A STUDY IN MILITARISM 
 
 R Y J . R A M S A Y 
 ■MACDONALD, M.P. 
 
 LONEiQN: GEORGE ALLEN & UNWIN LTjp. 
 RUS'KIN HOUSE 40 MUSEUM STREET, W,C. 1 
 
 Hniiiit tiwiii ii iiii W i iiiti i iw iw i i wi MBro 
 
NATIONAL DEFENCE 
 
EXTRACTS FROM THE REVIEWS 
 
 " / am convinced that Mr. Mac Donald's is 
 the wisest^ most statesmanlike, and the most 
 important of the books written on the possi- 
 bilities of future and permanent peace? — 
 Gerald Gough in The Herald. 
 
 " This powerful and incisive book is 
 invaluable? — The Friend. 
 
 " Mr. MacDonalds bitterest opponents will 
 have great difficulty in destroying the 
 fundamentals of his carefully reasoned 
 thesis? — Leicester Pioneer. 
 
 " Brilliantly emphatic? — Nation. 
 
 "Sincere and even powerful? — New Age. 
 
 "A masterly and unfaltering indictment 
 of militarism, root and branch? — Labour 
 Leader. 
 
NATIONAL 
 ^ DEFENCE 
 
 A STUDY IN MILITARISM 
 
 J. RAMSAY MACDONALD, M.P. 
 
 
 LONDON : GEORGE ALLEN & UNWIN LTD. 
 RUSKIN HOUSE 40 MUSEUM STREET, W.C. 1 
 
First edition published January igiy 
 Reprinted March . . lgij 
 
 Reprinted February . . igi8 
 
 (All rights reserved) 
 
TO 
 THE TRADE UNIONISTS OF THE COUNTRY 
 
 WHO ARE AT THE PARTING OF THE WAYS, AND 
 
 UPON WHOSE COURAGE AND WISDOM 
 
 THE FUTURE OF EUROPE SO 
 
 LARGELY DEPENDS 
 
 X 
 
CONTENTS 
 
 INTRODUCTION ...... 
 
 CHAPTER 
 
 I. PACIFISM AND PEACE 
 
 II. NATIONAL DEFENCE AND A CITIZEN ARMY 
 
 III. NATIONAL DEFENCE AND NATIONAL OFFENCE 
 
 IV. NATIONAL SERVICE AND THIS WAR 
 
 V. AN "ENFORCED" PEACE 
 
 VI. NATIONAL DEFENCE AND CONSCRIPTION 
 
 VII. THE MILITARY NATION . 
 
 VIII. A DEMOCRATIC GERMANY AND PEACF 
 
 IX. MILITARISM AND DEMOCRACY . 
 
 X. THE ARMY, THE STATE, AND LABOUR . 
 
 XI. THE ARMY AND REVOLUTION . 
 
 XII. THE GUARANTEE OF PEACE 
 
 XIII. THE POLITICS OF PEACE 
 
 PAGE 
 
 9 
 
 21 
 29 
 
 48 
 56 
 
 65 
 
 72 
 
 79 
 89 
 
 99 
 107 
 112 
 122 
 
 rT«1 ct 1 r\ 
 
INTRODUCTION 
 
 I HAVE tried in this book to prove that militarism 
 of an unlimited kind is a necessary consequence of 
 the political policy which European States have been 
 pursuing hitherto. For some years I have been 
 forced against my will nearer and nearer to the 
 conclusion that, given the way in which we have 
 been conducting our foreign affairs and the features 
 which our entente with Russia and France have 
 been assuming, war was becoming inevitable l and 
 the policy of the National Service League was 
 becoming an unavoidable calamity. We could not 
 get the country to take a sufficiently apprehensive 
 interest in its European policy, and the others could 
 not induce it to face the responsibilities of its 
 position. 2 It was right in refusing militarism, and 
 
 1 Whoever has had an opportunity of reading the dispatches 
 of the Belgian Ministers in London, Paris, and Berlin, published 
 in America in 1915, under the title of European Politics during 
 the Decade before the War as described by Belgian Diplomatists, 
 will understand how this inevitability was troubling the minds 
 of those who were well informed, and how the inevitability arose. 
 The point is also dealt with by Mr. Lowes Dickinson in his 
 The European Anarchy, George Allen & Unwin, 2s. 6d. net. See 
 also Mr. Morel's Truth and the War, 2s. 
 
 * But note the argument in Chapter IV. 
 
10 INTRODUCTION 
 
 yet it would not take the trouble to avoid war. 
 That was the dilemma in which we were. 
 
 When the war broke out conscription could not 
 be avoided. We had committed ourselves to 
 policies and expeditions which made every other 
 method of raising the necessary troops a mere 
 makeshift. If voluntaryism could have been saved, 
 it was not by recruiting meetings which only 
 hastened it to its end, but by a policy which at 
 the outset would have defined in severely precise 
 language our responsibilities and our purpose in 
 entering the war, and which would have kept open 
 channels for diplomatic negotiation. That was never 
 done except in perorations which increased fervour 
 and misunderstanding at the same time. When the 
 Coalition was formed, voluntaryism, doomed for 
 months, actually died, because the Cabinet had to 
 be kept together, and in the face of the military 
 demands the conscriptionists had to be appeased. 
 Labour in particular lost its chance of saving the 
 nation by keeping control upon militarism, and the 
 country set out upon the road to military victory 
 through the ruin of civil liberty. We sacrificed 
 the future to the present when we might have 
 saved both. In this book I deal with the future. 
 
 Those who read what I have written will have 
 two questions constantly in their minds, and I will 
 deal with them straight away. The first is, " Would 
 you disarm immediately after the war, whether other 
 
INTRODUCTION 11 
 
 nations did so or not? " and the second is, M How 
 is the old order of policy which you say brought 
 the war upon Europe to be ended? " 
 
 It is impossible to disarm right away. When 
 one has been pursuing for a long time a wrong 
 path, one has to consume some little time in return- 
 ing to wiser ways. There must be an intervening 
 time, the features of which (for instance, how arma- 
 ments can be progressively reduced) require for 
 their discussion a book to itself. I wish to raise 
 issues more fundamental and controlling than ex- 
 pediencies, because I feel that nothing will injure 
 the future more than if we accept expediencies as 
 final settlements — than if we assume that the best 
 we can do for the moment is to be regarded as 
 satisfactory. It must be remembered that there 
 will be no war for at least ten or twenty years 
 after this, and we have that time in which to lay the 
 foundations of peace. What I insist upon is that 
 if during these years false starts are made or un- 
 stable securities accepted, the next generation will 
 find itself in our position. There is no compromise 
 possible in militarism. It is all or none. 
 
 I do not discuss temporary expediencies and 
 makeshifts. I have tried to bring my readers face 
 to face with ultimate and governing facts. The 
 important thing is definitely to see one's error, 
 definitely to understand it, definitely to turn one's 
 back upon it. And it is particularlv important as 
 
12 INTRODUCTION 
 
 regards militarism to see that every — even the best 
 — halfway house is a dangerous dwelling-place, and 
 that so long as militarism in any shape or form 
 exists it is a menace to peace. 
 
 This country has been grievously misled by a 
 kind of pious pacifism, which lulled it into a false 
 sense of security, which refused to face the truth, 
 which allowed it to drift into war whilst it was 
 preaching peace, and which, when the war broke out, 
 chirped about this being the last of the wars and 
 linked its arms in those of Mars as the saviour of 
 society and the herald of peace. This kind of 
 pacifism is to be in the future as impotent for good 
 and as fruitful of evil as it has been in the past. 
 
 There can be no peace until the people search 
 for it with two assumptions in their minds : the 
 first, that war is not made by a conscious effort 
 of any one's will, but is an event in political policy, 
 an impasse; the second, that arms never can 
 provide for national security, that they only keep 
 nations insecure, and that they evolve an organiza- 
 tion, a morality, a necessity, and an expediency 
 based upon Force as Right, and that these are 
 constantly extending their authority and their threats 
 against liberty and self-government. 
 
 Militarism has increased its power enormously 
 within the last century, not because it has been 
 successful but because it has failed. The nations 
 have increased their military preparations and 
 
INTRODUCTION 13 
 
 handed themselves over to military control, obedient 
 to exactly the same impulse as that which urges 
 a gambler to increase his stakes. When a gambler 
 working upon a system loses, he increases his risks 
 till he loses all. After every war the failure of 
 militarism to secure the purposes of the war and 
 remove the causes of war has led to demands 
 for a more efficient and thorough militarism. I 
 might vary the simile. The nations have been 
 like sick men taking patent medicines. The less 
 good the trusted specific does, the bigger the dose 
 they take. When nations fear each other, Govern- 
 ments have an unlimited command over their 
 resources and their capacity to sacrifice. To 
 organize the power of resistance and attack seems 
 such an obvious security to those who do not think 
 of consequences, and armies seem so necessary, that 
 no cautious man can question them if he does 
 not follow cause and effect far enough. The truth 
 which I want to drive home is that the nation 
 which trusts to the sword must perish by the sword, 
 because it has committed itself to a system of 
 defence which cannot defend but which must in 
 the end destroy. 
 
 I have no belief that the waste and cruelties of 
 war will ever end it. If that were so, the mere 
 development of the powers of destruction would 
 drive nations to seek peace. War belongs to 
 emotions more primitive and elusive than those 
 
14 INTRODUCTION 
 
 which determine bargains over a counter. Its very 
 sacrifices are acceptable to people like martyrdom. 
 We say truly that armaments and war depend on 
 political policy, but that is only part of the truth. 
 Armaments and armies also influence political 
 policy. We live in a world of action and re- 
 action, of causes producing effects, and effects 
 becoming causes for further effects. I believe that 
 so long as there are armies there will be wars, 
 because the existence of armies produces those situa- 
 tions under which the sacrifices of war become 
 acceptable to the people. That is the fact which 
 rules everything, and if we do not face it we face 
 nothing. 
 
 I therefore say that whatever the intermediate 
 stage may be, it must be tolerated only as an 
 intermediate stage in which there should be no 
 lingering, and that the people all the time should 
 be working and agreeing to hurry through with 
 it and so get to the end of it. 
 
 Then, as to the second question. The existing 
 order of policy and tradition cannot make peace. 
 In its hands this war will just leave behind it 
 the usual crop of unsolved problems and irrita- 
 tions which in due course will strengthen mili- 
 tarism and diplomacy. Then Europe will steadily 
 drift into another conflict. If this war has not 
 forfeited the confidence of the masses of Europe 
 in the kind of Governments which they have been 
 
INTRODUCTION 15 
 
 having, there is to be no guarantee of peace in 
 Europe. International relations are controlled in 
 such a way as to make war inevitable. To discuss 
 the consequences of this would require a book, but 
 the fundamental points of the programme of the 
 Union of Democratic Control and its publications 
 may be consulted. 
 
 To think of peace under such conditions is like 
 expecting a warm, gentle, nourishing rain when 
 the temperature is below zero. It is therefore 
 futile to think of ending militarism and war 
 under existing diplomatic conditions. The one 
 depends upon the other ; both must be destroyed 
 together. This war is the proof of the failure 
 of both. 
 
 Special as may be the German responsibility 
 to-day, no greater misfortune could befall Europe 
 than if that responsibility were made to obscure 
 those of a more general character. If the wider 
 truth is not seen, Europe will be left in the clutches 
 of militarism. That is why so many interests are 
 anxious to make people believe that one man made 
 the war or that one national clique forced it. The 
 one man's head may be chopped off, the national 
 clique may be deprived of power — but the armies 
 will remain. If the victimized nations could but 
 see that this fraud of force to which they are 
 trusting is the very thing which is oppressing thfem 
 Snd scourging them, if they once grasp that the 
 
16 INTRODUCTION 
 
 old order of diplomacy and militarism has made 
 the war inevitable and will continue to make war 
 inevitable, then that old order will disappear and 
 war will go with it. 
 
 My answer to the second question therefore is, 
 that so soon as peace appears above the horizon 
 the democratic organizations of the various nations 
 (Labour in particular) should get together, should 
 confer simultaneously with the official diplomatists, 
 and, free from old traditions and modes of diplo- 
 macy, should agree amongst themselves about an 
 international action which will be co-operative and 
 express the really pacific national wills. 
 
 In one of the means for securing national unity 
 I am particularly interested. The International 
 Socialist movement bade fair to begin the new 
 order, but the war came too soon for it. It had 
 not established its grip firmly enough, and the 
 current down the rapids sped too swiftly since 
 the Agadir incident for any international unofficial 
 movement to withstand it and save Europe from 
 having to tumble over the waterfall. Still, we 
 must return to the corporate action of the workers 
 of Europe. The working classes must build up 
 a Labour international diplomacy (other political 
 and social sections doing their share in ways suit- 
 able to themselves), which will be enforced and 
 guaranteed by parties in every European Parliament 
 working in union with each other, insisting upon 
 
INTRODUCTION IT 
 
 knowing what their Foreign Offices are doing and 
 pursuing a common policy decided upon by them- 
 selves at joint conferences held frequently. In 
 other words, we must create a machinery of demo- 
 cratic diplomacy with decisions guaranteed and 
 enforced by the mutual confidence of the peoples 
 which only the existence of such an organization 
 call establish. We can have Hague Courts by the 
 score and Arbitration Treaties by the thousand, 
 but without this diplomacy of the democracy there 
 can be no guarantee of peace. 
 
 This organization of international democracy will 
 seek to control the action of the various nations so 
 that the official diplomacy, if disruptive #nd aggres- 
 sive, will be deprived of its backing from public 
 opinion, and will thus find its agreements and 
 policy useless. In other words, there must be 
 for foreign policy the same checking and controlling 
 political organization expressing the popular will 
 as there is for home policy, but obviously this 
 organization must be international and not national. 
 The general strike against war, should it ever be 
 necessary then, will be assured by an international 
 working-class compact so that it will not weaken 
 one nation Which resorts to it— a foolish and suicidal 
 thing— but will prevent any military authority 
 launching war upon the world. 
 
 Above all, this new diplomacy will trust to no 
 armed force. It will give no support to citizen 
 
18 INTRODUCTION 
 
 armies because it will have no need of them, 
 or to any idea that militarism is anything but a 
 menace to the security of a nation. It will labour 
 under no delusion that there is a difference between 
 military defence and offence, because it will have 
 been taught by experience that both are aspects 
 of the same error. People talk of an international 
 police force as though the enforcement of law in 
 an international State made up of a dozen or so of 
 nations could be done in the same way as in a 
 national State of nillions of citizens. That is 
 not so. A delinquent State, when the people have 
 seen the futility of militarism, must in the very 
 nature of things accept the decisions of inter- 
 national courts. Its people will see to that. If 
 they do not, each State will continue to provide its 
 own army of defence, and instead of an inter- 
 national police force we shall have the present 
 condition of affairs, with all the consequences de- 
 scribed in this book. To call national armies 
 an International Police Force seems to me to be 
 nothing but sticking new misleading labels upon 
 them. 
 
 In an oration delivered in memory of Jaur&s 
 on the second anniversary of his death, M. Vander- 
 velde spoke these words, quoting Nietzsche, " that 
 great German who more than any one detested 
 Prussian militarism": "Those who fight against 
 monsters ought to take care lest they become 
 
INTRODUCTION 19 
 
 monsters themselves/* and he added: "We fight 
 against militarism and the spirit of conquest ; take 
 care lest we ope day become the prisoners of 
 militarism." Europe has been the prisoner of 
 militarism for generations, and every time it has 
 tried to free itself it has only deepened and 
 darkened its dungeon. Is it to repeat its past 
 error? 
 
NATIONAL DEFENCE 
 
 CHAPTER I 
 
 PACIFISM AND PEACE 
 
 Wherever the rival armies may be when this war 
 ends, none of the great political problems which 
 have produced the conflict will have been solved. 
 The nations will not be in a position or in a frame 
 of mind to dispense with armed force. They will 
 be exhausted; they will be horror-stricken ; they 
 will begin to examine the tales and the opinions 
 which braced them whilst the work of mutual 
 destruction was proceeding, and they will correct 
 the one and revise the other, but they will not 
 have rid themselves of those fears and ambitions, 
 those rivalries and interests, those enmities and 
 injuries which call for military preparations and 
 which ultimately use them. 
 
 This futile ending of the greatest and the most 
 brutal and costly war which the world has ever 
 known can be obviated only on one condition — 
 that the people of Europe settle for ever the causes 
 of war. If they content themselves with expressing 
 
22 NATIONAL DEFENCE 
 
 sentiments of peace whilst they allow policies to 
 be pursued and obligations to be incurred which 
 make conflict inevitable, their neglect as citizens 
 will render their piety as individuals of no avail. 
 Indeed, this piety will only be an added danger. 
 For how will it work out? In the intervals between 
 the wars the piety of pacifism will tinge public 
 opinion, and the danger of the international policy 
 which is again leading the nations into war will 
 be minimized by statesmen who are at one and 
 the same time responsible for the fateful policy 
 and yet dependent for their authority upon electors 
 of pacific intentions. 
 
 This heart-breaking situation when good popular 
 intention becomes a national weakness, and when 
 it prevents the menacing truth from being told and 
 the proper defence from being prepared, was that 
 in which Europe found itself in 1 9 1 4 . when the 
 present war came upon it. 
 
 In Germany, where authority is stronger than 
 in any other European State except Russia, this 
 danger was not very great, though it was increasing. 
 Bernhardi wrote in order to minimize it. He shared 
 the view of the military class that a war was 
 inevitable. He believed that Germany would have 
 to fight to secure necessary outlets for her com- 
 merce and her people, and he believed that the 
 encompassing Powers meant to challenge the grow- 
 ing influence of Germany in the world. Men 
 
PACIFISM AND PEACE 23 
 
 brought up in a military atmosphere, whose actions 
 and outlook are determined by military assump- 
 tions, who believe that force is the midwife of 
 progress, would naturally take that view, and those 
 men have more authority in Germany than else- 
 where. But Bernhardi wrote because the German 
 people threatened to become actively pacifist. They 
 had been a military nation, he said, but " in striking 
 contrast to this military aptitude, they have to- 
 day become a peace-loving — an almost too peace- 
 loving — nation. A rude shock is needed to awaken 
 their warlike instincts and compel them to show 
 their military strength." 1 Again : 4I Thus the 
 political power of the nation, whilst fully alive 
 beneath the surface, is fettered externally by this 
 love of peace." And again : " From this stand- 
 point I must first of all examine the aspirations 
 of peace which seem to dominate our age and 
 threaten to poison the soul of the German people." 
 He told them of the danger they were in and, 
 by explaining military plans and necessities, sought 
 to enlighten them as to what he conceived to be 
 their duty. His book fell flat, and its circulation 
 was insignificant. But the war came before the 
 Germans were in a frame of mind to distrust their 
 military leaders. Their fear of Russia was known 
 to everybody, 2 and by playing upon that the Govern- 
 
 1 Germany and the Next War, pp. 10, etc. 
 
 * Bebel once told me in private conversation that if Russia 
 attacked Germany he himself would shoulder a rifle if he could. 
 
