THE CASE FOR
COMPULSORY MILITARY SERVICE
MACMILLAN AND CO., LIMITED
LONDON BOMBAY CALCUTTA MADRAS
MELBOURNE
THE MACMILLAN COMPANY
NEW YORK BOSTON CHICAGO
DALLAS SAN FRANCISCO
THE MACMILLAN CO. OF CANADA, LTD.
TORONTO
THE CASE FOR
COMPULSORY
MILITARY SERVICE
BY
G. G. COULTON
MACMILLAN AND CO., LIMITED
ST. MARTIN'S STREET, LONDON
1917
COPYRIGHT
GLASGOW : PRINTED AT THE UNIVERSITY PRESS
BY ROBERT MACLEHOSE AND CO. LTD.
TO THOSE WHO
WITHOUT COMPULSION, HATRED, OR FEAR
HAVE STAKED OR LOST THEIR LIVES
IN OUR DEFENCE
THIS BOOK IS DEDICATED
447045
AUTHOR'S PREFACE
THIS book was originally written for the Garton
Foundation, an institution intended for the im-
partial publication of documents and discussions
relating to important questions of war and peace.
For reasons into which it is unnecessary to enter,
the project for its publication by that body fell
through, and I now therefore turn in the ordinary
way to the general public.
The present volume may claim, perhaps, to be
the first attempt at a discussion of this great
national question on the firm ground of historical
and political facts. The most extraordinary errors
have hitherto been made by the most distinguished
men. Lord Salisbury, on the one hand, imagined
our own bowmen of Cr4cy and the modern Swiss
riflemen to be volunteers, while Lord Haldane
supposed that England was under a voluntary
system in the days of the Spanish Armada.
When, after the war, this question is finally settled
at leisure, it is essential that the general public
viii AUTHOK'S PKEPACE
should have no excuse for ignoring incontrovertible
historical facts : the author will therefore be glad to
accept rectifications, if necessary, from any quarter,
and to acknowledge them either in a second edition
or (if no such opportunity occur) on a sheet of
errata.
GREAT SHELFORD, CAMBRIDGE,
July, 1917.
CONTENTS
CHAPTER PAGE
INTRODUCTION - 1
I. CONSCRIPTION IN THE ROMAN REPUBLIC - - - 11
II. VOLUNTARISM IN THE ROMAN EMPIRE - - - - 20
III. ITALY, FLANDERS, FRANCE AND ENGLAND -32
IV. FRANCE AND ENGLAND (Continued) - - 51
V. CONSCRIPTION AND CAESARISM IN FRANCE 63
VI. CONSCRIPTION AND CAESARISM IN GERMANY (I.) - 78
VII. CONSCRIPTION AND CAESARISM IN GERMANY (II.) - 90
VIII. BRITISH DEMOCRACY AND VOLUNTARISM IN THE
GREAT FRENCH WAR. (I.) THE INITIAL BLUNDER 101
IX. BRITISH DEMOCRACY AND VOLUNTARISM IN THE
GREAT FRENCH WAR. (II.) " PAPERING OVER
THE CRACKS" 115
X. BRITISH VOLUNTARISM SINCE 1815 - 125
XI. AMERICA AND MODERN FRANCE - 135
XII. THE Swiss MILITIA - - 157
XIII. SWITZERLAND AND BRITAIN - - 170
XIV. PRINCIPLE OR EXPEDIENCY - - - - 187
x CONTENTS
CHAPTBR PAGE
XV. VOLUNTEER RECRUITS - ... 202
XVI. VOLUNTEER FIGHTERS - - - 220
XVII. NON-MILITARY OBJECTIONS - - 239
XVIII. EDGED TOOLS - - 255
XIX. LAST OBJECTIONS - - 264
XX. CONCLUSION - - . - - 292
APPENDICES - - 300
INDEX 371
INTRODUCTION
So far as modern times are concerned, the compul-
sory system began with the French Revolutionary
levies of 1793. Since then, compulsion has gradually
been adopted in all European states except Great
Britain, and in all civilized countries except the
U.S.A. and some British Colonies. In America
military compulsion has never been seriously con-
sidered since the Civil War. In Britain, though
it had been advocated as early as 1871 by such
eminent thinkers as John Stuart Mill and Pro-
fessor J. E. Cairnes, and though Lord Roberta's
propaganda had made considerable headway during
the ten years preceding this war, the majority of
political Liberals thought themselves compelled,
on principle, to refuse it all serious hearing. We
therefore find two extremes of thought on this
subject. To Americans at one end of the scale,
compulsory soldiering seems almost as unthinkable
as compulsory religion. 1 Throughout the Continent
1 It seems best to let these words stand as they were written in Dec.
1915, since the subsequent turn of events has emphasized the author's
contention that, for the large majority of thinking men, this question
of compulsory service is at bottom one of military expediency. Many
of the most determined converts to compulsion, during the last two
2 COMPULSORY MILITARY SERVICE
of Europe, on the other hand, the voluntary system
has scarcely more support for the army than for
/^ taxation; and there are practically no opponents
/ of compulsion but those few extremists who
advocate total disarmament. Britain stands (or
stood, before this war) between these two extremes,
but inclining far more to the American than to the
Continental view.
Why this wide divergence, among nations so
nearly equal in civilization, upon one of the most
essential functions of a state ? The Man in the
Street will at once give three reasons for the
British-American exception, which seem to him
conclusive, but which will not bear serious examina-
tion. We reject compulsory service, he will say,
in the name of Freedom, of Democracy, and of
Anglo-Saxon traditions.
But no serious thinker will define freedom, for a
civilized community, as " absence of legal com-
pulsion." The Briton lives under more and stricter
laws than the Bushman ; the main difference is,
that the free man recognizes these laws as just
and beneficent, and therefore has no serious wish
to break them. John Stuart Mill, in his essay On
Liberty, twice specifies military service as a thing
which the civilized state has a right to demand
from any citizen (chaps, i. and iv.). No law can
be combated in the name of civilized liberty, so
years, have been among those who strove hardest to keep out of war,
but who recognize that war, if it must como, demands no half-measures.
INTRODUCTION 3
long as that law tends towards the well-being of
the state and of mankind. Is it beneficial to the
state and to mankind that armies, like taxes, should
be raised by law ? This is the real question,
which the Voluntarist has no more right to beg
than the Compulsionist has. In other words, the
discussion of liberty depends entirely on deeper
questions of justice and world-peace ; and, as a
matter of fact, the fight for liberty has generally
been won with the aid of compulsory levies. 1
Democracy, again, will not serve the objector's
turn. It was the first French Republic which
invented Compulsory Service, and the present
Third Republic reintroduced it, after the Bourbons
and Napoleon III. had falsified the original principle.
The Prussian autocracy followed the French example
slowly and unwillingly, and has become less auto-
cratic, on the whole, since its introduction. The"
one country which did not need to imitate France,
having retained the compulsory principle since the
dawn of history, was Switzerland, then as now the
" laboratory of democratic experiments." It will
presently be seen that, in history, compulsory
service has been the usual note of democracies,
while despots have preferred a paid army. It is
an obviously democratic principle that all necessary s
burdens of the state should be shared, as equally
as possible, among all citizens ; and even those
1 This, and similar historical assertions, will be supported by detailed
evidence in the body of the book.
4 COMPULSOKY M1LITAEY SERVICE
objectors who lay most emphasis on the inequalities
of continental conscription will not attempt to
assert that, on the whole, it is as unequal as our
voluntary Territorial system, under which one man
trains for the sake of eight or nine others who are
often better able to afford the time or the money.
Lastly, it is not really contrary to Anglo-Saxon
traditions. The years 1300-1600, which laid the
foundations of modern England, and carried us
far beyond other Powers in civic and political
liberties, were years during which compulsory ser-
vice was a far greater reality here than elsewhere.
