The Assault Part 16

CHAPTER XIX

THE INTERNAL FOE

Britain's autumn of complacency faded unruffled into a winter and spring of la.s.situde 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 crus.h.i.+ng 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 n.o.body 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 Sh.e.l.led 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 sh.o.r.es of these sea-girt isles had felt the impact of bombardment. The raid extended far along the Yorks.h.i.+re 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 "Ca.n.a.l 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 circ.u.mstance 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 a.s.sailed 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 sh.o.r.es--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 dictators.h.i.+p on the shoulders of the "ma.s.ses,"

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 establis.h.i.+ng 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 s.h.i.+pbuilding and s.h.i.+powning firms now waited on Lloyd-George. They told him that drink, more truly the curse of the British working cla.s.ses 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-cla.s.s 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 Monmouths.h.i.+re 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 a.r.s.enal 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 "s.h.i.+rking-men" at some sh.e.l.l works or s.h.i.+pyard, 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 t.i.tan strength into the balance for the winning of the war. He addressed his appeal alike to masters and men. Pa.s.sionately 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 sh.e.l.ls!" 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 pa.s.sed 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 sh.e.l.l-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 s.h.i.+bboleths 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 s.n.a.t.c.hed 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 s.h.i.+rking 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 Sat.u.r.day, 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 s.h.i.+rkers 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 att.i.tude 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--s.h.i.+pping, 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 a.s.sert, 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 cla.s.ses 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 s.h.i.+rking. 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 sh.e.l.ls 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 sh.e.l.ls. 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 pa.s.s 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 sh.e.l.ls--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 n.o.bly. 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.

[Ill.u.s.tration: 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 cla.s.s 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 ma.s.ses, 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 ma.s.ses' 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-cla.s.s and lower middle-cla.s.s mult.i.tude. 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 cl.u.s.ter 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 a.s.signed 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 Dusseldorf 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 cla.s.ses 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. Ma.s.ses which have for decades been neglected and held in subjection and contempt by an unrelenting cla.s.s-distinction system heavily charged with arrant sn.o.bbishness 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 advertis.e.m.e.nts, reproaches of the "slacker" and the "s.h.i.+rker" in the press, on the platform, in the parks and from the pulpit, have signally failed to shame lower-cla.s.s Britain into doing its duty as the upper and middle cla.s.ses 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 a.s.suming the thankless job, Derby said he felt like taking over the receivers.h.i.+p 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 "pus.h.i.+ng" 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.