24 NATIONAL DEFENCE 
 
 ment rallied the German nation into a military unit, 
 and it fought. 
 
 But in Great Britain political sentiment was 
 enormously stronger than military authority, and 
 political sentiment was pacifist. It had, in conse- 
 quence, to be mollified. Whilst every one who 
 was in touch with European movements became 
 increasingly unhappy about the outlook of affairs, 
 the masses had to be kept quiet by pacific assur- 
 ances. A handful of men trained in military thought 
 tried to do in Great Britain what Bernhardi did 
 in Germany, but failed. The Navy League and 
 the National Service League saw the military 
 implications of the international policies in which 
 our country was mixed up, and conducted their 
 respective propaganda. The nation refused to listen, 
 not because it would not accept the responsibility of 
 self-defence, but because it had to be told, and 
 was told, by the politicians that it was not in 
 danger. It assumed that defence meant repelling 
 invasion, not fighting on the Continent. It was 
 wrong — fortunately, as I shall show — but it was 
 wrong all the same. Thus we neither got the 
 chance of removing the danger by insisting upon 
 a revision of international policy nor of providing 
 for it by adequate military preparations. 1 
 
 1 Whoever has written or spoken with knowledge and honesty 
 since this war has broken out has, irrespective of other opinions, 
 agreed that the Governments have hoodwinked the nation. 
 
PACIFISM AND PEACE 25 
 
 The proof of this lies in the records of the 
 past dozen years. Nearly every increase in naval 
 expenditure was accompanied by the pledge that 
 Ministers hoped to produce reductions the next year. 
 Mr. Lloyd George gave the country a New Year's 
 message for 19 14 — the year when the war broke 
 out — in which these sentences occurred : " I think 
 it [this] the most favourable moment that has 
 presented itself during the last twenty years. . . . 
 Our relations with Germany are infinitely more 
 friendly now than they have been for years." His 
 misreading of the Agadir incident is plain, but 
 his assurances regarding it were emphatic. It 
 " served the useful purpose of bringing home to 
 Germany and ourselves the perils involved in 
 the atmosphere of suspicion which had been created 
 and maintained by the politicians, the press, and 
 certain interests. ,, Finally, he gave the country 
 this soothing explanation and defence of Germany's 
 military preparations : " The German Army is vital, 
 
 Cf . Oliver, Ordeal by Battle, p. 23 (abridged edition) : " The 
 criticism against British foreign policy for upwards of a century 
 is that it has aimed at managing our international relations on a 
 system of hoodwinking the people." That on the one side ; this, 
 from the Manchester Guardian, December 3, 1912, on the other : 
 " Too much blame is laid on the newspapers for the part they 
 play in provoking international misunderstandings, for no one 
 is more ready to use them for its own purposes than the Foreign 
 Office itself and its agents abroad, and if half-truths often do 
 mischief, the fault is with the methods of diplomacy for con- 
 gealing the rest/' 
 
26 NATIONAL DEFENCE 
 
 not merely to the existence of the German Empire 
 but to the very life and independence of the nation 
 itself, surrounded as Germany is by other nations 
 each of which possesses armies almost as powerful 
 as her own." The only effect, and surely the only 
 intention, of these words was to lull the nation into 
 a comfortable restfulness. 
 
 But the most conclusively apposite proof of my 
 contention is found in two speeches delivered by 
 Mr. Asquith. In 191 2 Lord Haldane went to 
 Berlin to try to come to some agreement with 
 Germany after the very serious friction over 
 Morocco. Mr. Asquith referred to Lord Haldane's 
 mission and the subsequent negotiations, during a 
 debate on Imperial defence in the House of 
 Commons l as follows : — 
 
 Our relations with the great German Empire are, I am glad to 
 say, at this moment — and I feel sure are likely to remain — 
 relations of amity and goodwill. My noble friend Lord 
 Haldane, the present Lord Chancellor, paid a visit to Berlin 
 early in the year. He entered upon conversations and an 
 interchange of views there which have been continued since in 
 a spirit of perfect frankness and friendship, both on one side 
 and the other, and in which, I am glad to say, we now have the 
 advantage of the participation of a very distinguished dip- 
 lomatist in the person of the German Ambassador. 
 
 When the war broke out, Mr. Asquith, speaking 
 in Cardiff, 2 referred to the Haldane conversations 
 
 1 July 25, 1912, Hansard, p. 1393. 
 
 2 October 3, 1914. 
 
PACIFISM AND PEACE 27 
 
 and the interchange of views which followed in 
 a diametrically opposite sense :— 
 
 They [the German Government] wanted us to pledge our- 
 selves absolutely to neutrality in the event of Germany being 
 engaged in war, and this, mind you, at a time when Germany 
 was enormously increasing both her aggressive and defensive 
 resources, and especially upon the sea. They asked us— to put 
 it quite plainly— they asked us for a free hand so far as we were 
 concerned, if, and when, they selected the opportunity to over- 
 bear, to dominate, the European world. 
 
 In peace, public opinion demanded some pledge 
 that we were at peace, and the pledge was given 
 through the House of Commons ; at war, a justifica- 
 tion for the war had to be given, and the very 
 same circumstances which justified a pacific state- 
 ment in 191 2 were made to justify a belligerent 
 statement in 191 4. This proves that whilst the 
 nation was drifting into war the nation itself was 
 not only asleep but was being kept asleep. During 
 these critical years we had the most specific assur- 
 ances that we were in no entanglements, that we 
 had no commitments, that we never signed secret 
 treaties, and none of the assurances were reliable. 
 
 The unwillingness of a people to accept 
 militarism will not enable them to avoid it. 
 Certain political policies must be supported by force, 
 and if these policies are under the control of Govern- 
 ment departments inspired by the methods, the 
 traditions and the staffs of the Foreign Offices of 
 
28 NATIONAL DEFENCE 
 
 Europe — in the very nature of things the people 
 who are to supply the force must be kept ignorant 
 of the policy. This fact lies at the threshold of 
 every profitable discussion of peace. The pieties 
 of a peace movement which stops at sentiment 
 delude the country during peace and are swept 
 away during a war. They prevent honesty before 
 a war and are no safeguard to reason and reflection 
 when a war has come. 
 
 Therefore the people need knowledge, and they 
 need power. If they do not get these, they will 
 have to accept militarism, and they should not 
 be under any delusion as to the kind of militarism 
 which is to be their lot. 
 
CHAPTER II 
 
 NATIONAL DEFENCE AND A CITIZEN ARMY 
 
 JUST before the war broke out two very important 
 books were published in France, LArmee Nouvelle, 
 by Jaures, and Faites un Roi sinon Faites la Paix, 
 by Marcel Sembat, now a member of the French 
 Cabinet. Jaures' book— very lengthy and some- 
 what prolix — contained an extraordinarily fresh ex- 
 position of military tactics and organization based 
 upon three propositions : — 
 
 i . that the army should be a citizen force ; 
 
 2. that its tactics should be those of de- 
 fence, not offence ; and 
 
 3. that only when the army is a citizen 
 force can the policy of the country be de- 
 fensive. 
 
 The way in which many of the ideas explained 
 in the book seemed to have anticipated what 
 actually happened in the war drew great attention 
 to it, and an abstract of it has been published in 
 English for the purpose of inducing Labour in 
 
30 NATIONAL DEFENCE 
 
 particular to accept the National Service which 
 it advocates for France. 1 
 
 Jaurfes' position regarding Great Britain, how- 
 ever, must not be misunderstood. I have had many 
 conversations with him on the subject, and he 
 never expressed to me the view that what was 
 best for France was also best for England. At 
 International Socialist Congresses, when military 
 discussions were on, he always excluded England 
 from his proposals. LArmee Nouvelle was 
 addressed to France and to countries with large 
 standing armies and continental frontiers. His 
 references to Great Britain in the book are of a 
 special kind. 2 He describes the Lord Haldane 
 reorganization of the Army, and considers that 
 unless European policy changes it is only a tran- 
 sition form, and that a militia system must finally 
 be evolved. He discusses the National Service 
 League's proposals of universal service and suspects 
 them. "If % were to speak quite candidly/' he 
 says,3 <4 1 do not believe that peace is the chief 
 consideration of Lord Curzon and hi,s friends." 
 They would not be soxry if , something so upset 
 the minds of the British people that they would 
 plunge into war. He regards the whole move- 
 ment h£re as an Imperialist and aggressive one. 
 " It is an effort to capture for political Imperialism 
 
 1 Published under the title of Democracy and Military Servia 
 ■ Pp. 496-5I5- 3 p - 512. 
 
A CITIZEN ARMY 31 
 
 the forces of democracy." i More specifically he 
 points out that Great Britain has an alternative: — 
 
 In any case I repeat that England must either aid the move- 
 ment to inaugurate a new policy which will result in agreements 
 to disarm, and which will dissipate the nightmares of war and 
 invasion, or accept universal service by the force of events, by 
 the implacable logic of an armed peace, and by the dull fever 
 of an Anglo-German conflict. 2 
 
 The meaning of this is quite clear. Jaur&s 
 hoped that we would pursue a peace policy, and 
 keep out of the politics and antagonisms which 
 compelled the rest of Europe to resort to universal 
 military service, whilst being perfectly convinced 
 that if we did not do that the implacable logic 
 of events wooild drive us into a militia system. 
 The author of VArmee Nouvelle did not wish us 
 to adopt his system except as a last resort, and 
 after we had failed to pursue the political policy 
 which he advocated and which he believed was 
 open to us. 
 
 The book which his friend and colleague, Sembat, 
 Wrote was the political supplement to VArmee 
 Nouvelle. In a sentence its contention is that 
 political policy — not war preparations — not military 
 organization, determines peace and war ; that if 
 nations have to trust for their defence to arms 
 during peace they create, not only an undemocratic 
 spirit amongst their people, but must also adopt 
 
 1 Pp. 512-13. ■ P. 514. 
 
32 NATIONAL DEFENCE 
 
 a national organization other than democratic : 
 44 Make a King or make Peace." This is the 
 evolution which is inevitable, and from that point 
 of view he criticized adversely the Entente ,and 
 the policy of France. 
 
 In these books we have two great Frenchmen, 
 both devoted friends of peace, discussing from 
 different angles the problems of peace. " Create 
 a peace army," says the one, " because European 
 policy threatens you, and you must defend your- 
 self." " Create a. peace policy," says the other, 
 44 because militarism threatens the very State which 
 it is called in to aid." 
 
 Between these two magnets of fe,ar and reason 
 the peace sentiment swings. It creates an army 
 to defend itself, a^nd it supplements its military 
 efforts by diplomatic alliances ; at the same time 
 it sighs for aj policy which will remove dangers 
 and rr^ake military precautions unnecessary. Here 
 is the fix in which nations ,ate ; and the question 
 which very few people consider, but which long 
 experience thrusts upon us is, Can a nation swing- 
 ing between these two policies ever have pe^ce? 
 Can a Jaur£s ever assist to write history as both 
 he and Sembat would like it to be written? 
 
 I think hot, and I believe the reason to be 
 as fplain as ajiy reason ever can be. 
 
 One of several unreal distinctions which Jaur&s 
 makes is that if the army is a citizen force, such 
 
A CITIZEN ARMY 33 
 
 bl force would be more pacific and less un4etf 
 the control of diplomatists and aggressive military 
 sections 'than a barrack army or a hired one. In 
 other Words, he argues that a citizen army is a 
 peace army, and that statesmen can use it only 
 for defence because it will not tolerate a war of 
 aggression. That -is not true. The argument 
 was a familiar one at International Congresses, 
 but this \tfar has disproved it. No people even 
 make >wtar, whether they have to fight themselves 
 or only pay others to fight for them. But having 
 said that, we have said nothing of any valine or 
 importance. There wias little difference in the 
 way that the people of Great Britain, France, and 
 Germany leaped to the sword in the autumn of 
 19 1 4, and if there wjas any difference in the 
 policies of the various Governments during the 
 negotiations which preceded the w&r, it was the 
 Government with the voluntary and the hired Army, 
 which hesitated most, the Government which be- 
 lieved that it would only ha,ve to supply a few 
 hujndred thousand men to do its share of the fight- 
 ing. If there was any difference in the popular 
 desire for peace during the la^st ten years, not 
 one can say that the British people, m#io did 
 not expect to have to fight a<s a whole, were more 
 bellicose than 'either the French oir the Germans. 
 Indeed, what happened rather proves that the more 
 general the military service is, the more readily 
 
 3 
 
34 NATIONAL DEFENCE 
 
 the people (accept the military assumption* that 
 war cannot .he avoided, the more do they become 
 accustomed to take it for granted that soldiers 
 will be used to settle international quarrels. Nor 
 is there anything* in the argument that if people 
 have to fight themselves they will be more careful 
 to see that the swtord is only the last resort. 
 [Whether they fight or only pay, th^ir Governments 
 have to persuade them that they have justice and 
 righteousness on their side, and that they are de- 
 fending themselves and not transgressing on other 
 people's rights. It was a nation that Napoleon 
 led to threaten Europe, and not a hired or a 
 barrack army. Jaures for a moment forgot his 
 French history. On the other h|and, when people 
 know that they themselves have to fight, they 
 more readily accept doctrines of " military, neces- 
 sity.' ' The military argument that Belgium had 
 to be used &s a highway in order to save the lives 
 of Germjan soldiers was listened to more readily 
 by Germans because the whole nation was liable 
 to be called out than if only 4 per cent, of it 
 had been soldiers. 
 
 Further, Jaures simplified his categories of 
 war when he assumed they were either offensive 
 or defensive. They may also be casual in the 
 sense that they have arisen out of general policy 
 and represent a conflict in ideas or purpose. iWars 
 in these modern days are most likely to come like 
 
A CITIZEN ARMY 35 
 
 the harvest of fate in a Greek tragedy. A mistake 
 is m&de, an evil is done, and the innocent are 
 digged in to wipe out the stain with their blood. 
 (Whether the army is voluntary and hired for 
 citizen and conscript will make no difference in 
 that quarrel. If there is an army there will then 
 be a fight. 
 
 Therefore, when Jaurfes says that " a nation in 
 aims is necessarily a nation actuated by justice 
 and Uprightness/' and that in consequence it will 
 only (engage in Wars of defence or of liberty, 
 he is slaying what is not true, apd is using high- 
 sounding words which mislead people. Whether 
 a nation is trained in arms or trusts in a voluntary, 
 army, its rulers are under the same necessity to: 
 gjaon public opinion and passion in support o£ 
 wiar, and the former nation presents fewer diffi- 
 culties to such rulers than the latter. A nation 
 in 3,rms thinks more in camps, and ob'eys in- 
 voluntarily the impulses of militarism more readily 
 than does a nation not in arms. If this argument 
 is sound, practically the whole of the ground upon 
 which V Armee Nojuvelle rests is knocked aiway. 
 
 This is of special importance to Labour. Under 
 the promise that a citizen force is a peace force 
 Labour is being invited to support national com- 
 pulsion. The only result will be that the citizen 
 Army will teach obedience and military necessity 
 to the people, and cripple their initiative and 
 
36 NATIONAL DEFENCE 
 
 independence, and rob their political strength of 
 authority as it did in the case of the German 
 Social Democrats. Universal military training does 
 not raise any barrier of public opinion against 
 war ; it only tends to make all public opinion 
 pliable to authority. 
 
CHAPTER III 
 
 NATIONAL DEFENCE AND NATIONAL OFFENCE 
 
 The argument of the last chapter is well sup- 
 ported by recent events, but it requires to be 
 elaborated. Sembat says in his book : — 
 
 I know men, reflective, cultured, perspicacious, excellent 
 Frenchmen, who, in their secret minds or in the public expres- 
 sion of their thoughts, wish for war. And I know others (and 
 those are very great in number) who, less decided and more 
 hesitating, inclining ordinarily to peace, clench their teeth at 
 certain times and growl, " After all, if the Germans force us '.' 
 
 That is the true description of the feelings of 
 a nation during an armed peace. 1 Some few in 
 all nations want war ; they see it is inevitable ; 
 
 1 Another from a different quarter may be added. A writer 
 in the Nouvelle Revue, one of the leading French platforms of 
 intellectual opinion, wrote at the Morocco time : — 
 
 " We intend to have war. After forty years of heavily armed 
 peace we can at last utter this opinion. . . . France is ready 
 to strike and to conquer, as she was not ready forty years ago, 
 and as she will not be in four or five years to come, owing to the 
 annual divergent numbers of the birthrate in each country. . . . 
 We, the attacking country, will have arranged with England that 
 their Fleet . . . will follow the remains of the whole German 
 Navy into German waters." 
 
 37 
 
38 NATIONAL DEFENCE 
 
 they do nothing to avert it ; they let it come ; 
 they are interested only in preparing for it; when 
 it comes they say, " Had it not been for us you 
 would not have been so fit to fight as you are— 
 and then where would you have been? " But the 
 masses of all countries believe in peace and talk 
 of peace. Jaures upon this laid down what to 
 me is the utterly false proposition that an army 
 can be raised by a first-rate Power for purely 
 defensive purposes, and that then that Power can 
 direct its diplomacy also for purely defensive 
 ends. 1 
 
 I write advisedly " a first-rate Power. M Such 
 countries as Switzerland or Belgium may arm them- 
 selves for defence. They are small; they have 
 no influence on the diplomacy which deals with 
 the clash of great world interests. They are not, 
 on account of their resources, Imperially minded. 
 They have the psychology of the small State. 
 Defence to them is something quite apart from 
 offence, unless they are foolish enough to enter into 
 alliances, when they may have to accept offensive 
 
 1 His argument was inconsistent ; for whilst he thought that 
 England should keep out of the ring of armed nations, he argued 
 that France could best keep the peace by being armed, and so 
 compelling her people to interest themselves in policy. I should 
 have thought that if his conclusions about France were sound, 
 England, too, would have been doing the peace of Europe a 
 service if she had armed herself in order to bring the pressure 
 of an interested public opinion to bear upon her Foreign Office. 
 But that is in passing. 
 
NATIONAL OFFENCE 39 
 
 responsibilities. Then, however, when they are 
 attacked no defence can save them; it cannot be 
 effective for its purpose. 
 
 But where a Great Power, like Germany, France, 
 Russia, or ourselves, is concerned, defence and 
 offence are so intermingled that it is a mere 
 academic abstraction to discuss the two as though 
 they issued in separate policies. " The best defence 
 is often offence M is a sound military maxim; it 
 is a law in military tactics. But it is also a law 
 in diplomacy. It becomes a necessity imposed on 
 both sides when the accumulated burdens and fears 
 of efficient defence call for some action to put 
 an end to the unbearable strain. The man in the 
 street who accepts newspaper origins of war is 
 therefore always misled. 
 