If the Armada had landed on our shores, the
overwhelming majority of the levies sent to meet
the Spaniards would have been compulsorily re-
cruited. Later on, during the long fight for freedom,
our Compulsory Militia system was always looked
upon as a bulwark of national liberties ; and it
survived, in principle, into this century. British
common-law still demands that every man should
come forward when called upon for home defence ;
and it was in virtue of that common-law, upon
which American law is based, that Washington
and Lincoln were able to levy troops by force.
To assert that Compulsory Service is alien to the
Anglo-Saxon spirit, is to ignore all history, and to
talk as if the world had been created when we
ourselves happened to be born.
There is one important distinction, I believe,
which will account for the divergence of American
INTRODUCTION 5
and Continental ideas to choose the two furthest
extremes. Freedom is not the real distinction,
since we find America standing here on the
side of petrified China, and separated by a whole
horizon from Republican France or Switzerland, or
from Radical Australasia and Norway. Secondly,
democracy cannot account for it ; for Compulsory
Service saved the French democracy, and saved,
even in America, what Lincoln called the principle
of " government of the people by the people for
the people." Thirdly, if it were incompatible with
the Anglo-Saxon genius, the great Anglo-Saxon
nations would not have adopted it in every great
national crisis. Freemen, democrats, Anglo-Saxons,
have been obliged by every great war to face a
question which they have often tried to ignore in
times of tranquillity. Is not, this, then the real
difference ? Is it not mainly a question of adapta- -
tion to actual circumstances ? On one point both
parties would agree, that Compulsory Service is
certainly no easy course ; that it is no line of least
resistance ; that nothing but very strong resolu-
tion, or very great pressure, will ever bring a
nation to adopt it. Baron Stoffel, writing from
Berlin in 1868 to impress upon Napoleon III. the
urgent necessity of reverting to the French revolu-
tionary traditions of Compulsory Service, added
sadly : " Like individuals who correct nothing in
their lives, except taught by the stern laws of
experience, Nations never improve institutions
6 COMPULSORY MILITARY SERVICE
which govern them, until compelled to do so by
the rudest trials." Colonel Seely, as Secretary
for War, spoke almost to the same effect in the
House of Commons a year before this present war
(April 11, 1913), admitting that the whole-
hearted acceptance of the compulsory principle
in Switzerland is due to that country's experiences
of disastrous war in the past. 1
Here, then, we have the real clue to the Anglo-
American exception. Britain behind her fleet, and
America still more naturally in her vast and distant
continent, have looked upon themselves as free
from serious danger of invasion. That danger, on
the contrary, has stood constantly and insistently
before the eyes of all Continental peoples. More-
over, of recent years .it has become distantly
visible to our oversea Dominions ; with the result
that Compulsion has already been introduced in
Australia and New Zealand, though these are not
less free, democratic, or Anglo-Saxon than even
the United States to say nothing of China, the
only other great state which holds to the Voluntary
system.
In other words, the deciding factor is the military
problem, the recognized chances of invasion. What-
ever Jbe the social jmd political merite^or demerits
of the Compulsory system^mjtself (and these will
be fully discussed later on), they are subordinate
1 See full quotation in chapter xii. below ; also Stoffel, " Military
Reports," trans. Home (H.M. Stationery Office, 1872), p. 145.
INTRODUCTION 7
to the_main ^ .jguestion jpf^ national security, without
which no_jgongistent social ^advance is pqgaJSleT"
Under Compulsion a nation may progress as
rapidly as France has progressed since 1793 ;
under Voluntarism it may stand still as China has
stood still during this same period. Mr. Asquith,
Lord Haldane, and Colonel Seely, as will be seen
later on, have freely acknowledged in peace-time
that this debate must be decided mainly on military
grounds. No man, therefore, has a right to shut
his ears to the plea for Compulsory Service on
so-called Liberal principles. It is true that Com-
pulsionists are still in the minority among Liberals
here and in America. But, if we get rid of insular
prejudices and take the general opinion of all
democrats in the world, wp sTifl,]! find VolqrLfcari&ts
ni^vp.ry rlftp.jflp.rl fpi'nnn'fy There is no Liberal
principle which permits a man to shut his ears to
the arguments even of a minority ; though too
many so-called Liberals do in fact adopt this
essentially Conservative attitude. But for a
Liberal to stick blindly to his own preconceived
ideas, without considering contrary ideas which
are held even by the majority of his fellow-Liberals,
is an insult alike to truth and to common-sense.
As a Liberal I assert without fear of contradiction
that the refusal of my fellow-Liberals, in the past,
to discuss this question seriously, is answerable for
the fact that so many indefensible falsehoods are
still current. They have been exposed hundreds
8 COMPULSORY MILITARY SERVICE
of times ; but more than half the electorate have
carefully stopped their ears.
I entreat, therefore, all fair-minded readers to
follow me patiently through a brief plea for the
principle upheld by the majority of Liberals in
the world. In a rapid survey of the past we shall
see how strong is the general rule that democracies
have preferred the Compulsory system. Then,
coming to modern times, we shall find that con-
tinental democrats are Compulsorists on principle,
and not (as is often falsely asserted) from mere
opportunism. Then, again, taking the Swiss
Militia as a type, I shall attempt to show its military,
political and social working, and to anticipate the
probable operation of such a system among us.
Lastly, I shall bring arguments to meet the main
objections gathered during sixteen years of public
discussion, beginning from a time when no League
had been formed and when only a few propagan-
dists were working independently from private
conviction. The experience of those sixteen years
has been illuminating. In 1900, newspapers seldom
thought the subject worth discussing, whatever
their political complexion. On the other hand, my
first audience was among working-men in the North,
and was quite sympathetic. Gradually, as the
question forced its way to the front, one class of
papers began to favour it ; their opponents began
to show proportionate disfavour ; and finally the
average working-man, hearing it daily dinned into
INTRODUCTION 9
his ears that the whole thing was a " Tory job/ 5
set his face more and more against it. Now that
party distinctions are to some real extent obliterated,
there is more chance of a fair hearing for both
sides ; but all readers who follow me to the end
will probably admit that many quite indefensible
misstatements have already got a long start, and
are likely to die hard.
CHAPTER I
CONSCRIPTION IN THE ROMAN REPUBLIC
To write history with absolute detachment is
impossible. The historian's task is to select only
significant facts ; and the significance of every fact
depends upon the reader's state of mind. We do
not point out that William the Conqueror was a
year older at the end of 1087 than at the end of
1086, because we trust the reader to see this for
himself. On the other hand, we do emphasize
William's parentage (though we cannot be so
mathematically sure of this as of the other fact),
because it adds something to the reader's previous
knowledge, and helps to interpret certain important
points of William's career and character. Every
history, therefore, must to some extent reflect the
preconceived ideas of both author and reader ;
and we need not be surprised to find even educated
British readers ignorant of historical "facts which
are well known in France, or vice versa. The
connexion of Universal Service with Democracy
would seem to be a case in point. In France,
their close historical connexion is taken for granted ;
,12 -COMPULSORY MILITARY SERVICE
yet to the average Briton this idea comes with a
sense of real surprise. Fifty years ago, it was as
yet unfamiliar to the average Frenchman. When,
in 1870, the new French republic reverted to the
strict compulsory principle, one of the greatest
living French historians was compelled formally
to remind his compatriots that this was in accord-
ance with true republican traditions ; that Roman
freedom had flourished side by side with the com-
pulsory citizen-army, and Roman despotism had
been marked by the steady rise of the professional
soldier. 1 Even educated Frenchmen in 1870, like
Britons of to-day, had been tempted by their
political experience of the last two generations to
look upon a strong army as necessarily inimical to
democratic freedom ; they failed to note that the
size of an army is far less important, in this con-
nexion, than its social quality. With a mere
handful of professional soldiers, Napoleon III. had
overthrown the Second Republic : the defeat of
his professional soldiers was the main factor which
rendered the Third Republic possible. Events are
now compelling us to face these historical facts,
which, forty years ago, were painfully forced upon
the notice of Frenchmen.
