique and helping him to form healthy habits, you can thereby add on ten or fifteen years to his industrial efficiency, you are not only contributing to his own happiness, but are also adding enormously to the wealth and prosperity of the country. Any one indeed, who chooses to work out sums upon this hypothesis, will hardly regard the national debt as a large enough unit for comparison. The kernel of this matter is, that men wear out in the working classes earlier than in others, mainly because they have no break, no rest, no change, from the day they leave school to take up a trade, till the day when they have to hand in their checks for good and all. It is not effort, but drudgery, which most quickly ages a man. It is the rut—straight, dark, narrow, with no horizons, and no general view of the outside world—which is the greatest of social dangers. More than anything else it tends to narrowness of sympathy and bitterness of heart.
UNDER-RATING OF CONSCRIPT ARMIES
It would be cant to claim that universal military training will get rid of this secular evil; but to say that it will help to diminish it is merely the truth. The real 'cant' is to talk about the economic loss under conscription; for there would undoubtedly be an immense economic gain.
But indeed the advocacy of the voluntary system {387} is stuffed full of cant.... We are all proud of our army; and rightly so. But the opponents of universal military service go much further in this direction than the soldiers themselves. They contrast our army, to its enormous advantage, with the conscript armies of the continent, which they regard as consisting of vastly inferior fighting men—of men, in a sense despicable, inasmuch as their meek spirits have submitted tamely to conscription.
Colonel Seely, who, when he touches arithmetic soars at once into the region of poetry, has pronounced confidently that one of our voluntary soldiers is worth ten men whom the law compels to serve. Sir John Simon was still of opinion—even after several months of war—that one of our volunteers was worth at least three conscripts; and he was convinced that the Kaiser himself already knew it. What a splendid thing if Colonel Seely were right, or even if Sir John Simon were right!
But is either of them right? So far as our voluntary army is superior—and it was undoubtedly superior in certain respects at the beginning of the war—it was surely not because it was a 'voluntary' army; but because, on the average, it had undergone a longer and more thorough course of training than the troops against which it was called upon to fight. Fine as its spirit was, and high as were both its courage and its intelligence, who has ever heard a single soldier maintain that—measured through and through—it was in those respects superior to the troops alongside which, or against which it fought?
As the war has continued month after month, and men with only a few months' training have been {388} drafted across the Channel to supply the British wastage of war, even this initial superiority which came of longer and more thorough training has gradually been worn away. A time will come, no doubt—possibly it has already come—when Germany, having used up her trained soldiers of sound physique, has to fall back upon an inferior quality. But that is merely exhaustion. It does not prove the superiority of the voluntary system. It does not affect the comparison between men of equal stamina and spirit—one set of whom has been trained beforehand in arms—the other not put into training until war began.
Possibly Colonel Seely spoke somewhat lightly and thoughtlessly in those serene days before the war-cloud burst; but Sir John Simon spoke deliberately—his was the voice of the Cabinet, after months of grim warfare. To describe his utterances as cant does not seem unjust, though possibly it is inadequate. We are proud of our army, not merely because of its fine qualities, but for the very fact that it is what we choose to call a 'voluntary' army. But what do they say of it in foreign countries? What did the whole of Europe say of it during the South African War? What are the Germans saying of it now?
Naturally prejudice has led them to view the facts at a different angle. They have seldom referred to the 'voluntary' character of our army. That was not the aspect which attracted their attention, so much as the other aspect, that our soldiers received pay, and therefore, according to German notions, 'fought for hire.' At the time of the South African War all continental nations said of our army what {389} the Germans still say—not that it was a 'voluntary' army, but that it was a 'mercenary' army; and this is a much less pleasant-sounding term.[2]
THE CANT OF MILITARISM
In this accusation we find the other kind of cant—the cant of militarism. For if ours is a mercenary army, so is their own, in so far as the officers and non-commissioned officers are concerned. But as a matter of fact no part, either of our army or the existing German army, can with any truth be described as 'mercenaries'; for this is a term applicable only to armies—much more common in the past in Germany than anywhere else—who were hired out to fight abroad in quarrels which were not their own.
But although this German accusation against the character of our troops is pure cant, it would not be wholly so were it levelled against the British people. Not our army, but we ourselves, are the true mercenaries; because we pay others to do for us what other nations do for themselves. In German eyes—and perhaps in other eyes as well, which are less willing to see our faults—this charge against the British people appears maintainable. It is incomprehensible to other nations, why we should refuse to recognise that it is any part of our duty, as a people, to defend our country; why we will not admit the obligation either to train ourselves to arms in time of peace, or to risk our lives in time of war; why we hold obstinately to it that such things are no part of {390} our duty as a people, but are only the duty of private individuals who love fighting, or who are endowed with more than the average sense of duty.
"As for you, the great British People," writes Hexenküchen contemptuously, "you merely fold your hands, and say self-righteously, that your duty begins and ends with paying certain individuals to fight for you—individuals whose personal interest can be tempted with rewards; whose weakness of character can be influenced by taunts, and jeers, and threats of dismissal; or who happen to see their duty in a different light from the great majority which calls itself (and is par excellence) the British People...." This may be a very prejudiced view of the matter, but it is the German view. What they really mean when they say that England is to be despised because she relies upon a mercenary army, is that England is to be despised because, being mercenary, she relies upon a professional army. The taunt, when we come to analyse it, is found to be levelled, not against the hired, but against the hirers; and although we may be very indignant, it is not easy to disprove its justice.
The British nation, if not actually the richest, is at any rate one of the richest in the world. It has elected to depend for its safety upon an army which cannot with justice be called either 'voluntary' or 'mercenary,' but which it is fairly near the truth to describe as 'professional.' The theory of our arrangement is that we must somehow, and at the cheapest rate, contrive to tempt enough men to become professional soldiers to ensure national safety. Accordingly we offer such inducements to take up {391} the career of arms—instead of the trades of farm labourer, miner, carpenter, dock hand, shopkeeper, lawyer, physician, or stockbroker—as custom and the circumstances of the moment appear to require.
In an emergency we offer high pay and generous separation allowances to the private soldier. In normal times we give him less than the market rate of wages.
PAY OF THE BRITISH ARMY
The pay of junior or subaltern officers is so meagre that it cannot, by any possibility, cover the expenses which Government insists upon their incurring. Captains, majors, and lieutenant-colonels are paid much less than the wages of foremen or sub-managers in any important industrial undertaking. Even for those who attain the most brilliant success in their careers, there are no prizes which will stand comparison for a moment with a very moderate degree of prosperity in the world of trade or finance. They cannot even be compared with the prizes open to the bar or the medical profession.
Hitherto we have obtained our officers largely owing to a firmly rooted tradition among the country gentlemen and the military families—neither as a rule rich men, or even very easy in their circumstances as things go nowadays—many of them very poor—a tradition so strong that it is not cant, but pla............