 A policy of defence presupposes that some one 
 else is pursuing one of offence. There is always 
 a potential enemy against which the threatened 
 nation measures itself. The defending country not 
 only arms itself but supplements its military equip- 
 ment by military diplomacy. It chooses armed 
 friends who accept the alliance for reasons of their 
 own. National alliances are, as an almost universal 
 rule, manages de convenance. 
 
 Thus France made an Alliance with Russia the 
 terms of which have never been published, but 
 which the world has been given to understand was 
 for defensive purposes. The logical result of this 
 
40 NATIONAL DEFENCE 
 
 is the Balance of Power. In this way nations group 
 themselves into two camps, both of which justify 
 themselves on the grounds that they are defensive, 
 and are accepted for that reason by the various 
 peoples involved in them. But the policy of 
 alliances is complicated. It cannot be purely 
 defensive; its motives must be mixed. Historically, 
 the Triple Alliance was defensive; but it developed 
 into an offensive. Who will make bold to say 
 that in reality the Franco-Russian Alliance was 
 purely defensive? Each member of the Alliance 
 has its own aims and policies, which it advances 
 through the Alliance. 
 
 In any case, a time comes in the evolution of 
 events when the armed force becomes an influence 
 on political policy. An army being in existence, 
 policy is influenced by the possibility of its use. 
 By and by defence requires, and becomes, hostile 
 action. One of the parties requires to expand, 
 perhaps; it needs a new form of armament, as 
 the Triple Alliance needed a sea power. Or one 
 of the parties — like Austria — becomes involved in 
 an offensive policy. The result is that by a process 
 of subtle development the steps taken for defence 
 produce a condition of war between the whole of 
 the two camps. The very thing which the arms 
 and the alliances were designed to avoid has been 
 brought about by them. They produce the dreaded 
 catastrophe, and at the same time, by meeting it, 
 
NATIONAL OFFENCE M 
 
 seem to justify themselves. Thus, assuming that 
 France had become really pacific before 1914, and 
 that all intention of wiping out the disgrace of the 
 Sedan and the loss of Alsace-Lorraine had vanished 
 from the nationalist French mind, the political situa- 
 tion that year, when the Austro-Balkan or Teuto- 
 Slav troubles came to a head, was such that France 
 could not keep out of a European war. The 
 defensive alliances had gathered round themselves, 
 and got mixed up with, causes of dispute in which 
 their partners took opposing sides and which, in 
 consequence, were extended from the Balkans into 
 the whole of Europe. The position then was, so 
 far as France was concerned, " If Russia fights, 
 we must fight too "; so far as Germany was con- 
 cerned, " If Russia fights, France, too, will come 
 in, so our military plans must be laid accord- 
 ingly/' The holding back of French troops to 
 within ten kilometres from the frontier at the out- 
 break of hostilities between Russia and Germany 
 was, therefore, an act of no value whatever — an 
 act which could have had no effect upon subse- 
 quent military events. It did affect the political 
 situation, however, and brought public opinion on 
 to the side of the Government. " The French 
 Ambassador gave me to understand that France 
 would fulfil all the obligations entailed by her 
 alliance with Russia, if necessity arose, besides sup- 
 porting Russia strongly in any diplomatic negotia- 
 
42 NATIONAL DEFENCE 
 
 tions," l wrote Sir G. Buchanan to our Foreign 
 Office as early as the 24th July. So with us. Sir 
 Edward Grey said quite truly that the attitude of 
 Germany to Belgium would not have a decisive 
 effect upon our action, though it would influence 
 it. 2 The determining effect was the fact that we 
 were in the Entente and that it was a military 
 alliance. Our honour had been privately bound to 
 see France through in a war with Germany. But 
 the German — still more the Austrian — State, being 
 more militarist in its authority than that of either 
 France or Great Britain, could begin the war by 
 purely military moves, whilst France and Great 
 Britain had to begin it with political moves. 
 Germany lost the war largely because it forgot 
 civilized public opinion; the Allies gained it 
 because they had to pacify the opinion of their 
 people, and, as a by-product, gained that of the 
 world. If Germany had not been so responsive to 
 " military necessity " she would have hesitated 
 before she invaded Belgium and forgot humanity 
 in her eager pursuit of military advantage. That 
 would have made no difference so far as the number 
 of the nations engaged in the war (except for 
 Belgium herself) is concerned, but it would have 
 made all the difference in the world so far as public 
 opinion is concerned. i 
 
 1 White Paper No. 6. 
 
 2 White Paper: Documents 119, 123, 
 
NATIONAL OFFENCE 43 
 
 But the real fact remains that when the Balkan 
 squabble became a Russian quarrel, France could 
 not then rest upon her sword; when the Balkan 
 weakness became a Teuton irritation and tempta- 
 tion the Alliance, not Austria or Germany alone, 
 acted. The Alliance and the Entente had to fight. 
 
 The error in Jaures' argument that a citizen 
 army can only be an army of defence is therefore 
 shown in every sentence which describes the position 
 of France just before this war broke out. Jaur&s 
 assumes that the will of the people makes war. 
 The will of the people is like a leaf floating on the 
 current; it must drift with the stream and go 
 whither the rush drives it. When public opinion 
 settles policy, armies are secondary affairs. When 
 militarism settles policy, public opinion at any given 
 moment is a secondary affair, though it must always 
 be considered. 
 
 The same is true as regards Great Britain. Con- 
 sulting Parliament on the 3rd August, 19 14, was a 
 mere formality. It was not a real consultation, 
 because the die had been cast before it took place. 
 The soldier was already in the saddle, but it was 
 necessary for him to pay his respects to Parliament. 
 Great Britain was in the Entente ; she had shared in 
 the policy of the Entente; she had to side with the 
 Entente. An event like the invasion of Belgium 
 had no more influence in deciding if the Entente 
 would fight as a whole than a shower of rain had. 
 
44 NATIONAL DEFENCE 
 
 It affected public opinion at the moment; it did 
 not determine national policy. The statement made 
 by Lord Hugh Cecil in The Times on the 29th April, 
 191 6, that the war was decided, " not by the House 
 of Commons or by the electorate but by the con- 
 currence of Ministers and ex-Ministers " is true 
 to the letter. We were on the brink of war over 
 Morocco in 1 9 1 1 and 1 9 1 2 just as we were in 
 July 1 9 1 4, and in 1911-12 Belgium had never 
 been mentioned. In fact, whatever doubt Germany 
 ever had as to whether the invasion of Belgium 
 would bring us into the war in 19 14, she never 
 had the least doubt in 1911 that she would then 
 have had to fight us. If the war had broken out 
 then, public opinion would have been enlisted on 
 some other issue. The simple truth is — and to 
 believe in any other theory is only to humbug 
 ourselves and other people — that the Alliance and 
 the Entente came into conflict because preparations 
 for war and a military policy of defence must 
 always issue in war and provide a reason for war. 
 The truth I have been setting forth, that when 
 war is made by policy it is impossible, while 
 armies exist, for the people to think and act inde- 
 pendently of the circumstances in which they find 
 themselves, is enforced very substantially by the 
 way in which the peoples living under a foreign 
 sovereignty obeyed that call in 19 14. The Russian 
 Pole, for instance, marched with the Russian, the 
 
NATIONAL OFFENCE 45 
 
 Prusssian Pole with the German, the Austrian Pole 
 with the Austrian Army. The various races of 
 the Austro-Hungarian Empire filled the Austrian 
 Army as though they had no internal discords. 
 The outbreak of war draws all people round their 
 sovereign authority because in the flame of its 
 emotions all differences are fused. Every country 
 is believed to be in the right by its own people, 
 and the objection to being conquered is for the 
 time being the greatest of all objections. 
 
 Another attempt to maintain the false distinction 
 between defence and offence is found in the use 
 to which the armed citizen is put. Before the 
 war the National Service League insisted that it 
 only wished to apply conscription for home defence, 
 and the Territorials were enrolled for that purpose. 
 But what did the distinction amount to when the 
 war broke out? The Territorial who resisted the 
 pressure put upon him to offer himself unreservedly 
 had either to have an overwhelming reason for 
 holding back, or was branded as a coward and his 
 life made miserable. When war breaks out an 
 armed and a trained man will, either by law or 
 social pressure, be compelled to become a soldier 
 who fights where his rifle is required and not where 
 he himself selects. A home defence force is poten- 
 tially an expeditionary force. Soldiers like Lord 
 Roberts and Lord French have always expressed 
 that opinion. Only the civilian was allowed to 
 
46 NATIONAL DEFENCE 
 
 remain under any delusion— till the War broke 
 out. 
 
 Therefore the distinction which Jaures made 
 between a military policy for defence and a military 
 policy for offence is altogether unreal and artificial. 
 The truth is that so long as we have armies, what- 
 ever may be the justification we plead for them, 
 we shall have wars. The kind of army will not 
 determine how it is to be used. If we once admit 
 that force is necessary for national defence, then 
 every other militarist evil follows. The defence 
 must be complete and professionally able — hence 
 compulsion; the diplomacy which supplements it 
 must play into its hands — hence alliances, secrecy, 
 and Balance of Power; the political psychology 
 which supports it must not weaken it — hence a 
 military caste exercising independent authority in 
 the democratic State. If defence depends on force, 
 then it is criminal, it is treason, to feed the country 
 on honeyed words, on dishonest ideas, on false 
 pacifist piety/ For the force must be equal to its 
 work, otherwise it is not defence, and the enemy 
 knows it. The State trusting to force has to 
 turn to force and say, 4< .What you need for your 
 sustenance I must give you, and be content with 
 the remnant of political liberty which is left." 
 How much is left Germany shows. For this is 
 the position of Germany : Believing that she could 
 live only by force and expand only by force, she 
 
NATIONAL OFFENCE 47 
 
 trusted to force rather than to negotiation. She 
 became an Empire of force and accepted its con- 
 ditions. Her defence became an offence. Thus 
 the Great Powers of Europe became committed 
 to war, and during the year or two which preceded 
 its outbreak the most trivial incident might have 
 precipitated it. 
 
 There is no halfway abiding-place between abso- 
 lute peace and absolute militarism. If the nation 
 will not listen to good counsel and establish the 
 conditions of the former, it must accept the burdens 
 and oppressions of the latter. 
 
CHAPTER IV 
 
 NATIONAL SERVICE AND THIS WAR 
 
 It is being frequently said that if the country had 
 been wise enough to have taken Lord Roberts' advice 
 and had adopted National Service before the war 
 broke out, either there would have been no war 
 or it would have been over by now with a complete 
 victory for the Allies. 
 
 I do not believe that any one who has studied 
 the details of the war or the diplomacy which pre- 
 ceded it can hold such an opinion. All the facts 
 show that the German military authorities did not 
 consider that we could trouble them except upon 
 the sea, and they held that opinion, not because 
 our Army was small but because they did not 
 believe in our military genius. Moreover, they 
 apparently were not sure until the last moment 
 that we would come in at all, and that uncertainty 
 would not have been removed had our Army been 
 large or small. A diplomatic and military situa- 
 tion had been created in Europe which made war 
 
 certain. We had either to turn back or go on 
 
 4 8 
 
NATIONAL SERVICE AND THIS WAR 49 
 
 through war, and the arming of Great Britain in 
 1 9 1 1 or 1 9 1 2 " would not only not have eased 
 that situation but might have hastened the crisis. 
 Whatever view may be taken of the origins of the 
 war and of action that might have prevented it, 
 one thing is clear, and that is that more military 
 preparations would not have secured peace. Accu- 
 mulating armaments gradually drove home the con- 
 viction into the minds of all the peoples that they 
 were meant to be used, and as these accumulations 
 went on they pushed into the background all 
 agencies for and possibilities of peace. They were 
 challenges, not securities. 
 
 If no military preparations could have prevented 
 the war, might they not have changed its course, 
 shortened it, and made its ending more decisive 
 in our interests? Obviously had we put an army 
 of 1,000,000 into the field in August and September 
 191 4 instead of one of 160,000, events would not 
 have been the same as they have been. Our 
 casualties would have been much heavier during 
 the first year, the costs would have been much 
 greater, our munition supply much less, our 
 industrial output greatly curtailed, and our 
 financial staying power substantially diminished. 
 All the earlier moves would have been intensified, 
 
 1 If Lord Roberts had been listened to much earlier than 
 this the European chaos might have been greater than even it 
 is, and France might have been an enemy instead of an Ally. 
 
 4 
 
50 NATIONAL DEFENCE 
 
 but that does not mean that events would have 
 been better for us. 
 
 The course of the war as we have experienced 
 it has been that Germany played for a ■■' knock- 
 out " blow and failed, that France and Russia pre- 
 sented a retreating front which yielded like elastic 
 but did not break, which steadily tightened and 
 finally began to advance again. Our part was to 
 keep the seas and to finance the two conscript 
 Powers whilst they were resisting the energetic blows 
 of the enemy. By and by we were to come in 
 with millions of men when the. enemy's first blow 
 was spent, and when fresh troops were to decide 
 the military issues. That is a strategy balanced 
 in its parts and rationally complete and co-ordinated 
 — a strategy the success of which events are proving. 
 In war, when so much depends on chance and 
 victory anyhow is all that is wanted, it is nothing 
 more than a vain pastime to sit down and imagine 
 how much different things would have been had 
 this and that been done and not that and this; 
 and this pastime is all the more vain when experi- 
 ence has shown that the apparent shortcomings 
 complained of have contributed tremendously to the 
 success which has been won. For it is plain to 
 every one that had we had National Service before 
 the war our contribution to the campaigns would 
 not have been all that we have given plus some- 
 thing extra, but something quite different altogether. 
 
NATIONAL SERVICE AND THIS WAR 51 
 
 I believe that a detailed examination of what has 
 actually happened shows quite conclusively that the 
 services which this country has rendered to the 
 Alliance have been far more useful than if our 
 first Expeditionary Force had consisted of a 
 million men. 
 
 Had we exchanged industrial and financial help 
 for military help what might have happened? The 
 German " knock-out " blow would have been met 
 by a " knock-out " blow. The reply would have 
 failed, and the forcing of an early issue would 
 have been to the advantage of the German military 
 machine, which, owing to its interior position, would 
 have benefited by rapid issues. So much so is 
 that the case that it is more than likely that a 
 more aggressive military strategy on the part of 
 France and ourselves at the beginning of the war 
 (Russia could not have been more aggressive) would 
 have meant our ultimate defeat. As it turns out, 
 the fact of the country having rejected Lord Roberts 
 is the reason why this war cannot end in a German 
 victory, because that rejection has meant that all 
 the resources of the Allies have been poured into 
 the fight in such ways and at such times as enabled 
 each to give its maximum service to the com- 
 bination. 
 
 If we were to build up theoretically a combi- 
 nation of Powers which ought to be unvanquishable, 
 we should construct something like the Entente, 
 
52 NATIONAL DEFENCE 
 
 which has a vast population, a mobilized army 
 sufficient for defence, enormous financial and indus- 
 trial reserves. But no sane man, having got such 
 a combination, would ever think of making its 
 war preparations military alone, or of making the 
 contribution of each of the Allies uniform. Its 
 strength and invincibility lie in the variety of its 
 essential services, and to make it militarist through- 
 out would be to weaken it. The strategy it would 
 devise would not be that of the " knock-out M blow. 
 It would open on the defensive and, with its mind 
 fixed upon all the moves leading up to success, 
 it would not trouble if part of its territory were 
 in the occupation of the enemy. From a purely 
 military point of view that has its advantages, as 
 is seen to-day when we compare the state of public 
 opinion in France and Germany respectively. It 
 is a great disadvantage to the German military 
 powers that no part of their country is in the 
 hands of the enemy, because it leaves them weak 
 in public opinion. Through the demoralization of 
 its enemy this theoretical combination would march 
 to success. Such a strategy gives the greatest 
 security of success and entails a minimum of loss, 
 but that is exactly the strategy which would have 
 been impossible if those who favour National Service 
 had had their way. Paradoxical though it may 
 seem, it is literally true to say that had we as a 
 member of the Entente made more military pre- 
 
NATIONAL SERVICE AND THIS WAR 53 
 
 parations for war we should have run greater risks 
 of defeat than we have done. It is really not 
 paradoxical at all, because it is only an experience 
 of the fact that the maximum efficiency of a 
 combination, whether it be a football team or an 
 alliance of States, depends upon differentiation and 
 not uniformity of function. 
 
 Thus events have turned out. Chance — for it 
 is nothing more than chance — has been favourable 
 to us. We cannot flatter ourselves that we designed 
 it because we foresaw it. 
 
 All may be well, tho' if God sort it so 
 'Tis more than we deserve. 
 
 But I am pointing out in this book that when 
 the war is over this country is likely to be driven 
 into more militarism, and it may be asked whether 
 that argument is not inconsistent with this chapter. 
 It is not. The character of our present Alliance 
 is lucky for us, but it would indeed be a foolish 
 nation that would trust everything to chance because 
 it was once favoured by good fortune. 
 
 If we were sure of allies who would put great 
 armies into the field whilst we were financing them 
 and training our own, we might maintain our present 
 policy. But we can never be sure of such allies; 
 we can never be sure where national interests are 
 to lie ten years ahead. The history of Europe 
 is a kaleidoscope of changing allies. Besides, the 
 
U NATIONAL DEFENCE 
 
 reason why the country was wise enough to reject 
 Lord Roberts was that it did not believe that 
 National Service was necessary for National 
 Defence. Its decision had nothing to do with 
 the strategy of the Allies. A nation's military 
 policy will always be determined primarily by con- 
 siderations of self-defence, and I am perfectly sure 
 of this, that even were the argument in this chapter 
 accepted by every rationally minded man in the 
 country, if it were believed that there would be 
 another war in ten years, the crowd mind would 
 be so moved by fear and be so reluctant to take 
 what it would call the " risk " of finding an 
 Alliance so favourable as that of which we are 
 now part, that it would call for the policy of the 
 German State, seek to combine military with indus- 
 trial functions, and prepare for a strategy of offence. 
 The people of a State will always be moved by 
 the desire to be self-contained in their means of 
 defence, because an essential characteristic of the 
 military idea is that no State can really trust 
 another, but must always be prepared to stand 
 alone or seek new friends. 
 
 Moreover, it is also doubtful if the other Allies 
 would agree to our part. There are risks in it 
 for them too, and when fear is abroad and the 
 military mind is set to deal with it that mind will 
 move in accordance with its own notions and will 
 think of narrowly strict military equipment. 
 
NATIONAL SERVICE AND THIS WAR 55 
 
 Thus we have the apparent paradox of, on the 
 one hand, the certainty that National Service would 
 not have prevented the war but would have 
 diminished our chances of coming well out of it, 
 and, on the other, the equal certainty that the 
 war is creating political conditions and national 
 frames of mind which, when peace comes, will 
 make some form of conscription highly probable. 
 The dilemma is the dilemma of militarism, which 
 is created t<5 give a sense of security and to defend, 
 whereas its very existence keeps fear alive and adds 
 to danger. 
 