This connexion between Democracy and Univer-
sal Service may be clearly traced in Greek history,
though the multiplicity of different states renders
1 Fustel de Coulanges, in the Eevue des Deux Mondes for Nov. 15,
1870.
CONSCRIPTION IN EOMAN REPUBLIC 13
generalization more difficult in this field. Delbriick
gives good reasons for supposing that Marathon
was a victory won by the citizen-levies of a free
democracy over the piofessiona] army of a despot.
Athens, in her literary and artistic prime, relied
upon all her citizens to fight ; more than once the
levee en masse was decreed, and with a thoroughness
beyond that of any modern state. 1 Other states
went upon similar principles. Naturally, as wars
grew more complicated and more distant, the
professional soldier came into greater prominence ;
but the first thoroughly professional army was
formed by the first ruler who made himself despot
of all Greece Philip of Macedon. Alexander and
his equally despotic successors relied upon pro-
fessional armies ; Greece, in the days of her
decline, had lost the principle of the Nation in
Arms.
But Rome supplies an even clearer example ;
we have here a state whose military system we
can trace continuously, and in considerable detail,
for a period of ten centuries. The main features
of this evolution are admirably described in Fustel
de Coulanges's article, and in the first two chapters
of L'Arme'e a travers les Ages, published under the
direction of E. Lavisse (Paris, 1899. 3 f . 50).
The details are given far more fully by Delbriick,
1 H. Delbriick, Oesch. d. Kriegskunst, Berlin, 1900, vol. i. pp. 15-23,
39, 119, 140, 201. Delbriick reckons that, in Periclean Athens, only
7,200 were excused from service out of a male population of 36,000.
Compare W. Riistow, Gesch. d. Infanterie, Gotha, 1857, vol. i. pp. 4, 9, 21.
14 COMPULSORY MILITARY SERVICE
under the article Dilectus in the great Encyclo-
pedia of Classical Antiquities, edited by Pauly and
Wissowa (1903).
Rome, like the Greek states, raised her armies
on the compulsory principle. Livy tells us that
ServiugTullius, about 550 B.C., compelled the citizens
to arm themselves with different degrees of elabor-
ation according to their income ; and that he
imposed no military service at all upon the " pro-
letariate " that is, upon the poorest class, the
men who had nothing. Delbriick, following in the
footsteps of other scholars, gives strong reasons
for believing that Livy is here mistaken, and that
the proletariate were not really freed from military
service, but were used when required for the lowest
duties, which brought with them no right of
suffrage such as the other classes enjoyed. Thus
they bore some, at least, of the labours of war,
and only lacked the corresponding political pri-
vileges. 1 However this may be, there is no doubt
that the proletariate were excused only so far as
they were not actually needed ; and that, in great
crises like the Punic Wars, the Romans armed not
only the poorest classes but even slaves. The
Roman army, therefore, which drove out the
kings and founded the Republic, was essentially
ia citizen-army. In so far as any citizen legally
escaped service, it was only because he did not
enjoy full civic rights ; and, even so, he might
l l. 225-7; 383-4.
CONSCRIPTION IN EOMAN REPUBLIC 15
always be commandeered when the state had
need of him.
This gave a most efficient army so long as the
Romans remained a state of warrior-farmers, like
the Boers of to-day, and so long as they extended
their frontiers only by a gradual advance. But
the longer and more distant campaigns, which
their rivalry with Carthage forced upon them,
broke this organization down. It is true that
the system of citizen-levies enabled the Republic
to wear Hannibal down, just as Republican France,
by the mere superiority of numbers which com-
pulsion gave her, wore down the armies leagued
against her ; and just as Lincoln, when the Draft
Law gave him the numbers he needed, wore down
the Southern States. 1 But Rome's wars against
Carthage, like the French Revolutionary wars,
lasted so long that the citizen-soldier became
a professional. Let us look a little closer into
this.
When Hannibal first invaded Italy, Rome put
into the field about 3 J per cent, of her total popula-
tion that is, the same proportion as Prussia
brought against France in 1870. After the disas-
trous defeat of Cannae (216 B.C.), Rome at once
raised such vast levies that (if we are to believe
Delbriick) she had soon 8j per cent, in arms
1 We must, of course, take into account also the enormous services
rendered to Home by her tributary states. But for the fact that she
raised levies from free subject-states, as from her own, she would
probably never have worn Hannibal down.
16 COMPULSORY MILITARY SERVICE
indeed, if we count the losses already suffered, she
had by this time armed 9j per cent, of her total
population, or nearly the proportion which Ger-
many has probably armed to-day. 1 This effort
seems to have been kept at its full height for four
years, and to have relaxed only gradually in pro-
portion as the military outlook grew brighter ; an
effort perhaps unexampled in history. These men
had hoped to come back to their farms ; but, at the
very end of the war, we find that the backbone
of the Roman legions was still formed by men
enlisted fourteen years before, after Cannae ; just
as Napoleon's Old Guard consisted largely of
peasants who had joined in 1793. The armies were
led no longer only by amateur citizen generals,
but by Scipio Africanus, a man whose command
had been unconstitutionally prolonged from year
to year, who had become a complete professional
soldier, and of whom old republicans complained
that he " behaved like a king." This process went
on at an accelerated pace. The State, accepting
still wider military responsibilities as time went on,
drifted more and more in the direction of the pro-
fessional army, until Marius inaugurated a new
1 Delbriick, p 309. This levy, in figures of present British population,
would be equivalent to our arming nearly 4 J million out of our 45 million
souls. Professor J. S. Reid would very considerably reduce these
figures, emphasizing the fact that, by reading between the lines of
historians like Polybius, we can see that many citizens did in fact escape
service. But the most sceptical critic would not dispute the facts that (1)
every citizen's legal liability to serve was fully recognized, and (2) Rome
did, in fact, succeed in raising such numbers as to wear Hannibal down.
CONSCRIPTION IN ROMAN REPUBLIC 17
epoch by emphasizing and stereotyping a movement
which had begun long before his time. 1
How far the change had already begun, and how
far it was due to the sole initiative of Marius, need
not concern us here. The essential fact is that
Marius, from 107 B.C. onwards, ignored for recruiting
purposes all remaining distinctions between the
proletariate and the men of fuller citizenship
distinctions which had already been much weakened
by the lowering of the property qualification. At
the same time, he laid more stress on voluntary
recruiting, and offered terms which made soldiering
a really advantageous business to an adventurous
man of the poorer class. These changes rapidly
hastened the evolution from a citizen-militia into
a long-service professional army. Military service
was left more and more to the poor man, who
adopted it as his profession and served for as long
as he was fit for service. This system diminished
the necessity of resorting to the law of compulsion ;
which, however, was not formally abolished.
Moreover, as time went on, it made it easy for the
richer man to escape by procuring a substitute.
The Roman army, therefore, soon settled down into
the regular type to which all professional armies
tend to conform. The privates were mainly of
the poorest class, the officers almost entirely of
the upper or upper middle ; and the lower middle
class was very feebly represented. The real back-
1 Delbruck, 332-3, 338, 375-81.
B
18 COMPULSORY MILITARY SERVICE
bone of the army was the centurion the high-class
veteran who had risen from the ranks. As Del-
briick puts it (p. 394) :
" the nearest analogy to the army of the world-conquer-
ing Roman republic may be found in the English army
of the 18th century. The higher officers spring from
the aristocracy, and pass through a brief interval of
training to begin their career as staff-officers : Wellington
was Lieutenant-Colonel at 24. The mass of the army
is voluntarily recruited, and is kept together by the
strictest discipline ; yet the basis is national and English.
The foreigners, who are imported in large numbers to fill
the ranks, form separate units. The difference between
this and the Roman army lies in the subaltern officers,
who in England were recruited from 'gentlemen,' i.e.
the poorer aristocracy and the upper middle class, and who
were strictly separated from the non-commissioned officers ;
whereas the Roman Centurion was both subaltern and
non-commissioned officer." l
This army was irresistible against Rome's enemies,
but irresistible also at home.
" These men, soldiers by choice, soldiers by trade, were
citizens only in name. . . . They cared little for public
liberties, laws, or constitutional authorities ; they knew
only their general, that is, the man who gave them glory
and gain . . . Sylla and Marius, Caesar and Pompey,
Octavius and Antony, fought one after another for absolute
power in the state ; and the Republic belonged to the men
who conquered in battle. It was through the army that
Sylla and Caesar made themselves dictators ; through the
army that Octavius founded the Empire. No citizen-
1 Later on, however, the commands above centurion's rank were
increasingly given to men who had served in the lower grades.
CONSCKIPTION IN ROMAN REPUBLIC 19
militia would have lent itself to such a revolution as
this. For such a stroke, it needed a soldiery who had
lost all notion of civil life and who stood outside civil
society." l
A Nation in Arms had formerly overthrown the
kings ; professional armies now overthrow the
Republic.
1 UArmee a travers les Ages, i. 38-9.
CHAPTER II
VOLUNTARISM IN THE ROMAN EMPIRE
No doubt this soldier-rule was not only a cause of
decay to Roman liberties, but also the symptom
of a decadence which had already begun. Marius's
reconstitution had been partly or perhaps even
mainly conditioned by the ruin of the peasant
proprietors, who had suffered more than any other
class through the slaughter, the ravage of farms,
and the interruption of work occasioned by the
long Punic Wars. Then, again, in proportion as
Rome expanded by conquest, and as trade or slave-
cultivation were found increasingly profitable, the
Marian system of recruiting became more and more
convenient. To the capitalist, who tilled huge
estates with thousands of slaves, and to the small
holder, for whom this larger scale of competition
spelt economic ruin, the professional army-system
was as convenient as to the ambitious soldier of
fortune. The capitalist here escaped service al-
together, and the peasant found here a living wage.
Marius, we must remember, was himself the son of ;
a peasant-farmer ; and, so far as he may be said
VOLUNTARISM IN ROMAN EMPIRE 21
to have transformed the Roman militia into a
professional army, we may trace his motives almost
as clearly to social as to military insight.
But (as Appian remarked, looking back upon the
Civil Wars from the second century A.IX) in this
New Model Army the soldier was no longer a
citizen, but a tool. A couple of generations later,
Herodian explained why the early emperors made
so little use of their common-law right of compul-
sory enlistment for the army ; such a measure (he
wrote) would have been too democratic to suit
their policy (ii. II). 1
" For so long as the Roman State had been a democracy,"
writes Herodian, " all the Italians were armed ; but from
the time when Augustus became sole ruler, he relieved
the Italians of this burden and disarmed them, pushing
camps and garrisons nearer to the frontier of the Empire,
and establishing hired troops at fixed rates of pay."
This policy marked the Empire in an increasing
degree from generation to generation. After the
disastrous defeat of Varus, Augustus fell back for
a moment upon compulsory recruiting to fill his
shattered legions ; but such instances become
rarer and rarer. Tiberius, in 23 A.D., complained
of the low status and unruliness of the voluntary
soldiers, and threatened measures of conscription,
but apparently never ventured to carry them out.
Italy itself was free from conscription, except for
a sort of " garde nationale " in a very few pro-
1 Compare the King of Prussia's reasons in 1794, p. 92 here below.
22 COMPULSORY MILITARY SERVICE
vinces. The less favoured provinces were some-
times called upon for compulsory levies ; but even
this became rarer and rarer. In later imperial
times, the army may be looked upon as altogether
professional. It was not that the sources of
conscription were dried up : Seeley, in his well-
known description of the decay of Rome, is some-
what misleading on this point. Seeck shows
conclusively that the most peaceful and prosperous
provinces were those which supplied fewest soldiers.
In about 50 A.D., when there were six million
able-bodied citizens in the Empire, the army
numbered less than 350,000 men, many of whom
were not citizens. The real reason of this was
partly the growing disinclination of citizens for a
military life ; and still more, perhaps, the fact that
this harmonized with the Emperor's political
objections to a citizen army. To arm a force
without imperial permission was treason, and the
permission was rarely given. The Emperor took
on himself the maintenance of public order, and
carried out the duty very badly, on the whole.
The avoidance of service by self-mutilation, to
which Seeley alludes, is recorded only of these
imperial days when compulsory enrolment was
already the exception. The Empire rapidly settled
down into the condition in which it remained for
about three centuries. The vast mass of citizens
knew nothing of war, except that they were taxed
to hire other men to fight for them on the frontiers.
VOLUNTARISM IN ROMAN EMPIRE 23
j Becoming thus unwarlike, they did not permanently
gain either in political liberty, in mental culture,
or in worldly fortune. They were content to live
in unquestioning obedience to a series of despotic
rulers. Arts, sciences, and literature decayed, or
marked time at best ; and the centralized govern-
ment gradually created a vicious fiscal system
which ground the lower middle class, the healthiest
and most laborious factor in the state, to powder.
And this state of things seems to have been deliber-
ately encouraged by the Emperors. Astute rulers
caught at it as an obvious way of disarming popular
resistance, while it lulled the people into a sense
of security and material prosperity. It is probable
that Roman society was not ripe for real self-
government over so vast a tract of territory ; but
it is certain that the experiment was never tried.
The Emperor was tempted to centralize all the
powers of the State, and his command of the pro-
fessional army rendered this despotism easy enough.
After a few generations of this process, all real
political life was dead : the Emperors had made
a wilderness and called it Peace. And the mass
of the people, it must be noted, wished to have it
so ; they were content to lose the higher privileges
of citizenship, so long as they were freed from its
heaviest burdens. It so obviously suited the
Emperors to humour this mood, that we scarcely
needed Herodian's reminder to detect conscious
policy in this steady drift away from all idea of a
24 COMPULSORY MILITARY SERVICE
Nation in Arms. Of the drift itself, there can be
no doubt whatever. Before the final breakdown
of the Empire, the mass of the population were
altogether estranged from the army, and recruiting
was done mainly in the frontier provinces. More-
over, the vestiges of legal compulsion which still
survived were of the most arbitrary and odious
kind ; under this despotism, nothing was left but
the dregs of what had once been a real democratic
system. 1 In virtue of a law which bound many
citizens to their fathers' trades, and which thus
reduced Roman society not only to a class-system,
but even to a caste-system, soldiers' sons were
forced into the army. Again, military service was
bound up with certain holdings of land ; but this
was not necessarily personal service : the holder
had simply to produce a fit man, or, by way of
punishment (if he had been caught in the attempt
to palm off a useless man upon the State), three
fit men. A law of 382 A.D., punishing those who
produced other men's slaves as recruits, proves
fairly conclusively that, by this time, it was per-
missible to produce one's own slave. 2 This gan-
grene of substitution had been an almost inevitable
product of the Marian system. We are far, by
this time, from the ancient law which treated
1 Pauly-Wissowa, col. 635.
2 Ibid. col. 600. It is true that the Republic had no efficient organi-
zation, in the modern sense, for enforcing the law of compulsory service ;
but this was the case with other equally important laws, and must
always be so in a comparatively rudimentary state of society.
VOLUNTARISM IN EOMAN EMPIRE 25
evasion of military service as sacrilege. Among
all the early Italian tribes, punctual obedience to
the order of mobilization had been secured by the
so-called lex sacrata, by which the defaulter was
given over, as god-accursed, to outlawry and death.