CHAPTER V 
 
 AN "ENFORCED" PEACE 
 
 At this point it is necessary to discuss the move- 
 ment which has been founded in America, and 
 which has many advocates in this country, to enforce 
 peace by an armed union of nations. 
 
 The proposal is that the leagued nations should 
 agree to submit all differences to arbitration, that 
 they should at the same time maintain effective 
 armies, and that these armies should be available 
 for the punishfrient of any nation which violates 
 the basis of agreement. 1 That this is an advance 
 
 1 An extract from the speech delivered at the inaugural meeting 
 of the league by Mr. Hamilton Holt, editor of the American 
 Independent, may be given as an indication of what is in the 
 mind of the promoters of this League : — 
 
 u Now, suppose a League of Peace is established. Suppose the 
 majority of the Great Powers — all the Great Powers if we can 
 get them — should join such a League. The small Powers would 
 have to come in for protection. Suppose the Great Powers, or 
 the majority of them, had a standing army, we will say, of 
 two million men. Suppose Russia stays outside of the League and 
 has a standing army of a million men. The League, even if they 
 thought that Russia was likely to attack it, could reduce its force 
 down to a million and a quarter, or a million and a half, and still 
 protect itself against Russia. But what will be happening in the 
 
AN "ENFORCED" PEACE 57 
 
 upon the present state of affairs and upon the 
 Balance of Power policy may be agreed. That 
 it is the best that should be aimed at now, in view 
 of the horror with which this war will have filled 
 the minds of the nations, is more doubtful. That 
 it will bring about its purpose is also doubtful. 
 The hopes based upon such a union of States 
 are, however, by no means unimportant or not 
 worth some effort to fulfil. They are that, grant- 
 ing that militarism will survive this war, it ought 
 to be controlled and curbed by co-operative legal 
 action, and not left to be played with or gambled 
 with by national egotism or self-will. A State 
 using military power will then be treated as a 
 
 meantime in Russia? Will not the Liberals notice that the 
 members of the League are enjoying greater protection for less 
 taxes, and are attempting all sorts of co-operative experiments, 
 perhaps even Free Trade, as did our States under our Constitu- 
 tion ? They will forthwith begin to bring pressure to bear upon 
 the Russian Government, until finally Russia will apply for 
 membership in the League. Then, when Russia enters, there 
 can be a second pro rata reduction of the forces of the League 
 down to the size of the next great nation outside, and, when that 
 nation comes in, there will be another pro rata reduction, and so 
 on down and down, until finally a mere international police 
 maintains the peace of the earth, under a Federal form of 
 government, with legislative, judicial, and executive branches. 
 This is the theory of the League of Peace." 
 
 The words and the ideas of this pronouncement show the 
 unreality of the conception which the League has of the nature 
 of arms and of diplomacy. The story belongs to the fairy order. 
 It assumes a simplicity of motive and a removal of difficulties 
 which is not in accordance with reality. 
 
58 NATIONAL DEFENCE 
 
 dangerous citizen is and will be faced by organized 
 authority. Thus, " the armed anarchy which pre- 
 ceded and led up to the war " will be controlled 
 by- an arm&d order, and the Ishmael who would 
 strike will know that he will have to reckon with 
 a combination of socially minded States who are 
 ready to strike back and to strike all together. 
 
 Whatever we may hope for ultimately, after 
 the war the arrangements between nations for 
 securing peace must be made by Governments, 
 and however much we may distrust them we ought 
 to help them in making it difficult for themselves 
 to fight each other again. 
 
 Also, it is argued, the mere coming together of 
 States in this close way will begin the habit of 
 rational negotiation, and of talking difficulties over 
 in council with others, and that, as militarism is 
 the expression of a frame of mind destroyed by 
 that habit, this union of nations will gradually 
 evolve into disarmed nations. 
 
 As I have said, if the peoples of the Great 
 Powers of the world are unprepared for a further 
 advance in comimon sense, this proposal may~be 
 an improvement on the existing state of affairs. 
 But it is not without its special dangers, which 
 will appear big or small according as our confi- 
 dence in existing Governments is weak or strong. 
 The whole ant i -militarist section in Europe and 
 America is not agreed as to ttow much confidence 
 
AN "ENFORCED" PEACE 59 
 
 can be placed in existing Governments. One wing 
 accepts them and believes that, with some changes 
 in political opinion, Foreign Offices as we know 
 them, industrial rivalries, scrambling for markets, 
 can be controlled ; another wing regards the 
 happenings of the past two years as the final 
 proof that existing governing interests, classes, and 
 points of view are incapable of maintaining peace 
 even when they are doing their feeble best to that 
 end, and this wing bases its hopes of the future 
 solely on the intelligence and determination of a 
 popular international movement which will not only 
 control but change the existing machinery of 
 Foreign Offices. If the peace of the world is 
 to be maintained these two wings must co-operate, 
 each doing its own work and contributing to the 
 common gain whatever practical results may be 
 achieved. Therefore, even if we cannot all support 
 this League, our critical attitude to it ought not to 
 amount to active hostility unless it Were to take 
 up the position that it is a sufficient end in itself. 
 
 From the standpoints of this latter school of 
 opinion, the League to Enforce Peace contains in 
 itself all the evils of militarism, and this school 
 doubts if any effort to control these evils can in 
 the end succeed. 
 
 This new Union of nations, it must be assumed, 
 will be managed just as existing alliances are 
 managed, for it does not propose to make any 
 
60 NATIONAL DEFENCE 
 
 of the changes in international relations which I 
 think essential. It is a League of the old order 
 of national policy, not of th£ new. Within the 
 Union there will be alliances and understandings, 
 co-operations and rivalries. Outside it there will 
 be the disputes of diplomacies and capitalism, the 
 problems of markets, the campaigns of politicians, 
 the unremoved fears and suspicions of nations. 
 The Union itself will be controlled by the govern- 
 ing authorities of the nations, from whose point 
 of view its activities will be conducted. It might 
 even become a menace to liberty like a new Holy 
 Alliance. It will certainly have all the small 
 nations at its mercy, and whilst presumably it would 
 suppress rebellion, it would have no power to deal 
 with the demands of subject peoples striving for 
 liberty. 
 
 The handing over of the issues of peace and 
 war to an international committee of the governing 
 classes gives no security to the people that the 
 forces of the world will be used only in causes of 
 righteousness and liberty ; the creation of a great 
 international machine controlling the armies of the 
 world is no guarantee of peace ; militarism under 
 an international council would be deprived of none 
 of its national menace to democracy— the liberty 
 of the subject, the freedom of labour from military 
 interference in times of industrial dispute, and so 
 on ; and finally, an international agreement based 
 
AN. "ENFORCED" PEACE 61 
 
 upon efficient national armies would tend to per- 
 petuate the belief that armies are necessary for 
 security— the very assumption which I believe is 
 at the root of our international troubles. 
 
 If nations made war without any purpose except 
 the mere making of war, the League might prevent 
 war. But nations do not do this. We can prove 
 that war never pays, that it is brutal destruction, 
 that it is tremendously risky, and there will be 
 war all the same. The great eruption of passion 
 and enthusiasm Which attends the outbreak of all 
 wars will set at defiance all leagues for peace 
 and all arbitration courts so long as that eruption 
 has the armed force at its hand through which 
 to express itself. A national military organization 
 backed up by a military, diplomacy can always 
 create a situation which will defy the intervention 
 of courts of arbitration. 
 
 Moreover, the creation of such a Union presents 
 great difficulties. It can easily be a mere thing 
 of paper, like the Hague Conferences. Nations 
 would be at liberty at any time to leave it, and 
 their rulers, if backed by the Press, could satisfy 
 their people that national interests compelled them 
 to secede ; majorities at any crisis might be 
 influenced to give wrong decisions ; the practical 
 impossibility of saying what is the military efficiency 
 of a nation at any given moment would always make 
 the military programmes of such a League un- 
 
62 NATIONAL DEFENCE 
 
 certain, for the mere numbers of a standing army 
 are only one of the elements in military efficiency. 
 Rapidity of mobilization, the strategic value of 
 railways, th£ training of nominally unarmed citizens, 
 the character of. the armaments, the amount of 
 reserve munitions, the organization of the industries 
 of a country are all vital considerations in war, 
 and these no League can control. So far short 
 of the best does this proposal fall that, in view of 
 the reaction against war which this war will bring, 
 every one who wishes to put an end to war for 
 ever between civilized and law-abiding nations 
 should strive for something more satisfactory and 
 decisive than this. 
 
 If, however, it be argued that this Union pre- 
 supposes that the people will take a close and 
 intelligent interest in their international affairs, and 
 that they will never again put themselves in the 
 hands of military and diplomatic classes to 
 mortgage their honour and accept responsibilities 
 for them behind their backs, then that assumption 
 supports much more drastic steps than the forma- 
 tion of such a Union. If the people are so 
 enlightened as to protect their interests within such 
 a Union, if they are so vigilant as to prevent its 
 being captured by the classes and interests and 
 motives and policies which now make wars, they 
 do not require it at all. They will end the very 
 conditions which make such a Union an advance 
 
AN -ENFORCED" PEACE 63 
 
 upon the existing" system of alliances and arma- 
 ments. 
 
 There is one danger to the American democracy 
 in particular associated with this League. To 
 America it means M preparedness/' which is but 
 ia rechristening of the old European error that 
 peace is maintained by armaments, and that 
 national defence means the organization of force. 
 Now, the object of American preparedness is not 
 very clear, but two consequences are indisputable. 
 In existing frames of mind it will be disturbing 
 to Canada, which may reply, and thus the military 
 grip on the world will be strengthened and national 
 insecurity increased. It will also increase the 
 aggressive power of United States finance, especi- 
 ally on the American continent, and will lay United 
 States policy more open than ever to the designs 
 of the great financial houses. Whatever may be 
 said in Europe in favour of such a League, 
 nothing can be said in its favour in America, unless 
 it is argued that in order to help to emancipate 
 the Old World from militarism, the New World 
 should put its neck under the military yoke. 
 
 My contention is that so long as the people are 
 kept apart as they now are, so long as the kind of 
 national policies which are now pursued continue, 
 so long will the causes of war operate, and no 
 mechanical contrivance of a Union of Nations or 
 of legal arbitration can protect civilization against 
 
64 NATIONAL DEFENCE 
 
 war ; and further, that so long as these things 
 last, any machinery controlling military power can 
 be captured by the war - making interests and 
 instincts. It is impossible to conceive of peace 
 secured by courts of arbitration or by any other 
 means so long as efficiently trained troops and an 
 army organization are at the disposal of Govern- 
 ments. The currents of tendency making for war 
 will run in new directions perhaps for a little 
 while to come, but they will run all the same. We 
 must not let our anchors drag if we can help it. 
 The ground we hold is that the problem of defence 
 is not how to protect ourselves by force against 
 enmity, but how to remove enmity. 
 
CHAPTER VI 
 
 NATIONAL DEFENCE AND CONSCRIPTION 
 
 This war will leave Great Britain with new frontiers. 
 iWe thought that we started it as an island; we 
 shall certainly issue from it as a continental Power. 
 The Channel and North Sea are no longer our 
 borders. It is not rhetoric but sober common sense 
 to say that our soldiers have been fighting on the 
 British frontiers in France and Flanders. The 
 frontiers of nations in alliance are not those of 
 the separate nations, but those of the alliance. 
 The security of each is the security of the whole. 
 The military frontier of a nation is very often 
 outside itself. 
 
 When the war is over every effort will be made 
 to maintain an Alliance, for we have deliberately 
 ended the chapter of independent action and of a 
 distinctly national world policy. The syndicate has 
 come into politics as well as into industry. An 
 economic war will follow, not merely to punish 
 Germany but to keep the Alliance with France and 
 Russia. Whether an economic alliance is good 
 political business or not I do not discuss here. I 
 
 5 65 
 
66 NATIONAL DEFENCE 
 
 believe it is very bad political and military business. 
 Its difficulties have been shown in our own Empire, 
 and they will not be minimized when foreign States 
 come in. The economic market and the channels 
 of economic exchange cannot be coerced to suit 
 the conveniences of military plans or of political 
 unions, except at heavy cost and with much irrita- 
 tion. Neither the dangers nor the practical 
 problems of an economic war after the war 
 have been worked out. We are acting on a mere 
 aggressive emotion. 
 
 What I am concerned with is to point out that 
 after the war the military meaning of national 
 security will not be what it was before the war, 
 when it was the prevention of invasion. It will 
 be that with the maintenance of the existing Alliance 
 in addition, with its— to us — extended frontiers and 
 increased responsibilities. Our military necessities 
 have thus increased a great deal. I well remember 
 that in course of conversation with an important 
 personage some years before the war he remarked 
 that the military road from Berlin to St. 
 Petersburg lay through Belgium and Paris. That 
 road has now been extended to London. To- 
 day we seem to be assuming that when the war 
 is over we can return to our insularity, and that, 
 having put forth our great military effort, we can 
 go back to 191 4, so far as our military position is 
 concerned. That is a mistake. We have changed 
 
CONSCRIPTION 67 
 
 all that. What we have had to defend during the 
 war we shall have to prepare to defend during 
 peace, because what was in jeopardy these two 
 years will be in jeopardy again. National security 
 maintained by force does not mean fighting only, 
 but also training to fight. 
 
 Hence it is that the military problem which we 
 once had to face, and which led to the Haldane 
 reorganization of the Army, is now completely 
 changed. This war has proved that in a European 
 conflict in which we are concerned our responsibili- 
 ties cannot be limited to an overwhelming naval 
 strength, a small Expeditionary Force, and a Home 
 Defence army of volunteers. National defence now 
 means to Great Britain a military as well as a 
 naval power to strike. An Expeditionary Force of 
 160,600 men is as much a matter of ancient history 
 as a force armed with bows and arrows transported 
 in fishing-boats. Jaures' forecast regarding the 
 evolution of the Haldane reorganization has been 
 fulfilled. 
 
 Moreover, one new element has been added to the 
 fighting fields — the air — and another has been trans- 
 formed—the sea — by the submarine. Both of these 
 revolutionize the military strategy for the defence 
 of Great Britain. Our system was scrapped within 
 the first months of the fighting. We went through 
 months of futilities — imposed upon us perhaps by 
 political expediency — when we appealed for recruits 
 
68 NATIONAL DEFENCE 
 
 by posters of doubtful taste and dignity and recruit- 
 ing speeches of more than doubtful intelligence and 
 accuracy. Finally we came to the inevitable rock 
 face of conscription. We trembled and shilly- 
 shallied. Our rulers gave pledges that it was to 
 be " thus far and no farther/' The pledges were 
 broken. It was " all the way." Canute went 
 down to Southampton to prove the folly of his 
 flattering councillors who told him that the 
 advancing tide would obey him. To-day Canute 
 assures his subjects that he is master over the 
 waters. The Canute of to-day will meet with the 
 same experience as the councillors of yesterday. 
 
 One pledge still remains unbroken — because 
 nothing has yet clashed with it. Conscription is 
 only for the war, we were told. That pledge, how- 
 ever, is likely to go with the others. It was given 
 without thought of the new position in which the 
 war will leave the country; it was given on the 
 assumption that England after the war will bear 
 the same relationship to the Continent which the 
 people supposed it bore before the war. That is not 
 to be so. Great Britain will remain in a continental 
 alliance. The existing one may not last; indeed, 
 it is not likely to last. The war will be followed 
 by an active diplomacy inspired by the following 
 amongst other motives. The Central European 
 Powers will strive to form a new combination, 
 for even a democratic Germany is likely to have 
 
CONSCRIPTION 69 
 
 memories as bitter as a democratic France had 
 after the Franco-German War. The aristocratic 
 and autocratic classes of the various nationalities 
 will not continue to support an Alliance which will 
 tend to increase the power of democracy in Europe, 
 and the attempt to carry out the policy of the Paris 
 Economic Conference will strengthen their hands. 
 The new map of Europe, with perhaps Russia in 
 possession of the Dardanelles and Constantinople, 
 will reopen the problems of a Balance of Power 
 and re-form the distribution of national fear and 
 jealousy. The present Allies will, when peace 
 comes, scrutinize the position in which the war 
 has left them, and some little discord is certain 
 to arise. Coalition wars have had unsatisfactory 
 peace endings ; there are always too many interests 
 to placate and too many weak points to defend 
 against the diplomatic cunning of enemies. 
 
 In this new diplomacy Great Britain will appear 
 as a military Power, and British interests will have 
 to be defended by a British Army. We shall never - 
 again contemplate a war without an Army of 
 decisive strength, trained, equipped, and officered. 
 Every motive which was used on recruiting plat- 
 forms, every phrase of the appeals that the nation 
 should be defended, will continue to operate in the 
 defensive preparations of the peace, and the universal 
 military service of war-time will have to be con- 
 tinued when the war is over. There may be a year 
 
70 NATIONAL DEFENCE 
 
 or two of a lull of exhaustion when the people are 
 confident in the effect of their victories, but the old 
 order will reassert itself, the old politics will produce 
 their fears and rivalries, and the State, trusting 
 to its military strength, will have to demand of 
 its manhood that they become trained in the art 
 of war. 
 
 The annual meeting of the National Service 
 League was held on the 17th August, 19 16, when 
 Lord Milner spoke thus from the chair : — 
 
 It was impossible to carry on a propaganda in favour of 
 a system which had already been adopted. On the other hand, 
 it was impossible to think of dissolving so long as the question 
 was open whether the principles for which they stood and for 
 which a temporary triumph had been achieved were to be 
 permanently accepted or to be thrown over again after the end 
 of the war. They were bound to keep as quiet as they could at 
 the present time, but they were equally bound to " keep their 
 powder dry" in case it might hereafter be required. 
 
 Personally he had a hope that it might never be necessary for 
 them to become again active propagandists of National Service, 
 because the wonderful success which had attended the adoption 
 of their principles was calculated to commend them to the 
 nation in such a way that they would never be abandoned. 
 That was his personal hope and belief, but, of course, they could 
 not count on that, and must be ready and, as a body, keep 
 together. 
 
 The old kind of opposition may be put up to 
 this propaganda by men who accept the Paris Con- 
 ference decisions, and who have not a word of 
 criticism to offer against the foreign policy of the 
 Country before the war and who ^yilJ return to 3 
 
CONSCRIPTION 71 
 
 belief in voluntaryism in raising armies of defence. 
 It will be ineffective. For unless this country 
 emerges from the war with a new foreign policy 
 of peace and a new conception of national defence 
 the experience of war will drive the nation into 
 compulsory military service, for the needs which 
 drove us to adopt it temporarily this year will 
 continue through the peace. 
 
CHAPTER VII 
 
 THE MILITARY NATION 
 
 Let us disentangle our minds for a moment from 
 the events that are now crowding thick upon us 
 and take a wider survey. 
 