The Romans of the middle Republic, though they
permitted no substitution, were by some degrees
more lenient to the defaulter. He was sometimes
scourged or imprisoned, or even sold into slavery ;
but the most frequent punishment seems to have
been a heavy fine, with loss of civic rights. In
times of great emergency, when the State had its
hands full, there was difficulty in enforcing the
law absolutely ; Polybius shows us that, during
the Second Punic War, the levies cannot have
produced their full theoretical complement. During
the later days of the Republic, it seems to have
become common for those who could afford it, if
taken by the conscription, to buy themselves off.
A law of the Middle Empire says in so many words
"the numbers are mainly made up by voluntary
enlistment." * Moreover, the standard was steadily
lowered. The legion, the "line," was at first
recruited only from the Roman State in its narrower
sense ; and, of Romans, from those alone who had
" a stake in the country." Marius, as we have
seen, first admitted the proletariate. Presently
Italians of all kinds were admitted : then pro-
1 Pauly-Wissowa, pp.600, 611, 616; Digest, xlix. 16. 4. 10, " plerum-
que voluntario milite numeri supplentur."
26 COMPULSORY MILITARY SERVICE
vincials ; and finally, even barbarians. These
last, by a legal fiction, received the citizenship on
their enlistment, by way of maintaining the prin-
ciple that the legionary must be a citizen of the
Empire. Therefore, during the later generations
of Imperial Rome, the armies were to a great
extent recruited from foreign sources, quite apart
from the system by which whole barbarian tribes
had been admitted into the Empire on condition
of rendering military service as frontiersmen. As
Seeck puts it, there was often no difference
between the legionaries and the auxiliary troops,
except that the former received the citizenship
upon enlistment, and the latter only when
they had served their time and earned their
pension.
This steady decline of the soldier in social status,
with the odious and arbitrary character of such
compulsory enlistment as still survived, produced
their natural results. Some masters, as we have
seen, were bound to produce one or more serfs as
recruits ; if the serf cut off his thumb to avoid the
service, the master was to be fined for permitting
this mutilation. Similar difficulties hindered the
strictest enforcement of the law which bound the
soldier's son to his father's trade. Though substitu-
tion was here allowed, and though there were punish-
ments for the self-mutilator, it became necessary at
last to punish his father also. 1 These difficulties were
1 Pauly-Wissowa, pp. 633-4.
VOLUNTARISM IN ROMAN EMPIRE 27
inevitable in a State which had abandoned all that
was honourable in the compulsory principle, and
had retained only what was odious in it. Service
had long ceased to be the duty and privilege of all
citizens ; it had become an exceptional, arbitrary,
and, therefore, loathsome burden, even worse than
our pressgang of 150 years ago. The Nation in
Arms was gone ; all that remained was the Blood
Tax. This necessarily told upon the whole status
of the army, with the result that the recruiting
problem became more and more acute, and could
only be solved by the wholesale admission of men
who were scarcely less truly foreigners than the
very foreigners against whom they were hired to
fight. The army had become estranged from the
nation. The military writer Vegetius complained,
somewhere about 385 A.D., "it is not that martial
ardour has decayed in the men themselves, but the
carelessness bred of long peace has turned their
minds partly to ease and enjoyments, partly to
civil duties " ; and again, " the long peace has
bred careless methods of recruiting." 1 The army,
as Seeck says, was "barbarized"; in the last days of
the Empire even the highest commands were some-
times given to non-Romans, or to sons of non-
Romans.
"The contest with barbarism was carried on by the
help of barbarian soldiers. It must have been because
the Empire could not furnish soldiers for its own defence,
1 Pauly-Wissowa, pp. 629-630.
28 COMPULSORY MILITARY SERVICE
that it was driven to the strange expedient of turning
its enemies and plunderers into its defenders. Yet on
these scarcely disguised enemies it came to depend so
exclusively that in the end the Western Empire was
destroyed, not by the hostile army, but by its own/'
Grievously as the Empire sinned against political
liberty, it sinned almost as grievously against the
laws of nature. The citizen in his daily life, and
the government in its methods of recruiting, were
equally careless of the breed. The comparatively
stationary character of the population, during all
those centuries, seems far less traceable to wars and
epidemics than to the dislike of marriage and the
practice of infanticide. Even in spite of heavy
state bounties for fatherhood, and heavy taxes on
the unmarried, the evil showed no abatement.
" Marriage with us is a pleasure for which a man
must be content to pay ; with the Romans [of the
Empire] it was an excellent pecuniary investment,
but an intolerably disagreeable one." 2 The outside
barbarians, who lived in almost perpetual warfare,
seem rather to have multiplied than to have
dwindled. Yet there seems to have been no
principle of increase within the Empire, taking
the average all round, though its losses in war
1 J. R. Seeley, " Roman Imperialism " (Macmillan's Magazine, 1869,
p. 287 ; reprinted in Lectures and Addresses, 1870, p. 48). In the strictest
sense, it may be incorrect to say " could not furnish soldiers," for there
is no evidence that the Empire had ever made a serious effort to organize
for war the population of the inner and more prosperous provinces.
2 Ibid. p. 51. We must remember, of course, that this applies
mainly to the well-to-do.
VOLUNTAKISM IN EOMAN EMPIRE 29
must have amounted to only a very trifling per-
centage of the total population.
We cannot, however, judge these things by
percentages alone. A voluntary system of enlist-
ment is essentially more dysgenic than a compulsory
system ; that is now admitted by all serious
students of eugenics. 1 The Roman Imperial sys-
tem segregated, and to a considerable extent
sterilized, the most adventurous elements of the
population. From Marius onwards, the soldier
served for as long as his health and strength made
him a useful unit in the army. If he came back
at all to enjoy the little farm with which the State
pensioned him, it was at an age or in a condition
very unfavourable for founding an average family.
Under the later Empire his home, such as it was,
was generally somewhere on the frontier. Thus,
during the earlier centuries of voluntary enlistment,
hundreds of thousands of the sturdiest and most
adventurous left their homes, and came back, if at
all, to far less than their proper share of citizenship
and fatherhood. If, during the later Empire, this
process of exhaustion became less rapid and less
1 It has been emphasized lately, from different points of view, by
Prof. J. A. Thomson (Eugenics Review, Ap. 1915), by the Editor of the
Eugenics Review (Oct. 1915, p. 201) and by Sir Ronald Ross (Science
Progress, Jan. 1914, p. 591, and Times, Sept. 30, 1914). We must
doubtless beware of exaggerating this " Ausrottung der Besten " in
the Roman Empire, remembering that, up to at least the middle of the
third century A.D., there was no attempt to enlist from the peaceful
provinces except in a very fragmentary fashion ; after that, great masses
were tied and bound in the chains of the civil system, and the area open
for recruitment was very narrow.
30 COMPULSORY MILITARY SERVICE
complete, it was only because the heart of the Empire
was already unsound ; because it could not, or, in a
political sense, would not, supply the men. The
recruiting system, so far as it affected Roman
society at all, must have done much to " breed
out " some of the most virile qualities ; it must
have eliminated from the population, out of
all proportion, an element restless, perhaps, but
vigorous and capable of excellent work under good
direction.
Even the reader who has least belief in the
significance of anything which happened before he
himself was born, may have some patience with
this brief study in Roman history, for it is also a
study in the same human nature which we see
around us everywhere to-day. We, like the Romans,
are apt to forget that all is not won when we have
got rid of a bad thing ; that we have still to prevent
some worse abuse from taking the old one's place ;
and that this new task may prove harder than the
first. Immanuel Kant, the greatest man who has
espoused the pacificist cause in modern times,
frankly confessed that this tendency which we have
here traced in Rome has hitherto been the general
experience of the human race. " Long peace
generally gives the predominance to the mere
commercial spirit, with its concomitant failings of
base selfishness, cowardice, and effeminacy, and
thus tends to debase the national mind." Again,
" Look at China, which . . . has no powerful enemy
VOLUNTARISM IN ROMAN EMPIRE 31
to fear, and which has therefore lost every vestige
of freedom." 1
The Roman example, therefore, is not merely a
fossil fished up from some dead quarry of the past.
It is a study in human nature, in tendencies which
exist to-day as they existed 2,000 years ago. Rome
shows these at work over a period of many centuries,
on the greatest scale recorded in history ; and
therefore her example is in some respects the most
significant of all to us. It shows most clearly in
practice, what we might have anticipated in theory,
that a nation which avoids the burden of national
defence is not mainly actuated by moral reasons
that military responsibilities, if truly national, are
not degrading, but, on the whole, ennobling and,
therefore, that immediate relief from military
burdens, if bought at the price of ignoring higher
rights and duties, must in the long run work towards
national decay.
1 " Critique of the Aesthetic Judgment " (Collected Works, ed. Harten-
stein, 1867, vol. v. p. 270). The second quotation is given by Dietrich
in his Kant und Rousseau, p. 140. We must not, of course, infer from
this that peace may not be made, some day, to develop better than
war even those virtues which we prize most in the warrior. But we
must face the fact that, hitherto, the problem has not been solved,
and that J. S. Mill was right when he pointed out that the higher organi-
zation of peace had still a great deal to learn .from military discipline
and self-sacrifice.
CHAPTER III
ITALY, FLANDEKS, FRANCE AND ENGLAND
THE Roman example is in no way exceptional ; a
similar lesson is taught by the history of other
countries, both in ancient and in modern times. It
seems impossible to quote the case of any single coun-
try which, having adopted Universal Service, has
thenceforth found itself less free politically than in its
voluntarist or semi-voluntarist days. On the other
hand, history abounds with striking examples of the
contrary process ; and, quite apart from the obvious
tendencies of human nature insisted upon at the
end of last chapter, this historical evidence throws
a very heavy burden of proof on those who would
contend that, though the despot and the mercenary
have commonly gone hand in hand, there is no
real connexion between them. Indeed, our op-
ponents would have to prove even more than this.
According to their theory, voluntarism in the army,
as in other departments of state, is the note of a
free country. They have therefore to prove that,
in every case, the despot has not only happened to
choose a system which was actually disadvan-
ITALY 33
tageous to his despotism, but also (by a still morfe
curious and unexpected stroke of luck) has managed
to carry out his evil purpose of enslaving the people,
even though the machinery which he chose for
effecting this was really, in its own nature, an
engine of popular freedom ! I am not aware that
anybody has attempted any such proof. On the
contrary, this strange thesis is generally main-
tained by mere dogmatic assertions, the very tenor
of which shows that the writers have read neither
Mill on Liberty, nor the well-known pleas of foreign
democrats for a universal militia-system.
In the city-republics of medieval Italy, there was
a law of universal service in the citizen-militia. It
was these levies who won liberty for the Lombard
communes at Legnano, in 1176 ; the distinction
of a city like Milan was that " artisans, whom the
military landholders contemned, acquired and
deserved the right of bearing arms for their own
and the public defence." l Here, as in ancient
Athens, every able-bodied man was called out at
once at the time of national crisis. As a contem-
porary chronicler tells us of the war between two
of these cities in 1284 : " The Pisans ordained that
none betwixt the ages of 20 and 60 years should
stay at home ; and the Genoese had ordained that
none of their citizens should stay at home betwixt
the ages of 18 and 70, but that all must go to fight." 2
1 Hallam, Middle Ages, chap. iii. pt. 1.
2 Salimbene, M. 0. H. Scriptt. xxxii. p. 215.
34 COMPULSOKY MILITAEY SERVICE
Levies of this kind, however, are better for de-
fensive than for offensive warfare ; and the
intestine quarrels of these Italian cities threw
them at last into the hands of the despot and the
mercenary. 1
In 1200, the constitutions of these North Italian
communes approached more nearly to pure demo-
cracy than any other constitutions in Europe, and
their military power depended almost entirely on
the compulsory citizen-levy. A century later,
these cities were ruled, almost without exception,
by despots ; and there is no exception, I believe,
to the rule that these despots governed by means
of paid standing armies " the usual policy of an
absolute government," as Hallam calls it. 2 In
Rome, the least free politically of all the great towns,
the militia was never a success : it was reconsti-
tuted at the republican revival of 1356, but dis-
appeared soon after the abolition of these free
institutions in 1362. In Florence, on the other
hand, by the popular reconstitution of 1250, " the
people . . . was now organized on a military footing
. . . These towns and country companies com-
bined, formed a united popular militia, ready for
action at any moment, either against foreign foes
1 Extreme militarists on the one hand, and extreme pacificists on
the other, are fond of denying that any distinction can be drawn between
the offensive and the defensive in warfare. I try to show in a later
chapter that this denial rests upon a confusion of thought : meanwhile
I assume, with most other writers, that the distinction is not only real,
but vitally important.
2 L.c. pt. 2.
FLANDERS 35
or to curb patrician tyranny at home." 1 These
armed men numbered, according to Giovanni Villani,
100,000 in 1312. By 1351, however, Florence had
begun to follow the example of the other Italian
cities ; Matteo Villani, describing her war with
the Archbishop of Milan, boasts of the ordinary
citizen's unconcern. He writes (lib. ii. cap. 20),
" Though the enemy had so great a host close by
at Mugello, the Florentines seemed to care little
for all this ; within the city, every man went about
his merchandize or his handicraft without bearing
any sort of arms." A century later, the Florentine
Republic had practically become a despotism under
Cosimo de Medici, who laid the foundation of his
power by an alliance with the greatest mercenary
leader of his time, Francesco Sforza.
We find a similar process in the great cities of
the Low Countries Ghent, Bruges, Ypres, etc.
It may be traced clearly enough in the first two
volumes of Pirenne's admirable Histoire de Belgique
(Brussels, 1902). The civic militias which saved
Flanders from French despotism at the beginning
of the fourteenth century were, as Pirenne points
out, the forerunners of that levee en masse which,
centuries later, saved the French Revolution. But
towards the end of that same century, the Counts
of Flanders began to break down the civic liberties
by astute diplomacy. The citizen-militias decayed;
1 P. Villari, The Two First Centuries of Florentine History, London,
1901, p. 189.
36 COMPULSOEY MILITARY SERVICE
in 1411 the Count mobilized them, but found that
they gave him little help in his wars, while they
refused to disband again until they had wrung from
him certain political concessions. He took care
not to call out the militia again ; and, by 1471,
Flanders had a standing professional army of 10,000
men, even larger in proportion than those of the
Great Powers. By that time, in spite of a great
deal of local self-government in the towns, the
country in general was subjected to a monarchical
government modelled upon that of contemporary
France (vol. i. pp. 297, 393; ii. 327, 345, 376).
We cannot say, of course, that the decay of civic
liberties is directly traceable to the dfecay of the
civic militias. But, on the other hand, it seems
impossible to avoid the conclusion that the same
causes which contributed to the one process, con-
tributed also to the other : here, as so often else-
where, the despot and the professional soldier appear
hand in hand.
Most instructive of all, however, is the contrast
between French and English policy and develop-
ment during the last six centuries. It was a French
historian who first pointed out that, six centuries
ago, the most strictly conscripted country was the
one which now knows least of compulsory service. 1
The English citizen-militia was better organized,
and more frequently used, than any similar force
in Europe, except the republican militias of the
1 Simeon Luce, Bertrand du Guesclin, chap. vi.
FRANCE AND ENGLAND 37
Swiss Cantons and of Lombardy, and the almost
equally democratic militias of the Low Countries.
The Saxon Fyrd (as the militia was then called)
nearly beat William off at Hastings ; and its subse-
quent development cannot be better sketched than
in a series of brief extracts from Professor Tout's
article in the Dictionary of English History, pp.