 After the French Revolution war entered upon 
 a new phase of its development which is only still 
 in process of evolution. By the end of the 
 eighteenth century war had become an affair of 
 armies, not of peoples, and, as has been said, a 
 battle or a siege was just a form of a diplomatic 
 note delivered by one ruler to another. When the 
 French Republic was challenged by the rulers of 
 Europe, they marched against it with their old 
 armies. But the challenge was to the French 
 people, and the French people armed themselves 
 to resist it. Thus the modern national war began. 
 The French armed nation was successful in defend- 
 ing itself, and then proceeded, with Napoleon at 
 its head, to threaten the peoples of Europe. The 
 peoples that were threatened responded as the 
 French themselves had done, and Prussia, " without 
 
 either money or credit, and with a population re- 
 
 n 
 
THE MILITARY NATION 73 
 
 duced by one-half, took the field with an Army 
 twice as strong as in 1806." This revolutionized 
 modern war. It brought in the people as well 
 as the rulers. It established the practice of con- 
 scription. It made available for military opera- 
 tions the unlimited resources of the State in men 
 and credit and labour. It can end only with the 
 most absolute control of men, women, and children, 
 of workshops as well as of armies, of workpeople 
 as well as of soldiers. " Thus, therefore," says 
 Clausewitz, " the element of war, freed from all 
 conventional restrictions, broke loose with all its 
 natural force." It made a public opinion in war 
 necessary. It raised fury in the public mind. It 
 gave a new function to the Press. It made neces- 
 sary the suppression of liberty to think and speak 
 and criticize. To the mind of nations thus placed 
 it made the imminence of war a constant assump- 
 tion. As in the Dreyfus time, an insult to the 
 Army became an insult to the nation ; as in modern 
 Prussia, a military officer was a sacred thing apart ; 
 as in Great Britain during this war, a whisper of 
 reason became treason to the national will. 
 
 And it must be remembered that the sources 
 from which all this sprang was " the necessity M 
 which the Allies a hundred years ago imposed on 
 France, and France imposed on Prussia, to defend 
 themselves. The origin of the European militarism 
 of to-day is national defence, not national aggression. 
 
74 NATIONAL DEFENCE 
 
 The uninterrupted growth of military power in 
 Europe throughout the century is the inevitable 
 evolution of a false policy. 
 
 The failure of Napoleon to land in England, 
 and the isolated position of the country ever since, 
 protected us until two years ago from this flood 
 of change. Part of it washed over us during the 
 South African War; it came in its fullness during 
 this war. No sane man can believe that it will 
 depart when this war is over. The country mixed 
 up in twentieth-century military diplomacy and 
 obligations cannot possibly return to an eighteenth- 
 century Army or an eighteenth-century attitude 
 to war. 
 
 We can now make peace permanent or prepare 
 for war. There is no alternative obligation. If 
 we prepare for war, it must be for a national 
 war involving two things — a National Army and 
 the cultivation and moulding of opinion by the 
 military State. For no military State can allow 
 the growth of opinion which cuts at its own founda- 
 tions. Military patriotism will be taught in schools. 
 Patronage on the one hand and coercion on the 
 other will be applied to our Press to keep up 
 such education amongst the masses. The military 
 strain and burden upon Europe will now be enor- 
 mously greater than it was between 1 87 1 and 19 14. 
 For Germany did not reach the limits of military 
 preparation, far as she went. On its purely military 
 
THE MILITARY NATION 75 
 
 side the war has shown the need of being pre- 
 pared on the vastest and the minutest scale; on 
 its political side it has proved the " military neces- 
 sity " of creating an obedient and a muzzled people. 
 
 All the scientific modern military writers lay the 
 greatest stress upon public opinion, and their 
 thoughts are always stretching out to the final 
 conclusion that democracy is treason to the State, 
 that freedom to criticize and weaken the military 
 machine and its necessities is treason to the nation. 
 This war, described so grandiloquently as " a fight 
 for the right and freedom," has conquered enor- 
 mous territories of the mind and of States to 
 militarism. We are witnessing a further stage in 
 the evolution of nineteenth-century militarism, not 
 an emancipation of twentieth-century liberty. 
 
 How the military mind is running is revealed 
 in an interesting interview which the Russian 
 General Skugarevski gave to the Russkoe Slovo, 
 and which was reproduced in the Russian Supple- 
 ment of The Times for the 29th July, 191 6, under 
 the heading "The Future War." " At the present 
 time," he says, " it is possible fairly accurately to 
 imagine the picture of the next war after this." 
 It is to be more frightful than this, both as to 
 scale and destructiveness. This war has brought 
 into the field numbers of men and masses of 
 munitions for which no State had made prepara- 
 tions. We shall begin our armament preparations 
 
76 NATIONAL DEFENCE 
 
 on the scale upon which this war ends them. 
 " Humanity must at last learn how to prepare for 
 war." This war has shown that a State will use 
 25 per cent, of its men for military operations. 
 Allowing for sickness and other inefficiencies, that 
 means that armies equal to 20 per cent, of the 
 population will at once take the field. In ten 
 years, therefore, the Russian Army will number 
 40,000,000, the German one about 20,000,000. 
 The Russians will require 300,000 officers, who 
 will have to be provided by a special form of 
 conscription. It may be necessary to introduce 
 industrial conscription for girls and childless widows, 
 so that the places of workmen may be taken at 
 once by women previously trained, and a supply of 
 clothing, food, and munitions to the Army secured. 
 The Army will be equipped with 100,000 guns, 
 1,000,000 Maxims, tens of thousands of motor- 
 cars; 50,000,000 gun projectiles will have to be 
 kept ready and 5,000,000 rifle cartridges. Each 
 regiment will, in addition, have to be equipped with 
 great numbers of portable machine-guns. The 
 explosives used will be deadly in the extreme, and 
 a tremendous advance will be made in the 
 mechanism of rifles. There will be thousands of 
 dirigibles and tens, if not hundreds, of thousands 
 of aeroplanes. The daily cost of the new war 
 on the Russian scale will be at least £20,000,000. 
 The peace footing of the Russian Army will be 
 
THE MILITARY NATION 77 
 
 2,000,000 to 3,000,000 men, and the annual cost 
 will be about £100,000,000. Everything will have 
 to be planned during the intervening peace, and, in 
 preparation for the war, the labour and the industry 
 of the nation will have to be controlled and 
 organized. 
 
 NVe need not pin ourselves to details. The 
 general accuracy of this forecast is good enough. 
 In its evolution militarism is grasping the whole life 
 of the nation; everything has to be subordinate to 
 it; within the net it is casting, every activity and 
 service must be caught because all are necessary. 
 Those who are trusting that the pains and losses 
 inflicted by this war will end war are building their 
 houses upon sand. The memory of pain and loss 
 passes, and a new generation arises which has not 
 the memory at all. But the menace and the spirit 
 of militarism and of armed force endures. The 
 permanent memory of these years will be the need 
 of the most thorough preparation. This war drove 
 us pell-mell out of voluntaryism into compulsion, 
 both military and industrial, and we shall begin in 
 peace, not where we were in August 191 4 but at 
 the point to which the war brought us. 1 
 
 1 After I had finished this book I read Naumann's Central 
 Europe, a book which in every page, argument, and proposal 
 shows the soundness of my position. Here there is no thought 
 of a settled peace. The war has made the nations more aggres- 
 sive and more self-willed. " It is not to be supposed that at the 
 conclusion of the war the long jubilee years of an everlasting 
 
IS NATIONAL DEFENCE 
 
 Whether this is to happen or not, says General 
 Skugarevski, depends upon the peace. With that 
 we shall all agree, but we shall disagree as to what 
 kind of peace will avoid this horror and what 
 kind of one will make it our inevitable doom. 
 The important thing for the moment to remember 
 is that every responsible Government is assuming 
 that a state of incipient war will follow the ending 
 of present hostilities, and this will undoubtedly 
 happen unless the people determine otherwise. 
 
 peace will begin ! . . . The war will leave behind it an immense 
 number of unsolved problems, both new and old, and will lead 
 to disillusionments which will express themselves in exten- 
 sive armaments. All the War Ministers, General Staffs and 
 Admiralties will ponder over the lessons of the past war, 
 technical skill will contrive yet newer weapons, frontier fortifi- 
 cations will be made still wider and, above all, longer. Is it 
 really credible that in such an atmosphere the isolated State can 
 remain any longer in isolation ? " (p. 7). Of the economic war 
 after the war he says : " It is no theoretical academic demand 
 but is a practical precept, and its chief supporters must be the 
 Ministers of War on both sides" (p. 174). Further: "It will 
 not only be Central Europe that will emerge from the war 
 with schemes for equipment and defence, but all the other 
 States as well. Even a growing inclination among the people 
 towards peace can do little to alter this steady preparation for 
 coming wars" (p. 179). 
 
CHAPTER VIII 
 
 A DEMOCRATIC GERMANY AND PEACE 
 
 The hope is that Germany may become democratic 
 
 — perhaps a republic — as the result of the war, but 
 
 I see no signs of the political genius which is 
 
 handling the position with that tact which might 
 
 induce the Germans to translate military defeat into 
 
 a pacific democracy. We can help the Germans to 
 
 do that, and we are doing the very opposite. We 
 
 seem to forget that the German people may rid 
 
 themselves of the Hohenzollerns and the Junkers, as 
 
 the French rid themselves of their Emperor in 1871, 
 
 without wishing to forget the war. The passionate 
 
 hate with which it is being conducted, the flinging 
 
 about of insults, the insistence that every crime 
 
 committed by an army is a badge of the spirit of 
 
 the whole nation, is but sowing the wind from which 
 
 the whirlwind is reaped. And both sides are busy 
 
 with this evil work. 
 
 The problem which Germany presents to us is as 
 
 follows : We have either to exterminate it altogether 
 
 or make peace with it. If we do neither the one nor 
 
 the other we retain the antagonism of a people 
 
 79 
 
80 NATIONAL DEFENCE 
 
 of great energy, great mental power, great indus^ 
 trial enterprise, great organizing capacity, great 
 patience, a people, moreover, prolific in numbers. 
 Hampering them either by political policy or 
 economic manipulation is petty and futile : it only 
 keeps their enmity virulent. If our aim is to crush 
 and keep down, that spells extermination, for there 
 is no halfway resting-place. .We cannot face, either 
 alone or in alliance, a generation of studied repres- 
 sion. Every economic war that has been fought 
 between States only shows the futility of those who 
 enter upon it. 1 A perpetual blockade is impossible, 
 and no political or economic means have yet been 
 devised for keeping an industrial country out of the 
 important markets of the world. A country which 
 has something to sell will find some one to buy. 
 
 On the other hand, we may make Germany a 
 co-operator in the keeping of European peace. We 
 may relieve Europe of the menace of German mili- 
 tarism and organized force, of that aggressive and 
 self-conscious German nationalism which threatened 
 to domineer over the other nations ; and at the same 
 time we may help to bring a feeling of freedom and 
 relief to the masses of Germans themselves. We 
 can do something of the same kind for ourselves 
 as well. But the methods we are adopting to keep 
 our people in a fighting spirit— the enflaming of 
 passion and the maintenance of a squabbling and 
 1 Sec Modem Tariff History, by Percy Ashley. 
 
A DEMOCRATIC GERMANY AND PEACE 81 
 
 stupid hate— threaten to defeat this. We are acting 
 as though we deliberately wished to compel 
 Germany to throw back in our teeth any benefits 
 of a political kind which the war may offer to 
 her. We are making the German people a 
 disturbing factor in Europe, irrespective of whether 
 democracy or militarism, the citizen or the soldier, 
 rules in Germany. And, as I have said, the fault 
 is not all on our side. 
 
 This is no question of saving the face of Germany, 
 but of studying a problem and devising a solution 
 for it. We can fight this war to an absolute military 
 conclusion irrespective of consequences, one of the 
 most important of which will be its effect upon the 
 future peace of Europe ; or we can fight it with 
 our eye fixed steadily upon its political results. 
 We cannot do both, and nothing will be more 
 disastrous, or will be condemned more emphatic- 
 ally by its consequences, than a policy (or, to write 
 more accurately, a want of policy) which expects 
 political results from military operations that have 
 hitherto always brought the opposite of these results. 
 
 This war has shown that if nationalism is roused 
 every other political impulse is swept out of people's 
 minds. In peace times we heard much of class 
 wars, of the capitalist being the only enemy, of 
 patriotism being a delusion of a past age. When 
 the war came the men who had been the most un- 
 balanced and loud -mouthed in preaching these 
 
 6 
 
82 NATIONAL DEFENCE 
 
 doctrines were blown farthest to the other extreme. 
 Those to whom I used to protest that they were 
 going too far, and only raising unnecessary preju- 
 dices amongst thinking people owing to gratuitous 
 and somewhat ignorant attacks on patriotism, 
 clothed themselves in their national flags and outdid 
 the most Jingo of their old opponents. The Herv£s 
 of all nations are a warning that ought not to be 
 forgotten. The German democracy is German, 
 jealous of its national name, and will be prevented 
 from purging itself from the blood of this war only 
 by the attacks of foreigners. 
 
 The mere establishment of democracy in Germany 
 will not therefore save us from having to reap the 
 whirlwind if we now sow the wind. 
 
 The greatest weakness of democracy is that it wall 
 not think and act for itself. A race that has been 
 conquered and kept subordinate develops the vices 
 and virtues of subordination, and the masses and 
 their leaders cannot in a day free themselves from 
 the mental inheritance of subordination which their 
 ancestors who hewed wood and drew water handed 
 to them. When this war broke out, it was seen at 
 once how sound were the instincts of the people 
 and how ill -equipped were their minds. Every 
 nation was led by its rulers, every people took up 
 the role assigned to it in the military scheme. During 
 the war the Press, whose chief work was to keep 
 the fires of passion well stoked and blazing, published 
 
A DEMOCRATIC GERMANY AND PEACE 83 
 
 absurdities, contradicted itself, palmed off the most 
 palpable nonsense upon the people, but the people's 
 critical intelligence had gone to sleep. Deception 
 was never detected because there was no memory. 
 Thus every nation sincerely believed that it was 
 defending itself, and that the enemy had been plan- 
 ning and preparing for Armageddon for years ; 
 during the war, every people believed in the cruelties 
 of the other ; newspaper readers knew that the 
 censor was at work, but never paused to think what 
 that meant as regards the news they were permitted 
 to read every day. They must have seen that their 
 papers were carefully selecting from enemy countries 
 news and opinions to create prejudice, and not to 
 reveal the real state of the enemy's mind ; and yet 
 there was no caution shown. The people believed 
 and did not think. 
 
 We have, therefore, to face the future and form 
 our opinions as to what is to happen with this fact 
 firmly set in our minds, that in matters of national 
 security — our own old " We-want-eight-and-we- 
 won't-wait " agitation, for instance — people are not 
 swayed by calm judgment, but by stormy emotion 
 and by panic. Even under a republican Germany 
 with a grievance and a tender memory, a German 
 Delcasse backed by the popular German Press would 
 be an instrument for breaking the peace of Europe. 
 And he would do this not as an avowed aggressor. 
 There will be plenty of " causes " left unsettled 
 
84 NATIONAL DEFENCE * 
 
 in Europe after this war to give alliances an excuse 
 for fighting — nay, even to drift alliances into war 
 though they do not exactly wish it. I see no prospect 
 of a final solution of Balkan difficulties ; I see no 
 chance of a satisfactory settlement of Poland ; I see 
 a grave menace in some of the proposed partitions 
 of the Near East and Asia. Above all, I see no 
 prospect of the racial enmity between Slav and 
 Teuton being ended, no hope of removing from 
 Europe by any of the policies now in vogue the 
 dangers of the Pan -Slav and the Pan-Teuton con- 
 flict. A democratic Germany will, indeed, have no 
 difficulty in finding many opportunities in the next 
 generation to challenge the decision of this war and 
 to write a sequel to it more congenial to the German 
 spirit than the record that is now being made. 
 
 Happy, but profoundly mistaken, is the man who, 
 taking up his newspaper every morning, reads of 
 allied victories and sees in them the security of an 
 abiding peace ; reads of German cruelties and 
 believes that by crushing the nation and punishing 
 the innocent and the guilty together, the responsible 
 and the irresponsible in one sentence, he is to cut 
 from our civilization the cancer which corrupts it. 
 He neither diagnoses the disease nor understands 
 the remedy. He is a quack and the victim of 
 quacks. His emotion is good, but his common 
 sense and judgment are far to seek. He is not only 
 not ending Prussian or any other form of militarism : 
 
A DEMOCRATIC GERMANY AND PEACE 85 
 
 he is handing himself over to the interests and the 
 logic of events which make a continuation of mili- 
 tarism inevitable, and which will drag this country 
 into the vortex. All that we see going on round 
 us to-day, the opinions that are being expressed 
 and the temper in which they are expressed, the 
 policies that are being pursued and prepared for 
 the coming of peace, make militarism an essential 
 condition of national security, and continental 
 alliances and counter -alliances necessary conse- 
 quences. 
 
 It is true that our people have no intention of 
 making this war the parent of militarism, and the 
 words they use and the feelings which possess them 
 are moral and pacific. The sermons they preach 
 to themselves are as usual right, but there is a con- 
 duct as well as a sentiment of piety, and that is 
 generally forgotten. Our good intentions sometimes 
 become the very reason why we allow evil to be 
 done. 
 
 One of the reasons for this is that when a nation 
 is under the control of emotional piety it is apt to 
 forget that it was ever under such a control before. 
 But during wars it is always under such control. 
 The Allies in the Napoleonic wars proclaimed their 
 purpose to be " the reconstruction of the moral 
 order," M the regeneration of the political system 
 of Europe," the establishment of "an enduring peace 
 founded on a just redistribution of political forces." 
 
86 NATIONAL DEFENCE 
 
 Nationality was to be preserved and respected, 
 treaties were to be sacred documents, war was to be 
 ended by arbitration and a Concert of Nations. The 
 war was fought, the peoples suffered for their ideals, 
 Napoleon was crushed, and none of the moral inten- 
 tions were fulfilled. Revolutionary and Liberal ideas 
 were repressed, and a book which by numerous 
 examples of suggestio falsi offers wrong explana- 
 tions for this war l has to admit that when this 
 great moral effort was ended " the rewards of that 
 overthrow [Napoleon's], however, were reaped, 
 not by the peoples but by the dynasties and State 
 systems of the old regime." 
 
 The moral appeals to the nation to support the 
 Crimean War were equally conspicuous. The Times 
 of the 30th March, i°.54, declared that we were 
 fighting because " of the sympathy of this people 
 with right against wrong " and to save Europe 
 " from the predominance of a Power which has 
 violated the faith of treaties and defies the opinion 
 of the civilized world.' ' The day before it had 
 spoken of Russia as " menacing nothing less than the 
 conquest of all Europe." Mr. Sidney Herbert said 
 in the House of Commons (25th July, 1854) that 
 we were fighting for " guarantees which might afford 
 a prospect of peace for the future." The Illustrated 
 London News, attacking America for not having 
 come in on the side of the Allies, told that country, 
 1 The War and Democracy, p. 31. 
 