730-1.
" The history of the national militia subsequently
to the Conquest strongly illustrates the continuity of
English constitutional development. William I. exacted
from every freeman the old national oath to join
in defending the king, his lands and his honour both at
home and beyond sea. In 1073 the fyrd took a pro-
minent share in the conquest of Maine. William II.
cheated the fyrd out of the ten shillings a-piece which
the shires had given them for their maintenance. Yet
it was always faithful to the crown in its struggle against
the feudalists. The defeat of Robert of Belesme, the
repulse of David of Scotland at Northallerton, the sup-
pression of the feudal revolt of 1173, were largely due to
its valour and patriotism. . . . Henry II., while relying for
foreign service mainly on mercenaries paid for by the
scut ages of the barons, trusted to the fyrd for home defence.
His Assize of Arms (1181) revived and reorganized that
ancient body, and devised an excellent machinery for
compelling every citizen to possess the arms appropriate
to his station in life. The increased dread of mercenaries,
through their misuse by John, and their attempts to control
the destinies of the kingdom during his son's minority,
gave an increased importance to the re-issue of the Assize
of Arms by Henry III., in close connection with the system
of Watch and Ward. In the Statute of Winchester,
38 COMPULSORY MILITARY SERVICE
Edward I. (1285) still further developed the same system
which a series of later measures of Henry IV., Philip and
Mary, and James I., has brought down to our own days.
. . . The ' train bands ' of the seventeenth century, which
the Act of James I. substituted for the mediaeval system,
though in a sense the continuation of the fyrd, were also
largely of voluntary origin. The difficulties caused by the
militia question in 1642, between Charles I. and his Parlia-
ment, and the prominent part taken by the train bands
in the Great Rebellion, rendered it necessary for the Restora-
tion Parliament to reorganize the national forces, and
reconstitute the militia under the headship of the crown.
Up to 1757 this force was, however, quite neglected, when
the absence of the regular army on the Continent caused
it to be revived as a local organization for internal defence.
Its importance as a recruiting-ground for the army was
also a great reason for its revival. Under George III. and
Victoria a series of Acts of Parliament have modified the
militia laws."
It was under the first three Edwards that our
militia reached its highest organization, as com-
pared with those of other countries. Edward I.
in his Welsh and Scotch wars, had learned the value
of the long-bow and the foot-soldier : and we have
documentary evidence that the Statute of Win-
chester was far more thoroughly carried out than
the average of medieval laws. At Norwich, for
instance, there exist originals or summaries of nine
different " views " of the militia between 1355 and
1370. 1 These show that the city mustered 1,000
1 See W. Hudson, " Norwich Militia in the Fourteenth Century " (Nor-
folk and Norwich Arch. Soc. vol. xiv. p. 263), and especially the same
author's Records of the City of Norwich, vol. i. pp. cxli ff . and ii. p. cxxii.
FRANCE AND ENGLAND 39
armed men. Mr. Hudson, whose knowledge of
medieval Norwich is unrivalled, doubts whether
the total population, at this time, could have ex-
ceeded 8,000 ; in that case the Statute must have
been worked with a thoroughness beyond that of
any modern conscription. Even if we take the
extreme limit consistent with known facts, and
estimate the population at 10,000, we still get a
proportion which, on the basis of our last census,
would enable us to muster 4,500,000 men in modern
Britain. And the Government did all it could to
secure efficiency as well as numbers. Edward I.
was a great military organizer, and his work was
carried on by his grandson. Edward III. was thus
able to raise a strong force of infantry composed of
men whose income fell short of 15 a year. The
sturdiest served as knife-men, and the most skilful
formed his redoubtable archery. The long-bow was
a quick-firing arm as compared with the cross-
bow. The English weapon was of yew, more than
5 ft. long, so light and easily handled that the archer
could shoot three arrows while the crossbow-man
shot one single bolt. The knife-men were armed
with a pointed cutlass, a sort of sword-bayonet,
with which they could either cut, or thrust between
the joints of the armour. Such was the infantry
to which the English armies of the fourteenth cen-
The calculation of only 5,000 for the Norwich population, in this latter
passage, is apparently by Mr. Tingey ; if this were correct, it would
greatly strengthen my contention ; but I cannot help suspecting that
Mr. Tingey takes too low a figure.
40 COMPULSORY MILITARY SERVICE
tury owed their main strength. Edward III. gave
it a business-like training. He frequently forbade
such knightly exercises as jousts and tourneys ;
those courtly competitions were hampered by con-
ventions which paralyzed all initiative in actual
warfare. " It was advised and determined " (writes
Froissart), " that all games should be forbidden,
upon pain of death, save only the practice of the
long-bow ; and that all bowyers and fletchers
should be freed and quit of all their debts." In
the islands and along the coasts, " it was ordained
that the soldiers and armed men should teach and
accustom their children to handle arms and to
draw the bow." Lastly, here is a no less practical
provision : " Moreover, it was ordained and deter-
mined that all lords, barons, knights and sub-
stantial men of the good towns should take care
and diligence to teach their children the French
tongue, whereby they might be the more ready and
more serviceable in war." 1
Nor did Edward hesitate to make full use of the
men thus trained. The London city documents,
as the fullest existing, give us the best idea of the
extent to which men were levied for the French
wars. Between 1337 and 1355, London was called
upon for more than 2,500 men ; this in terms of
modern population, would mean a levy of some-
thing like 300,000 from London alone. The town
archives of Norwich and Lynn show similar evi-
1 Lavisse, Hist, de France, t. iv. pt. ii. p. 31.
FRANCE AND ENGLAND 41
dence ; and the Berkeley papers show how much
was required from the county of Gloucester. 1 Al-
though the full complement was not always forth-
coming, the numbers actually conscripted were
evidently very great. In the later stages of the
war, the citizens generally paid money instead,
and the armies were raised by indenture, on the
voluntary system. But, even then, it was of de-
cisive importance that the English volunteers were
drawn from a population accustomed, after the
rough fashion of that day, to some sort of discipline
and some sort of readiness in self-defence. England
in those days (as Luce puts it), " acted on the
principle of the Nation in Arms."
In France, meanwhile, things were very different.
There was, of course, a theory, everywhere recog-
nized in the past, that all men might be called upon
to fight if necessary. But there was no organized
militia for the whole country, like our fyrd ; there was
no Nation in Arms. Even the town militias played
a very secondary part, except that they did occa-
sional good work in pure self-defence behind their
own ramparts. Before the end of the thirteenth
century, there began " a transformation of military
service into a tax paid to the king. The communes
and chartered towns gave money instead of sending
their armed men ; a fact which gradually brought
about a radical change in the military and financial
1 These figures are given far more fully in my Chaucer and Ms England,
2nd ed. pp. 238 ff, and in my article on " Our Conscripts at Crecy "
in the Nineteenth Century and After for Feb. 1909.
42 COMPULSORY MILITARY SERVICE
organization of the monarchy." 1 This system
was regularized by an act of 1317, which definitely
consecrated vicarious service. Thus,
"whilst the King of England was extending obligatory
service to his whole nation, his rival of France, after
seeming at first to follow the same course, turned com-
pletely aside towards the end of his reign. Thanks to the
principle laid down by Philippe le Bel, that, in any extreme
crisis, every Frenchman ought to bear arms, but those
who could not or would not serve might get off with a
money-payment, whenever the French kings were in press-
ing need of money during the first half of the 14th century
they commanded a general levy redeemable by money
or, in other words, they imposed a war-tax. Thus Philippe
de Valois, in 1337 and 1338, 1347 and 1348, proclaimed
a general levy for defence of the kingdom ; but we must
not blink the fact that these decrees chiefly aimed at,
and chiefly resulted in, filling the treasury. In all the
deeds by which the towns granted subsidies during this
reign, it is stipulated that the citizens shall be dispensed
from military service, except in the case of the arriere-ban."