A DEMOCRATIC GERMANY AND PEACE 87 
 
 in words which those used to-day do but echo, that 
 it ought to have been " unanimous in support of 
 Great Britain and France in their disinterested and 
 generous struggle against the wicked aggressor 
 [Russia] and disturber of the world's repose. ,, What 
 harvest was reaped from these words and emotions? 
 What guarantee of peace did the Crimean War 
 give? Historians are unanimous about that. Their 
 verdict is expressed by Sir Spencer Walpole : — 
 
 From 1856 to 1878 the continent of Europe was afflicted with 
 five great wars — the Franco-Austrian of 1859 ; the Danish of 
 1864, the Austro- Prussian of 1866, the Franco-German of 1870, 
 and the Russo-Turkish of 1878 — all of which can be lineally 
 traced to the war of 1854. 1 
 
 Lord Salisbury supported the historians when he 
 said that in the Crimean War we had backed the 
 wrong horse. 
 
 Wars can never be fought unless the peoples 
 involved believe they are fighting for liberties or for 
 some generous moral issue, but these great purposes 
 have never been secured as the result of wars. 
 There is nothing new in our spirit and our mani- 
 festos to-day. They have been published again 
 and again. There will apparently be nothing new 
 in the results. Nor is there anything new in our 
 expectation that after the war our enlightened 
 enemies will come to us in white robes of repentance, 
 confessing that they were wrong all the time and we 
 
 1 Cambridge Modem History, vol. xi. p. 324. 
 
88 NATIONAL DEFENCE 
 
 were right. There will be nothing new about the 
 way in which that expectation will be falsified, and 
 yet we base all our hopes of the German future upon 
 some such confession after a good defeat ! 
 
 Germany may become a republic next year. The 
 Kaiser may be sent to St. Helena, the military castes 
 to till fields and reap harvests. But unless states- 
 manship settles the peace there will be no peace, 
 and unless public opinion accepts the terms with no 
 hot feelings in its heart, a German democracy will 
 polish and sharpen the sword and manipulate 
 diplomacy as effectively as any other form of govern- 
 ment. The Jingo may rage tumultuously and the 
 people imagine a vain thing, but their ends will 
 elude them. They will never gain what they desire. 
 " Striking at one another desperately," said Jaur&s 
 in 1905 of Germany and Great Britain, " the two 
 peoples would bruise and wound one another and 
 splash the world with blood ; but neither of them 
 would eliminate the other, and after an exhausting 
 struggle they would still have to reckon with one 
 another." This great problem of national conflict 
 is not to be settled by those who stumbled into it in 
 August 1 9 14 for the first time and have acquired 
 all the information they know about it by reading 
 war news since then. 
 
CHAPTER IX 
 MILITARISM AND DEMOCRACY 
 
 Again let us widen our view from closely pressing 
 events. War and militarism are not the result 
 of the actions of rulers of evil intent. It is neces- 
 sary so to stage the tragedy to-day before the 
 crowds, so that the theatre — stalls and galleries 
 together— may hiss the villains, call for the hang- 
 man in the final act, and be treated to a tableau 
 with a gibbet in the centre and a crowd of the 
 angelic virtues — the audience themselves — surround- 
 ing it to see that vengeance is done, and so be 
 assured that God is in His heaven. That is war 
 seen through the bloodshot eyes of war. That is 
 romance. That is not how military statesmen look 
 at it. That is neither the place nor the emotion 
 they assign to it. To all the greater writers and 
 thinkers on war, war is a mere inevitable incident 
 in political policy, for which much has to be said 
 by way of praise. It is by no means generally 
 regarded as an evil. It is accepted as a good. 
 Its training is advantageous. It licks the loafer 
 into shape, it braces up the slacker, it makes 
 
90 NATIONAL DEFENCE 
 
 men obedient and fits them for working smoothly 
 in a machine. In other words, it substitutes 
 mechanical discipline for self-discipline, it gives 
 us obedience for initiative. To democracy that 
 is an evil ; to autocracy it is a gain, because it 
 removes the problem of training from education 
 and assigns it to drill. But those who find good 
 in war as a rule contemn democracy, and what 
 they approve we naturally disapprove. 1 
 
 Others, again, are quite open in their advocacy 
 of militarism/ on the ground that it will keep the 
 working classes in their place and subordinate 
 them to " higher " interests and commands. An 
 utterance which gained some notoriety at the time 
 was that of Colonel Sir Augustus FitzGeorge, son 
 of the late Duke of Cambridge, when he said at 
 the United Service Club on the 26th August, 
 191 5, " Compulsory service is necessary at this 
 
 1 I do not accept the argument that training in the Army is 
 good. The open air is of course all to the good, and so are the 
 walking and the exercise. But M. Daumont, the Editor of the 
 Libre Parole, has written of France that its military system "has 
 gone a long way towards ruining our peasantry, and to a large 
 extent has already debased them. I deem the universal military 
 service, as it is sometimes termed, one of the saddest sacrifices 
 our country calls on us to bear." Lieutenant Bilse's descriptions 
 of the effect of militarism on young German soldiers in his Life 
 in a Garrison Toivn are also well known. The men of our 
 Empire, outwardly improved in physique by the training they 
 have had in camp, have other sides to present to us which we 
 shall be in a better position to examine and discuss when peace 
 comes. 
 
MILITARISM AND DEMOCRACY 91 
 
 time when the people are getting out of hand." 
 But leaving such expressions of casual offensive- 
 ness out of account, there can be no doubt but 
 that such opinions as that expressed by Lieutenant- 
 Colonel W. H. Maxwell in the Outlook l are not 
 only prevalent but represent a large body of in- 
 telligent and weighty opinion — even if we should 
 call it prejudiced : — 
 
 The abuse of personal freedom has reached its climax in this 
 country. Trade Unionism — that shelter for slinking shirkers — 
 is imperilling our existence, and by its action a rot of our national 
 soul has set in. One remedy and one alone can eradicate this 
 state of rot — martial law will cure it. 
 
 In a more general way Colonel Ross has ex- 
 pressed the military view. The great weakness 
 of the British Army, he indicates with much truth, 
 is that British militarism has always been subordi- 
 nate to British liberty. The officer here is of no 
 special account as in Germany—except for dances. 
 And, therefore, if we are to bte strong and well 
 protected, our military must be granted increased 
 respect in the country and authority in the State ; 
 it must have at its head a military man and not 
 a civilian ; representative government must not 
 interfere with its mind or its preparations ; military 
 efficiency needs the establishment of autocratic 
 government " in all primary questions, or those 
 
 1 Quoted by Mr. Bruce Glasier in Conscription, p. 15 (Inde- 
 pendent Labour Party, id.). 
 
92 NATIONAL DEFENCE 
 
 relating to war or the struggle for existence, and 
 representative government in all secondary matters 
 on which the comfort of the people depends/' l So 
 it must settle the framework of our Constitution. 
 On similar lines we have opinions like that ex- 
 pressed by Professor RidgWay of Cambridge in 
 his Presidential Address to the Classical Associa- 
 tion in 191 5, th&t a world of democratic States 
 would be " a stagnant pool " in which no higher 
 forms of life could live, and that humanity in a 
 world of peace " would perish from its own physical 
 and moral corruption." 
 
 This professorial utterance puts in an academic 
 form an opinion and determination which were 
 not at all uncomlmon before the war, and which 
 were frightened by the menacing success of the 
 Labour Party. The only way to prevent the capture 
 of the State by the people was to make war. 
 The French agents in Germany reported to Paris, 
 according to the French official paper on the war, 
 that the Prussian Junkers welcomed war because 
 they Were getting afraid of death duties, democracy, 
 and Socialism. 2 In war the masses " substitute 
 national passions for social aspirations,' ' because 
 war rouses the most instinctive fears of men. 
 Whatever the immediate cause of a war may be, 
 when it comes it compels some enemy to threaten 
 
 1 Representative Government and War, p. 107. 
 
 2 French Yellow Book, Document No. 5. 
 
MILITARISM AND DEMOCRACY 93 
 
 national existence and honour, and then the com- 
 plete fabric of democratic gains and aspirations, 
 built upon the foundations of national security, 
 tumbles down to the ground. When the war is 
 over, reaction has a breathing space, for the world 
 in which democracy begins afresh to rebuild its 
 habitations is a new and a strange one. Demo- 
 cratic experience has been buried deep under mili- 
 tary emotions. Old opinions have to be revised, 
 old principles have to be applied in new ways, 
 democracy itself has been broken. So time is 
 lost and the work of a generation wiped out. 
 Reaction remains in possession until new demo- 
 cratic movements have been formed, programmes 
 and policies revised, and leaders found. Thus the 
 world drags on its weary way, the motto of re- 
 action each generation being: M Sufficient unto the 
 day is the opportunity thereof/ ' A people requires 
 to be revolutionary to the core to resist the strength 
 which a war gives to reaction. Franchise reform 
 very often follows wars. But then it is safe, 
 because the democracy is in no mind to use its 
 new powers, and being disorganized and having 
 no certain and fixed aim, it cannot employ them 
 to its own advantage. 
 
 We have been hitherto inclined to minimize 
 the influence of such military and reactionary 
 opinions as the above, just as we minimized the 
 dangers of a war. But they have been very wide- 
 
94 NATIONAL DEFENCE 
 
 spread and have been found in high and influential 
 places. Intellectually as well as practically mili- 
 tarism is antagonistic to the liberty for which 
 democracy stands ; it has to limit that liberty in 
 its own s:elf -interest, and it is used by other interests 
 to the same purpose. 1 
 
 The opinion of the soldier one understands and 
 respects. The soldier desires the efficiency of his 
 profession. Popular assumptions that national 
 defence rests ultimately on force compelthe soldier 
 to study the organization of force, and he is driven 
 to the Prussian conclusion. He naturally detests 
 politics and politicians becausr their methods and 
 psychology are poles asunder rom his. He sees 
 that the officer must be put on a pedestal, that 
 military uniform should be a sacred garb. He 
 wants no humanitarian humbug. The Clausewitz 
 formula, " War is an act of violence which in 
 its application knows no bounds," is honest. It 
 has been formally accepted by the soldier of every 
 nationality. His work is to kill, frighten, and 
 destroy. His authority is not that of the State or 
 the nation, but the War Council, which he demands 
 should be composed of military men. International 
 
 1 The story of the persecution of Mr. Bertrand Russell can be 
 placed alongside the most obnoxious suppressions of civil liberty 
 in Germany, and not suffer by the comparison. There will be a 
 chapter in the history of this war on civil liberty, and it will read 
 just as the similar chapter in the history of the Napoleonic 
 wars reads. 
 
MILITARISM AND DEMOCRACY 95 
 
 law is a mere fiction V hardly worth mentioning." 
 Treaties are only valid so long as convenient. 1 
 Might is to him right— at any rate, they are so 
 mixed up that they cannot be . distinguished. In 
 the military mind, as Colonel Ross has said: 
 " Might has taken the place of right, and should 
 the destruction of homes and farms not prove 
 sufficient, whole towns must be destroyed and the 
 inhabitants must hang " ; or as Lord Wolseley, 
 dealing with another aspect of military moral 
 psychology, has written in his Soldier's Pocket- 
 book, that though public opinion condemns false- 
 hood, detests the word " spy " and believes in 
 honesty, " the man who acts upon that opinion 
 in war had better sheathe his sword for ever." 
 Similar expressions could be quoted through pages 
 upon pages. They all prove that the professional 
 military psychology in every country is precisely 
 the same. There is no distinction in spirit between 
 Prussian militarism and any other militarism. 
 Openly by practice in Prussia, theoretically in 
 Great Britain up to now, but now rapidly becoming 
 practical, militarism challenges democracy, de- 
 
 1 " Directly circumstances change — and they change con- 
 stantly — the most solemn treaties are torn up, as Russia tore up 
 the Treaty of Paris, or as Austria tore up the Treaty of Berlin. 
 All history is full of torn-up treaties. And as it has been, so it 
 will be. The European waste-paper basket is the place where 
 all treaties eventually find their way" (Major Stewart Murray, 
 The Reality of War, p. no). 
 
96 NATIONAL DEFENCE 
 
 mands an independent existence in the democratic 
 State, and claims a morality and a rationality all 
 of its own. Jaur&s never wrote a truer sentence 
 than this— true not merely as a description of what 
 had happened, but true as a warning of what 
 must always happen in the nature of things : " Who 
 is most menaced to-day by the military action of 
 the generals, by the always glorified action of 
 military repression? Who? The People." 
 
 Nor must we treat too lightly or too senti- 
 mentally the rationality of all this. These people 
 believe that wars cannot be avoided. Wars are 
 not brought about by Kaisers, but by nature. War, 
 says Major Stewart Murray in his interesting and 
 (granting his assumptions) profoundly true com- 
 mentary on Clause witz, 1 " is based on the essential 
 fundamental characteristics of human nature, which 
 do not alter." We can arbitrate on non-essentials, 
 but we cannot arbitrate on honour. Here is the 
 dilemma. Honour compels us to make war ; 
 we make it successfully, and our military victory 
 forces the other side, which of course can- 
 not accept a defeat on a point of honour, to 
 devise how to make another appeal to the sword. 
 That is the reductio ad absurdum of war as an 
 incident, as well as a determining factor, in national 
 policy. That reductio ad absurdum is, however, 
 accepted by the militarists as " the inherent weak- 
 1 The Reality of War, p. 68. 
 
MILITARISM AND DEMOCRACY 97 
 
 ness of human nature " ; but a weakness which 
 is seen, exposed, and can be provided against 
 is not " inherent." 
 
 Let us honestly face the logic of facts, how- 
 ever. We base national security upon an army, 
 and national security is psychologically an over- 
 mastering demand of civic human nature. So long 
 as the fear of national insecurity is in people's 
 minds, liberty and everything else must be limited 
 by military efficiency, the soldier acquires a privi- 
 leged place in the State, and the moral and intel- 
 lectual requirements of his profession are accepted 
 as a necessity. Thus arises the doctrine of 
 " military necessity,'' which means that the military 
 mind is allowed to create standards of moral action 
 and political policy which accord with its own 
 problem of how to make Might and Force 
 triumphant. The evolution in the military 
 ascendancy in States, extraordinary as its results 
 are, is to be explained by the simplest and most 
 obvious psychological processes. M I am an abso- 
 lute necessity," argues the soldier, " and you must 
 therefore allow me to create the political conditions 
 under which I can do my work efficiently. If 
 you do not do that, your blood be upon your own 
 heads." 
 
 We can go on encouraging this idea by harbour- 
 ing false views of international relations, by trusting 
 our security to organized force instead of to 
 
 7 
 
98 NATIONAL DEFENCE 
 
 organized rationality, and by obscuring the facts 
 and applying adjectives like " Prussian " to a spirit 
 which is universal ; but the penalty we shall have 
 to pay is that which is now being; meted out to, 
 Germany. 
 
 How literally true it is that the people who trust 
 to force will perish by force ! 
 
CHAPTER X 
 THE ARMY, THE STATE, AND LABOUR 
 
 I HAVE argued that in the political State militarism 
 cannot be controlled by the true democratic will, 
 but that when it is trusted it must dominate, and 
 I have now to consider what its effects are upon the 
 industrial State. 
 
 I am not to discuss here the industrial cost of 
 conscription — the loss in ineffective and wasted 
 labour, the burden imposed upon the young work- 
 men, and so on— because that has been done else- 
 where, and I wish in this study to confine my 
 thoughts to the more political aspects of the problem. 
 I simply note this important consideration in 
 passing. 1 
 
 Jaur&s has not much to say about this, but his 
 argument is that the Army, at any rate in France, 
 has no will of its own. It is not something, as it 
 is in Turkey, Greece, or Spain, which plots revolu- 
 tions and takes an active part in government. 
 In France it is obedient to the civil authority. 
 
 1 Mr. Glasier discusses it in his pamphlet on Conscription, 
 published by the Independent Labour Party. 
 
100 NATIONAL DEFENCE 
 
 It is a tool. It is something which the democracy 
 can use for its own ends. 
 
 We are not very much interested in Caesarism— 
 the government by the Army— in Great Britain. Our 
 fear is rather that the Army can always be used as 
 a tool. The point which Jaur£s made to allay the 
 fears of the French democracy is one which we 
 should make to rouse the suspicions of our people. 
 
 The Army is obedient. Universal military train- 
 ing means a nation under the discipline of officers, 
 not a nation under the discipline of its own mind. 
 Hence it is often argued that in a democratic State 
 an Army is no menace. It obeys the rulers, the 
 political chiefs, and therefore follows the popular 
 will. Such is the argument. 
 
 This argument only rings the changes on the 
 word " democracy " and makes it bear a meaning 
 which does not belong to it. There is no State of 
 any consequence to-day controlled by the interests 
 of the industrial classes. This statement is not 
 contradicted by the fact that in some nations there 
 is manhood suffrage. The interests which control 
 even democratic nations are those which are well 
 organized, vigilant, and coherent— those which own 
 the Press and the political machinery of the con- 
 stituencies ; those from whom Ministers are taken ; 
 the families which pay £400 a year to get their sons 
 into the Diplomatic Service. The industrial classes 
 are an influence more or less remote, especially 
 
THE ARMY, THE STATE, AND LABOUR 101 
 
 between elections, but are not a steady political 
 authority. Thus the State is less democratic than 
 the nation. Now, the Army is the servant of the 
 State, not of the nation. That is the fundamental 
 fact which we have to bear in mind. If this distinc- 
 tion between State and nation were removed by 
 democratic Governments, international diplomacy 
 would be so altered that armies would be altogether 
 unnecessary. The whole problem would be solved ; 
 it would not have to be settled by compromises 
 and safeguards. It would not exist. 
 
 With Jaures, we object to an Army which has 
 a will of its own and makes rulers and revolutions ; 
 but we also object to his Army which is a tool of the 
 State, because the State uses the Army to support 
 the interests which control the State. 
 
 Whilst the distinction between State and nation 
 lasts, the industrial danger of the armed nation is real 
 and pressing. The Army will be used for industrial 
 purposes, especially in times of trade disputes. The 
 best recent case is that of the French railway strike, 
 the story of which is as follows : The French 
 railway employees were conducting an agitation for 
 Trade Union recognition in 1910, and those of the 
 south obtained it ; but it was refused to those of the 
 north, and in October they came out on strike, 
 M. Briand, who came into political prominence as 
 a syndicalist firebrand of the extreme type, had 
 worked his way up the political ladder and was 
 
102 NATIONAL DEFENCE 
 
 then Premier. He instantly mobilized the Army and 
 put it to running the trains. Thus Jacques left his 
 engine one night as a Trade Unionist and stepped 
 upon it next morning as a soldier under instructions 
 to defeat himself as a Trade Unionist. Some who 
 refused were punished by court-martial as soldiers. 
 The strike was broken. That is a very simple form 
 of industrial conscription which will no doubt be used 
 frequently should the conflict between Labour and 
 Capital in the future become severe and all attempts 
 to solve it by peaceful means be defeated. A nation 
 of conscripts is a nation of potential strike-breakers. 
 Free labour associations under the French methods 
 are unnecessary institutions. 
 
 Since the war broke out and conscription was 
 established here, military service has been used to 
 coerce workmen and punish Trade Unionists. Fore- 
 men have decided who have to be taken and who left. 
 Men have been compelled to join the Army and 
 have been sent back to work as soldiers. Cases are 
 innumerable. Ministers did not mean it. When 
 they pledged themselves that this would not happen, 
 I do not believe they had any thought of making it 
 happen. The true explanation is that militarism 
 cannot be worked so as not to involve industrial 
 conscription. 1 
 
 1 - These are some interesting facts : — 
 
 Mr. Asquitlis pledge to Labour deputation on January 12 
 1916 ; " I cannot imagine anything more monstrous than th at 
 
THE ARMY, THE STATE, AND LABOUR 103 
 
 But the more common form of using the military 
 is to overawe the workmen. Great Britain affords 
 the best example of that. When the railway strike 
 broke out here in 191 1, the Home Office, under 
 Mr. Winston Churchill, immediately put itself at 
 the head of the military and in turn put the military 
 at the disposal of the railway directors. Troops 
 were put in possession of the lines and were paraded 
 fully armed in front of the men. They were sent 
 
 advantage should be taken of this opportunity to introduce a 
 method by which unscrupulous and unpatriotic employers would 
 get additional power over workmen. I am not in favour of 
 compulsion in regard to industrial work. I see no reason for it. 
 I shall absolutely resist it to the last." — Times. Mr. Bonar Law : 
 "There was no intention whatever in this Bill to introduce in 
 any shape or form industrial conscription." — Hansard, p. 317, 
 January 8, 1916. 
 
 Such was the intention. This is the experience : — 
 " Within a month of the passing of the Military Service Act 
 there was a strike at Dundee. . . . What did the employer do ? 
 He did not use the ordinary methods of a dispute and fight it 
 out. . . . He immediately reported these men to the military 
 authorities, and they were called up under the Act." — J. H. 
 Thomas, ALP. (Hansard, May 16, 1916). " A working party of 
 102 soldiers was supplied to the Llanelly Steel Company. These 
 men . . . remain in the military service of the Crown, and are 
 under military discipline. They receive no wages, but continue 
 in receipt of their military emoluments." — Dr. Addison, Ministry 
 of Munitions (Hansard, p. 671, August 7, 1916). 
 
 Mr. Robert Smillie, speaking at Edinburgh, stated that he had 
 been informed of a case where a miner had been sent back to 
 work in a mine, and had been told by an officer that he was to go 
 back to a particular mine and stay in that mine, and that any 
 disobedience would result in his being at once sent back to the 
 Army. 
 
104 NATIONAL DEFENCE 
 
 to towns that had never asked for them and where 
 their presence was regarded as an nisult. Men 
 returning in the dead of the night froi negotiations 
 designed to end the trouble found themselves held 
 up by the secret movement of troops on the streets. 
 By the end of the week the country was, in conse- 
 quence, on the verge of the most serious civil discord. 
 At the time the foreign situation was bad, owing to 
 the difficulties about Morocco, and that restrained 
 the Home Office and the State authorities and peace 
 was brought about. Thus by a mere coincidence 
 the country was undoubtedly saved from serious 
 bloodshed and the workmen from a complete defeat. 
 The shooting of strikers during riotous disturb- 
 ances arising out of strikes and lock-outs is still 
 more common. Such shooting is generally ill-timed 
 and the victims are as a rule innocent people. This 
 violence does no good. It neither protects property 
 nor allays passion. It takes place as a rule when 
 local authorities lose their heads. But the military 
 being at the beck and call of magistrates who are 
 generally prejudiced against the workmen, and often 
 interested in the issues of the dispute, is a grave 
 disadvantage to the Unions and provokes men to 
 excesses. The police forces are perfectly com- 
 petent to deal with any trouble that may arise, 
 especially if the local authorities were compelled to 
 seek the co-operation of the leaders of the strikers 
 to prevent disturbance. This would be far more 
 
THE ARMY, THE STATE, AND LABOUR 105 
 
 effective than bringing files of soldiers with ball 
 cartridge in front of excited mobs. The military, 
 however, are really used to end the strike and to 
 punish for destroyed property, not to keep order. 
 They are an industrial force, not a police one. 
 
 In this way the military — a citizen army with 
 citizen officers — has been used in Switzerland, in 
 Australia under a Labour Government, in South 
 Africa under a Government which apparently had 
 no sympathy with mine -owners, in France, in 
 Germany, and in Russia. 
 
 An army is always a powerful weapon in the 
 hands of Governments to destroy the chances of 
 labour in a hard -fought industrial dispute. It is 
 never used against capital, for in the nature of things 
 it cannot be so used. The interest of capital 
 is not of such a kind as would bring it into 
 conflict with the military, even when it is in direct 
 conflict with the law and ought to be in conflict 
 with the police. A conscript nation puts special 
 powers in the hands of capital to control labour 
 and hamper its freedom, and that power has always 
 been used whenever and wherever occasion has 
 arisen. 
 
 But there is something more than this that has to 
 be said. No line can be drawn between the camp 
 and the workshop. An efficient military camp must 
 have an obedient workshop behind it. Production 
 of munitions, of food, clothing, and other necessities 
 
106 NATIONAL DEFENCE 
 
 is absolutely essential to an army, and an autocratic 
 control of that production is necessary for the nation 
 which leans upon force for its security. When the 
 armies are called up the places of the enlisted men 
 in field, mine, and workshop must be taken at once. 
 This means the training of women during peace. 
 No nation in the future can neglect this, for con- 
 scription has been proved by this war to be as 
 necessary as regards tools as it is as regards arms. 
 Function after function of the nation has to submit 
 to be painted khaki, as the nation with increasing 
 completeness organizes itself to defend itself by force. 
 General Skugarevski is perfectly right. The military 
 nations of the future must prepare their workshops 
 for war. Those that are most thorough will train 
 their women by a process of conscription, because 
 the woman worker in the time of war is essential to 
 the State. She is a reserve to be mobilized on the 
 outbreak of war, and her mobilization requires 
 preconcerted plans and preliminary training. 
 
 So, just as there is no distinction in actual fact 
 between a policy of armed defence and offence, 
 there is none between military and industrial 
 conscription. The former cannot be worked without 
 calling the latter to its aid. 
 
CHAPTER XI 
 THE ARMY AND REVOLUTION 
 
 There are some Socialists and Trade Unionists in 
 this country who advocate a citizen Army of a 
 special kind which they do not hesitate to say 
 they will use if they can for a special purpose. 
 They would train all men in arms; the officers 
 would come from the ranks, or, in any event, com- 
 missions would be open to the working classes; 
 barrack discipline would not be rigid and the regi- 
 mental aspect of militarism would be reduced to 
 a minimum. Their idea is to train citizens in the 
 use of arms and in military drill, organization, and 
 cohesion, and their purpose is to defend the nation 
 if need be against invasion, and to use force also 
 if need be in industrial disputes. One of them is 
 reported to have said, " We want to be able to 
 meet armed force with armed force if the capitalists 
 use it." 
 
 That method of social progress has no attractions 
 for me; and the people of influence who are push- 
 ing universal military service can afford to smile 
 
 at such a card up Labour's sleeve, They will 
 
 107 
 
108 NATIONAL DEFENCE 
 
 take care that if my friend gets his citizen Army 
 he will not get his revolution as well. He will 
 never get that card down his sleeve. 
 
 The idea that arms are a badge of liberty and 
 an evidence of power and that they are useful to 
 overawe rulers and secure domestic reform is an 
 old revolutionary one. The armed nation used to 
 appear in every revolutionary programme. 1 But 
 that was before the franchise, which armed intel- 
 ligent men with something far more powerful than 
 a rifle and more deadly than a sword. " What is 
 the use of liberty if we are not armed to protect 
 it? " is as dead as Queen Anne as a piece of political 
 wisdom. He who cannot use the vote cannot use 
 the rifle, and to try to revive this ancient doctrine 
 is putting the clock back. The armed nation will 
 be the tool of the State. The Socialist who 
 thunders one moment against the existing capitalist 
 State, and demands the next that the nation ought to 
 be armed, may fancy he is speaking with magnifi- 
 cent dash and thoroughness, but in reality he is 
 only demanding that the worker should put his 
 neck more securely into the yoke of capitalism, 
 should impose upon himself a discipline and 
 
 1 Nothing has been written in its favour that is better than 
 Major Cartwright's JEgis, or the Military Energies of the Consti- 
 tution (1804). The argument was appropriate to the time, but 
 one has only to read the book to understand how the conditions 
 of the more revolutionary section of political parties has changed 
 since then, 
 
THE ARMY AND REVOLUTION 109 
 
 obedience which stunt the free growth of the demo- 
 cratic spirit of initiative and freedom, and should 
 hand himself over to an organization which, from its 
 very nature, must be controlled by State authorities 
 whom he as a soldier cannot disobey without in- 
 curring the direst penalties and punishments. 
 
 Revolution in some countries may yet be neces- 
 sary to open out the road for freedom; but when 
 it is successful it will only bring the workmen of 
 such a country to the position now held by the 
 workers of Great Britain, and' at that point they will 
 have to lay aside arms and tout for votes. There 
 may be a lack of romantic heroism about this, but 
 the part of the romantic hero is generally played 
 by the Socialist who talks and poses. It is not 
 real business. 
 
 Jaures does make the point that when officers 
 are drawn from the democracy the control of the. 
 Army will not be so completely in the hands of 
 the State authorities. He discusses this very fully, 
 but comes to the Conclusion that Socialists and Trade 
 Unionists should accept all the risks and take com- 
 missions. They will be able to use their power 
 on behalf of the workers, and the capitalist will 
 find, with them in authority, an Army not so pliable 
 to the will of the State. But that means that the 
 Army will then have a will of its own, and that there 
 will be Army politics. No greater evil can befall 
 the democratic State than this. Caesarism, even 
 
110 NATIONAL DEFENCE 
 
 if it be inspired by democratic feelings, is an evil. 
 The supreme power in the democratic State must 
 be civil, and if that be bad it must be reformed 
 or changed politically. The very worst way to 
 remedy such a state of things is to create an Army 
 which will have the power and the will to accept 
 or reject orders from the duly constituted civil 
 authority. The mutinous conspiracy of the Unionist 
 officers at the Curragh Camp was bad, not because 
 it was directed against a decision of Parliament 
 which suited Liberal and Labour opinion, but 
 because it was a conspiracy of officers and an 
 interference of the Army as such in civil affairs. 
 The whole of the Ulster movement is a splendid 
 illustration of the evil which will arise if the Army, 
 however wrong the decisions of Parliament may 
 be, is taught to believe that it holds in its hands 
 the power to thwart Parliament. The inherent 
 objection to military rule is only intensified by the 
 deliberate pursuit of a method of selecting officers 
 which will give some promise that the Army will 
 be used in an enfranchised nation on the side of 
 democracy if democracy should have occasion to 
 quarrel with its civil and representative rulers. 
 
 But the selection of officers from the industrial 
 classes is no guarantee that the Army will be demo- 
 cratized. An officer from whatever rank he is drawn 
 is trained in his military job, and the vast majority 
 pf such men will take on the tinge of militarism, 
 
THE ARMY AND REVOLUTION 111 
 
 will look upon politics and the State from militarist 
 angles of vision, and allow their minds to be run 
 into militarist moulds. Experience shows that there 
 is no man more ready than he who has risen from 
 the working class to adapt himself to the habits 
 and point of view of other classes, and in the 
 Army I believe it is true that the officer who has 
 risen from the ranks has adopted to a special degree 
 the mind and discipline of the soldier. The problem 
 of how to make Cabinets representative in all their 
 acts is a political and not a military one, and armed 
 citizens cannot assist to solve it. 
 
 The Social Revolution, if made at all, must be 
 made in the workshop and through the ballot-box, 
 by the citizen himself changing his opinions and 
 life, by the workman assuming more industrial 
 power, and by the elector showing more political 
 intelligence in the management of his affairs. 
 
CHAPTER XII 
 
 THE GUARANTEE OF PEACE 
 
 My argument thus far has been : 
 
 i. National defence cannot be confined to de- 
 fensive precautions, but must become an offensive 
 if it is based upon military force, however that 
 force is officered or constituted; 
 
 2. A military organization is a weapon in the 
 hands of the State for industrial purposes, partly 
 because the State is always less democratic than 
 the nation, and partly because industrial warfare 
 must always raise questions of national security 
 and existence; 
 
 3. No line can be drawn between the military 
 and the industrial order. The military authority 
 must embrace the workshop because industrial 
 production is necessary to an army. Military con- 
 scription must involve industrial conscription ; and 
 
 4. After this war, unless there is a complete 
 change in the inspiration and control of international 
 policy, Great Britain will have to accept, in addition 
 to its special obligation to provide the most power- 
 ful Navy in Europe, the same military responsibility 
 
THE GUARANTEE OF PEACE 113 
 
 as any other continental Power, and that means 
 that conscription will have to be a peace expedient 
 as well as a war necessity. 
 
 Two points still remain to be discussed. The 
 first i3 guarantees of national safety, and, arising 
 from that, the kind of peace which ought now 
 to be striven for. 
 
 The Russian General Skugarevski, who gave the 
 interview to which I have already referred, con- 
 cluded his conversation with some remarkable 
 opinions. When Germany has been subdued, he 
 said, the States of Europe might agree, as has 
 already been proposed at The Hague, to limit 
 armaments. Then he remarked, " An international 
 tribunal must at last acquire power." Finally, he 
 made an important admission. What power? Is 
 power only armed power? He goes on : — 
 
 Some people think that this power can be defended only by 
 the armed hand, whilst, since it is impossible to create a kind 
 of international Hague army, the decisions of an international 
 tribunal will be equivalent merely to " scraps of paper." No. 
 The decisions of an international tribunal can rest, first, on the 
 strength of public opinion. 
 
 The second foundation-stone of this power may 
 be economic, according to General Skugarevski. 
 
 The guarantee of peace is educated public opinion, 
 acting through a State or controlling a Govern- 
 ment, and there is no other. Even a threatened 
 
 economic war is of little consequence. That one 
 
 8 
 
114 NATIONAL DEFENCE 
 
 nation can punish another by refusing to trade 
 with it is an idea which breaks down when examined 
 in the details of its process. It assumes the false 
 premises of Tariff Reform — viz. that political nations 
 trade with each other, whereas trade is conducted 
 only between certain individuals of the nations. 
 If the economic punishment is meted out in a limited 
 way, only certain persons and interests suffer, and 
 these will not be the guilty persons or the offend- 
 ing interests; if it can be carried out to the extent 
 of a general blockade, nobody but the poor will 
 suffer for a long time, and interests that are really 
 national will be untouched until the consequences 
 of the blockade have spread upwards through 
 society. The blockade purpose is to cause revolu- 
 tion by the starvation of the helpless ones of a 
 nation. .Whilst the economic war is in operation 
 all the complicated channels through which inter- 
 national trade runs will have to be explored and 
 drained of the trade of the offending nation, and 
 this will not only mean much irritation amongst 
 the injured interests of the other nations but much 
 punishment of the people of all countries. The 
 method is ineffective, inaccurate, and clumsy. On 
 paper, it is a threat ; in reality, it is an impossibility. 
 
 Let us concentrate our attention upon the real 
 facts. 
 
 The only way to provide for national security 
 is to remove the fears and arbitrate upon the mis- 
 
THE GUARANTEE OF PEACE 115 
 
 understandings and rivalries which grow up into 
 conflicts when armies are available and the posses- 
 sion of force is an inducement to rulers to be 
 unbending. The problem, if apparently difficult to 
 solve, is easy to state. It is this : — 
 
 No people wants to fight any other people. 
 Public opinion in times of peace is always against 
 war; it becomes warlike only when roused by 
 the bugles of war, blowing from Foreign Offices, 
 Ministries of War, and through newspapers. How 
 are national disputes to be settled by the people 
 before their passions are aroused? I have said that 
 this is apparently difficult, but in reality the ease with 
 which it can be done is the great obstacle to doing 
 it. Foreign affairs in some mysterious way have 
 been withdrawn from the light of the world. They 
 are transacted in rooms with blinds drawn, with 
 backstairs entrances and secret doors and waiting 
 chambers. Upon them are employed spies, suborned 
 agents, ambassadors whose business it is to cheat, 
 and finesse. The whole corrupting system should 
 be swept away. It stands like a dirty old slum 
 area, full of vermin and disease, in the midst of 
 a district cleared and improved. It belongs to 
 the kind of evil which exists by leaning upon a 
 similar evil which, in turn, exists by leaning upon 
 it. Few seem to see that a kick at any of the 
 supports will bring the whole offensive fabric down. 
 Supposing Mr. Asquith had informed both 
 
116 NATIONAL DEFENCE 
 
 Germany and ourselves in 191 2 that the two 
 countries had failed to come to an understanding, 
 instead of assuring us that we were on terms of 
 the most complete agreement, how d: "erent events 
 would have been ! Supposing it had been the habit 
 of people to regard foreign relations as within the 
 scope of democratic control, and our rulers had 
 been afraid to commit the country's honour with- 
 out sanction, again, how different things would have 
 been I Even assuming that the German authorities 
 were then bent on war, an open diplomacy on our 
 part would have prevented the German people from 
 being hoodwinked, would have rendered the rush 
 to arms at the end of July 1914 impossible, and 
 would have defeated the policy of the Governments 
 to begin the war by persuading all their peoples 
 that each was fighting a defensive battle. Or 
 supposing I am too pacifically optimist and nothing 
 could have prevented war, an honest statement of 
 our dangers and an unmistakable proof that they 
 were real would have led to preparation (say in 
 food and other supplies) adequate to the risk. 
 
 I do not make the mistake of assuming that open 
 diplomacy will remove the causes of war; I do 
 say that it will enable these causes to dissipate 
 themselves without an explosion. Secret diplomacy 
 acts upon national rivalry as a confining chamber 
 acts upon a high explosive. In the open the high 
 explosive burns; in a confined place it explodes. 
 
THE GUARANTEE OF PEACE 117 
 
 Capitalist rivalries, the spirit which animated our 
 Tariff Reform campaigns, the need of national ex- 
 pansion, such as both Russia and Germany feel, 
 will provide plenty of causes for future wars, but 
 an open diplomacy will prevent these causes from 
 generating disruptive force. The people and reason- 
 ableness will settle them as they arise. 
 
 There is no other guarantee of peace and national 
 security. No army can give it; no treaty under 
 existing conditions can give it. It can only be 
 given by the people themselves insisting upon know- 
 ing to what their rulers are committing them and 
 what game their diplomatists are playing and upon 
 taking responsibility upon themselves. Everybody 
 will not do this. Heaven help us if that were 
 necessary I But many agencies of goodwill and 
 intelligent political thought and action will do so, 
 and that will suffice. 
 
 The argument I have been stating in this chapter 
 was always present in J auras' mind when consider- 
 ing how far his military views were applicable to 
 Great Britain. He believed, as I have already 
 said, that we could do better than create a citizen 
 force for national defence. In the English trans- 
 lation of his book appears the following significant 
 pronouncement :— * 
 
 There are two courses open to England as regards her foreign 
 and colonial policy. By following the lines so ably laid down 
 
 1 Democracy and Military Service, pp. 124-5. 
 
118 NATIONAL DEFENCE 
 
 by the advocates of peace— the Socialists, the Labour Party, the 
 best and most courageous members of the Radical Party — 
 England can play a decisive part in inducing Europe and the 
 world at large to adopt a policy of peace. In that case she will 
 grant far-reaching concessions — both political and social— to 
 Egypt and to India, and will thus avert the revolts with which 
 she is threatened. She will accept, she will herself propose, the 
 abolition of the right to seize private property at sea ; and by 
 thus weakening the power of naval war, she will do away with 
 all danger of war being brought about by the economic rivalry 
 between herself and Germany. By adopting the principle of 
 arbitration as applicable to all international disputes, she will 
 open up the way to progressive reduction of armaments. By 
 such measures the economic forces both of England and of other 
 countries will be enabled to follow their natural course, and the 
 law of nations will easily be able so to extend its jurisdiction as 
 to prevent industrial and mercantile rivalry from leading to 
 fraud or violence. 
 
 England may, on the other hand, refuse to follow this wise and 
 beneficent policy. And in that case the half-hearted measures 
 elaborated by Mr. Haldane for the purpose of national defence 
 will certainly not enable her to face the dangers which she 
 foresees in the future — national and religious uprisings in Egypt 
 and in India, and the dreaded conflict with Germany, whose 
 naval force, growing day by day, threatens the coasts and, at 
 any rate, the imagination of England. 
 
 Mr. Haldane's Territorial organization is one of those ingenious 
 compromises which English statesmanship excels in creating. 
 But it will probably not be able in the long run to withstand the 
 varied attacks to which its complexity exposes it. If ever the 
 danger of a world-wide war comes home to the masses of 
 the English nation, the territorial system as it exists will prob- 
 ably be swamped, 
 
 The war has rendered some of the phrases in 
 the above extract old, but the idea and argument 
 behind them are as sound now as when they were 
 published in 1910. 
 
THE GUARANTEE OF PEACE 119 
 
 Should any one urge that we must arm because 
 other people are arming and defend because other 
 people are threatening, my reply is : It is not our 
 business to content ourselves with allowing other 
 people to take the initiative, and to consider our- 
 selves wise in merely countering their moves; we 
 ought to have a clearly mapped out policy to secure 
 peace, and we ought to pursue it; if for the time 
 being we are driven to do something that is not 
 altogether in accord with it, we should recognize 
 that we run great risks in doing so. But chiefly 
 my reply is that this game of following an evil 
 lead is one of life and death to the nations, because 
 it is an endless game. The resort to militarism 
 provided the conditions which make militarism 
 necessary — more militarism and still more militarism, 
 more danger and still more danger. The M prac- 
 tical " man whose vision is limited by his existing 
 conditions and whose mind is satisfied by reflecting 
 that disarmament is at present unpractical is, as 
 usual, not practical at all. He is a passive dreamer. 
 Arms have been proved by history to be the most 
 unpractical of all expedients to secure either peace 
 or justice. To go on trusting to old broken reeds 
 is foolishness, not wisdom. By an effort of will 
 we must become civilized men. Nothing else will 
 be of any use. Wc are like a squirrel in a revolving 
 cage; the faster we run, the faster we have to 
 run. One day the nations will have the courage 
 
120 NATIONAL DEFENCE 
 
 and the wisdom to step out. The instant they do 
 so they will find themselves in a peaceful world. 
 
 In every nation after this war there will be a 
 specially keen interest in the causes and effects of 
 militarism, and every nation will be willing to con- 
 sider the subject of peace. Some nations will be 
 dominated by the military spirit, perhaps because 
 they are sulky and have scores to wipe off, perhaps 
 because they are afraid. But in every nation there 
 will be a clear-sighted peace party. If these 
 parties, acting internationally, are not strong enough 
 to hold militarism in absolute check and to impose 
 upon it an increasing control, they must sub- 
 ordinate many differences in their own domestic 
 politics in order to strengthen international demo- 
 cratic organizations. The great political issues of 
 this war will be fought out after the war ends, 
 not by it, nor during it. A strong united effort 
 will be required in which enlightened opinion 
 in the various nations must be in the very closest 
 communion, must act both officially and unofficially 
 on arranged plans in the separate States, must devise 
 and support policies to strengthen the pacific move- 
 ments in each country, and must create both a 
 national and international political organization which 
 in every country will act in unity. The days of 
 peace picnics and polite and meaningless speeches 
 are over. They have been empty. Energy that 
 is sleepless and a policy which is pursued from day 
 
THE GUARANTEE OF PEACE 121 
 
 to day and with complete detail, watching every 
 move in the diplomatic game and with a thoroughly 
 efficient Intelligence Department and Parliamentary 
 policy, are now required if the men who have died 
 for us are not to have died in vain. 
 
CHAPTER XIII 
 THE POLITICS OF PEACE 
 
 Meanwhile we must consider the politics of peace, 
 for peace is a political and not a military problem. 
 Amongst the truths that history teaches with a con- 
 clusiveness which cannot be questioned is that a 
 peace made by military victors in the spirit of mili- 
 tary victors is no peace at all. To-day we are 
 deluded by such catch-penny phrases as " a prema- 
 ture peace," "no patched -up peace," and so on. 
 They are quite meaningless and very delusive. They 
 imply the doctrine, which I have said history proves 
 to be wrong and mischievous, that war can make 
 peace. You can punish a nation by war, you can 
 devastate it, you can rob it of its territory and 
 impose an indemnity to cripple it in the future, but 
 you cannot in this way make peace. Never can any 
 nation have a more complete victory over another 
 than Germany had over France when the Franco - 
 German War ended, and never was peace more 
 patently " patched -up " or more clearly vitiated by 
 the qualities of inconclusiveness than the Peace of 
 
THE POLITICS OF PEACE 123 
 
 Frankfurt in May 1871. France and Germany lived 
 in a state of armed truce from 1 87 1 to 1914, and 
 the whole of Europe knew it. The shadow, the 
 fears, the disturbance of the imminent war perturbed 
 Europe throughout the whole generation ; it deter- 
 mined European diplomacy ; it defeated every 
 attempt to arrive at settled agreement ; it created 
 the Alliance of the Central Powers and the Entente 
 between the surrounding nations ; finally, it merged 
 itself in the causes of this war. 
 
 The blindness of a people at war believing that 
 absolute military victory is the only way to peace 
 characterizes all wars. It is now more than an 
 arguable proposition that we could have made a 
 better peace in 1800 than we did fifteen years 
 later. The Treaty of Paris which ended the 
 Crimean War in 1856 was considered by Queen 
 Victoria as " rather premature " and was opposed 
 by Palmerston. As a matter of fact, it could have 
 been secured in 1855. Mr. J. A. Farrer, writing 
 in the Manchester Guardian, says, after a survey 
 of the seven great wars of the last two centuries to 
 which this country has been a party :— 
 
 When one thinks of the countless millions of lives that have 
 been sacrificed in these former wars by their needless prolonga- 
 tion, for some insignificant aim, or for some party purpose of 
 the time, one is inclined to execrate the memory of those who, 
 in their rejection of premature peaces, effected belated ones 
 which added so unnecessarily to the world's sufferings. It is not 
 a premature peace that we have to fear so much as a belated 
 one ; for the balance of history is on the side of those who in 
 
124 NATIONAL DEFENCE 
 
 former wars favoured what seemed a premature peace, not on 
 the side of those who prolonged those wars for no result that 
 justified their continuance. 
 
 When a war breaks out it drives with its terrible 
 force the peoples of all the belligerent nations into 
 what is called the patriotic camp. They all believe 
 they are right. Then some measure of calm comes. 
 The first pain of death and suffering is sobering. 
 They all feel hatred of the slaughter and are dis- 
 turbed by the privations. That also begins to pass, 
 however. People get accustomed to death both at 
 home and on the field, and suffering becomes 
 habitual. By that time the military pressure has 
 begun to show itself, and through the mists we can 
 see how the battle sways and which side is likely 
 to be beaten. The victor is unwilling to stay his 
 hand ; the conquered fights to remove disgrace. 
 Then the military end comes. The cannons can fire 
 no more, and the vanquished nation, sullen, angry, 
 and resentful, like poor, unhappy Queen Mary, nurses 
 its grievance in its heart and begins to study revenge. 
 Civilization and the pacific purposes of the peoples 
 have been defeated. Militarism, beaten on the field, 
 retires into the hearts of the people as into a sanc- 
 tuary. That is the course of all national wars, and 
 the failure of all statesmen hitherto is that they have 
 allowed that full course to be run. 
 
 It seems absurd, but it is true, that the future 
 peace depends, not on the victor but on the van- 
 
THE POLITICS OF PEACE 125 
 
 quished. It is not the amount of military success 
 but that of military defeat which determines whether 
 the nations are to settle down. It is because this is 
 true that victors so often make a mess of things and 
 undo the military results of war by the political 
 consequences. By assuming that the victors can 
 settle things, we forget that the essential problem 
 is to get the vanquished to accept things. 
 
 A simple truth recognized by all military writers, 
 but turned by them to imperfect use, is always 
 obscured in the minds of people during a war. It 
 is that war is an incident in political policy, like 
 a spurt in the course of a race. 1 When it is over, the 
 political policy goes on again, and the value of the 
 war is determined by whether it has aided or 
 hindered the policy. This truth must be hammered 
 at and hammered at. If this war does not end 
 militarism and the menace of force, the object of 
 the British people in accepting it will have been 
 betrayed. 
 
 So I return to the political question. When, in 
 that evolution of popular feeling during a war, has 
 war reached its maximum political effect ? Evidently 
 somewhere about the middle, just at the time when 
 the crowds are being urged to shout that they will 
 have no inconclusive peace. 
 
 " " In one word, the art of war in its highest point of view is 
 policy. War is only a part of political intercourse, therefore 
 by no means an independent thing in itself."— Clausewitz. 
 
126 NATIONAL DEFENCE 
 
 Students of Clausewitz will remember that in a 
 finely impressive passage in his book On War, he 
 insists that the military leaders should always keep 
 before them the art of forcing the people of the 
 enemy nation into a frame of mind which induces 
 them to submit. That pregnant idea is much wider 
 in its common sense than Clausewitz saw. It means 
 that the statesmen as well as the generals of the 
 belligerent nations should study the minds of their 
 enemies, for a willingness to submit arises, not from 
 the fear and the sacrifice of war but from mental 
 and moral opinions as well. This justifies — nay, 
 indeed it necessitates— the demand of such bodies as 
 the Union of Democratic Control that statesmen 
 should make their intentions clear, not only in order 
 that the peoples at war should understand what they 
 are fighting for and what they are fighting against, 
 but also that the statesmen themselves may have 
 the ends they think the war is to serve definitely 
 before them, and so prevent the war from entering 
 upon a stage when every new military success only 
 drives the political goal farther and farther off. If 
 the rulers who conduct wars really mean to establish 
 peace permanently in the end, war and diplomacy 
 together must be inspired by the Clausewitz idea, 
 and the object of waging war must be to produce in 
 the minds of the peoples such attitudes as incline 
 them to accept peace. A war which ends in un- 
 willing submission, or which leaves as an inheritance 
 
THE POLITICS OF PEACE 127 
 
 fresh causes of war, is not ended at all. For the 
 "end" of a war is not military victory but peace. 
 The military mind assumes, as a matter of fact, that 
 war can never end, but the civil mind makes no 
 such assumption. That is why the military mind 
 thinks only of " absolute " victory in terms of mili- 
 tary success, whereas the civil mind ought to think 
 of it in terms of political success. To-day we are 
 sacrificing political success and ultimate peace to 
 military success. For it is clear that the political 
 climax does not coincide with the military climax, 
 the former coming when weariness without resent- 
 ment is at its maximum, the latter when defeat is 
 absolute and humiliation is deepest. 
 
 From this point of view the Army is an instru- 
 ment in the hands of the men responsible for political 
 policy, and that is why we must apply a maxim of 
 the militarists themselves in a wider and truer way 
 than they apply it. Clausewitz wrote that " the first, 
 the grandest, and most decisive act of judgment 
 which the statesman and general exercises " is to 
 understand precisely what the object of war is, and 
 not " wish to make of it something which, by the 
 nature of its relations, it is impossible for it to be." 
 The statesman of any capacity and judgment ought 
 to know when the war has secured him his political 
 object, and then immediately put his political forces 
 into action and so win his purpose. That is exactly 
 what our statesmen never do and what the men at 
 
128 NATIONAL DEFENCE 
 
 present at the head of affairs are declining to do. 
 Be they Conservative or Liberal, militarist Labour 
 or Socialist, they belong to the old order who see 
 in the triumph and the support of force the conditions 
 of peace. They are where the Congress of Vienna 
 and the Conferences of Paris and Frankfurt were. 
 And yet upon the ending of this war politically, and 
 upon that alone, depends the future peace of 
 Europe. 
 
 Let us assume that the problem to-day is Germany, 
 and that it centres round the question whether the 
 German military mind is to dominate the policy of 
 that country, and so maintain in Europe a sense 
 of insecurity that has to be temporarily allayed by 
 armaments. How is Europe to get guarantees against 
 this? No sane man would suggest that the Govern- 
 ment of Germany can be controlled by any com- 
 bination of Powers in occupation of Berlin. Sooner 
 or later we have to trust ourselves and Europe 
 to the will and policy of a self-governing Germany. 
 When the best and the worst have been done, 
 Germany will still have it in her power to stir 
 up strife and fear or accept peace. How 
 will military operations affect that will and policy? 
 If Germany is left in the frame of mind in 
 which France was in 1871, obviously the effect 
 upon Europe will be bad. But if Germany is not 
 to be left where France was, equally obviously we 
 must show our trust in her self-governing capacity 
 
THE POLITICS OF PEACE 129 
 
 at the earliest practicable time. To force the popular 
 will of Germany into the arms of militarism is to 
 defeat the very purpose for which we engaged in 
 the war. To end this war with the peoples 
 not on speaking terms is to sacrifice for no 
 gain the thousands of our men left to sleep 
 in Belgium and France, because such an end 
 would not only give militarism a new lease 
 of power but would increase its grip on the throat 
 of civilization. 
 
 I believe that the people of Germany now, if 
 released from the strain of the war and the neces- 
 sity of presenting a united front to the enemy, would 
 end the dominance of militarism, would remove its 
 menace from Europe, and would enter into the co- 
 operation of States which will have to be established 
 if Europe is to be saved from destruction, and I 
 further believe they will be less inclined to that after 
 another year of war. Writing thus, I am no pro- 
 German. I am a pro -European. To me Germany 
 is a problem just as capitalism is a problem, and 
 unless that problem is faced in an atmosphere of 
 scientific rationality it will never be solved at all. 
 Atrocities and brutalities are not only the means 
 by which militarism fights, but those by which it 
 perpetuates itself. They rouse, quite rightly, whir]r 
 winds of moral indignation, and, alas I under these 
 whirlwinds reason is uprooted. How often do we 
 find in life that a man whose cause is just and whose 
 
 9 
 
130 NATIONAL DEFENCE 
 
 indignation is altogether worthy is swept to ruin and 
 ineffectiveness by the fury of his moral indignation 
 overwhelming his rational judgment ! Our lunatic 
 asylums, and the wildernesses where our Ishmaels 
 are, are full of such wrecks of good but injured 
 men. From the people gush bountiful springs of 
 pure feeling, but these springs water the weedy 
 fields cultivated by their rulers. I want the 
 crimes committed by Germans punished ; if it 
 can be proved that crimes have been com- 
 mitted against Germany, I want them punished 
 too. If we could get the various peoples into that 
 frame of mind we could have peace, but only in 
 that way. 
 
 As to programmes, 1 I do not believe they present 
 much difficulty provided they are considered by 
 the peoples themselves. The restoration of Belgium, 
 the rehabilitation of France, the settlement of the 
 Balkans, the re -establishment of a Polish autonomy, 
 outlets for Germany— these and kindred questions 
 are so agreed upon really in the hearts of the people 
 that no Conference representative of the people could 
 fail to settle them, or could quarrel about the 
 principles upon which they ought to be settled— 
 the recognition of nationality and self-government, 
 the inviolability of properly sanctioned treaties, the 
 
 1 I do not consider these in detail, but content myself with 
 referring my readers to such books as Towards a Lasting 
 Settlement, by C. k\ Buxton and others. George Allen & Ufcwin, 
 23. 6d. net. 
 
THE POLITICS OF PEACE 131 
 
 desirability of arbitration, the convenience of a 
 Council of the nations. 
 
 The danger is that all these questions will be 
 approached when the time comes by men who will 
 assume the possibility of further wars, men who 
 will have enmity brooding in their hearts and who 
 will be in a position to play with hations as their 
 stakes, by men who have not freed themselves from 
 a dependence upon militarism as the only guarantee 
 of national security. 
 
 Unless the old order of diplomacy and inter- 
 national policy is swept off the stage by the fury 
 of this war, democracy and militarism will be left 
 at hand -grips upon it and Europe will be doomed 
 to the curse of an armed truce. We have suffered 
 much these past two years. A whole generation of 
 men has been obliterated. National wealth, so much 
 needed to enrich the starved lives of our people, has 
 been wasted. A burden of debt unsurpassed in the 
 history of mankind has been accumulated. Problems 
 of terrible import in the State and the workshop 
 have been created. Is this all to go for naught? 
 Is it " Ichabod M that we are writing on the gate- 
 ways of the future? Is it 4< Failure " that the next 
 generation will have to carve on the widely scattered 
 graves of this? , : 
 
 These views may for the moment be unpopular. 
 But they are Truth. They are gathered from the 
 waysides of the past. From them, and from them 
 
132 NATIONAL DEFENCE 
 
 alone, can we build worthy and abiding monuments 
 upon the graves of the men who have fallen, and 
 to build these monuments no sacrifice imposed upon 
 us by the bitter passions of the moment is too 
 great for us cheerfully to bear. 
 
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