The first obvious advantage of the English system
was to give us the steady supply of numbers which
alone made it possible to maintain the war. Prance,
in those days, had a population of 20 million or
more, with about 300,000 in Paris alone. Eng-
land had only about 4 million, and London perhaps
1 A. Luchaire, Les Communes Franqaises, 1890, pp. 188, 189.
* S. Luce, Bertrand du Guesclin, p. 132. The arriere-ban was, in
modern German terms, the calling out of the Landsturm ; for instance,
at the battle of Crecy there appeared citizen militias from the neigh-
bouring towns of Abbeville, St.-Riquier, Rouen and Beauvais. They
arrived a day late, and were cut to pieces.
FRANCE AND ENGLAND 43
40,000 or 50,000.* Even when we make all allow-
ance for the fact that part of S.W. France was then
more or less under English rule, this numerical
disproportion ought to have been overwhelming.
Nearly all our main battles, as it was, were fought
at a great numerical disadvantage ; and, if France
had kept in the field anything like our proportion
of total population, we should have been worn
down in a very few years.
A second and even greater advantage of the
English system came to reinforce us on the frequent
occasions when, even with our utmost efforts, we
found ourselves outnumbered. The whole English
nation was associated with the army : therefore
we had a businesslike army. Not only did Edward
III. lay small stress on tournaments, and often
forbid them altogether, but he definitely conducted
the war on business principles, as opposed to the
aristocratic conventions of chivalry. In the Crecy
campaign, when he had pushed even to the suburbs
of Paris, he found himself with a dwindling and
ill-fed army, far from his base, and confronted now
by an overwhelming force of French. But Philip,
instead of attacking at once, sent Edward a knightly
challenge in due form, offering him the choice of
two different fields to fight in, and of four days
during the coming week. Edward amused the
French envoy with a feint, rapidly repaired the
1 E. Lavisse, Hist, de France, t. iv. pt. ii. p. 20 Social England
(illustrated edition), vol. ii. p. 323.
44 COMPULSORY MILITARY SERVICE
broken bridge of Poissy, and gained so long a start
on the way home that Philip caught him up only
10 days later, and under far less advantageous
circumstances, at Crecy. This is only one instance
out of many. Promotion in the English army went
not merely by feudal precedence, as in the French.
Our tactics were the novel and effective tactics
forced upon Edward I. by long experience in small
wars ; while the French either clung to traditional
methods, or (as at Poitiers) imitated us with so
little discernment of circumstances that their new
error was worse than the old. Finally, the longbow
gave us the same advantage which the breech-loader
gave to the Prussians against the Austrian muzzle-
loaders in 1866. Nothing might seem easier than
for the French to adopt this arm at once ; but a
nearer view of the facts will show that our super-
iority here was rooted in the peculiarity of our
national life. It took many years to form a first-
rate archer, and thoroughly efficient archery pre-
supposed a Nation in Arms. Bishop Latimer shows
us this in one of his delightful autobiographical
passages (sixth sermon before King Edward VI.) :
" In my time my poor father was as diligent to teach me
to shoot, as to learn me any other thing ; and so I think
other men did their children ; he taught me how to draw,
how to lay my body in my bow, and not to draw with
strength of arms, as other l nations do, but with strength
of the body : I had my bows bought me, according to
1 As divers other, 1607.
FRANCE AND ENGLAND 45
my age and strength ; as I increased in them, so my bows
were made bigger and bigger ; for men shall never shoot
well, except they be brought up in it : it is a goodly art,
a wholesome kind of exercise, and much commended in
physic."
Latimer insists also on the disciplinary benefits
of such exercise ; and here is the greatest glory of
our fourteenth-century Nation in Arms. Rough
and bloodstained as is our history in that age, it
compares well with any other. No other such
important insurrection as our Peasants' Revolt of
1381 was marked by so little murder and robbery.
With all their disorders, those revolutionaries did,
on the whole, keep a discipline which we shall find
nowhere else in the Middle Ages under similar
circumstances ; and abroad, by the confession of
our very enemies, we showed the same superiority.
Among the Free Companies (as those mercenary
adventurers were called who became the scourge
of Europe in this century), the English were among
the most formidable in war, but among the least
cruel to the vanquished. Hawkwood, one of the
most hardened of their leaders, disobeyed his orders
and spared a thousand women whom the Papal
Legate commanded to be slain at the massacre of
Cesena. 1 And Father Denifle, the late sublibrarian
of the Vatican, printed a far more substantial testi-
monial to our soldiers. In 1433, Archbishop Jean-
Juvenal des Ursins addressed a long memorial to the
1 M. Creighton, Hist, of the Papacy, bk. I. chap. i.
46 COMPULSOEY MILITARY SERVICE
States-General, then sitting at Blois, and a similar
letter in 1439 to the French King. While emphasiz-
ing the cruelties practised on both sides during the
war, he twice points out that the French peasants
suffered less, on the whole, from the English
soldiery than from their own. In the first memorial,
speaking of the indiscipline and tyrannies of the
French soldiery, and their disregard of their own
plighted word given by way of safe-conduct or
otherwise, he adds, " at present, however, things
are somewhat amended by the coming of the Eng-
lish." In the second, after describing the suffer-
ings endured by the population under the English
invaders, he goes on : " Nevertheless, it must truly
be confessed that they do keep not only their
securities once given, but their safe-conducts also ;
and I will pass briefly over their deeds ; for, whatso-
ever tyrannies these our enemies may do, your own
soldiers do as terrible, and far worse, all things
considered." l We have truer cause for pride in
a testimonial of this sort, than in our victories of
the Hundred' Years' War. Yet those victories were
almost, if not altogether, unexampled in history.
A man born in 1335, and living to be eighty, would
easily have remembered Crecy, Poitiers, and Agin-
court. Is there any other country or time in which,
during a single lifetime, three such crushing vic-
tories were won, in spite of such enormous odds,
1 H. Denifle, La Desolation des Eglises, etc. (Macon, 1887), vol. i.
pp. 497, 504 : cf. Dussieux, vol. i. pp. 248-9.
FRANCE AND ENGLAND 47
against a country of the first military rank ? Both
victory in war, and superior tranquillity in peace,
went here with the country which laid most stress
on the universal liability to serve.
Nor is the political and commercial development
of England, during these centuries, less remark-
able than her other successes. Our towns grew in
wealth, in numbers and in freedom ; while the French
civic liberties decayed, and many towns surrendered
their charters altogether. Our parliament not only
successfully asserted the power of the purse, but
even helped in the overthrow of three kings. The
difference in political freedom between the England
and France of 1450, as compared with the England
and France of 1150, is enormous. There were
doubtless many causes for this divergent develop-
ment ; then, as now, our insular position may have
contributed more to our freedom than any other
cause ; happy is the people that can work out its
own political problems without violent interference
from an outside invader ! But, so far as the
influence of universal military service can be
traced in either direction, it certainly tended to
confirm, rather than to retard, our development in
liberty.
The comparison with France will again make
this clear. In 1357, when the King had been taken
at Poitiers and was still a prisoner in London, the
States-General forced upon the Dauphin a series
of articles of Government, a medieval Petition of
48 COMPULSORY MILITARY SERVICE
Right. One of these articles insisted that Govern-
ment should arm not only all the townsfolk, but
the far hardier and more numerous peasantry also. 1
But the Dauphin hated these articles, which had
practically been forced upon him by the semi-
revolutionary population of Paris ; the rest of the
country was far less advanced in democratic thought
than the capital ; and this Ordinance was never
carried out. When, at last, in the middle of the
fifteenth century, the French armies began to assert
their superiority over ours, it was not through a
Nation in Arms. One determining cause, un-
doubtedly, was that the English had long since
lost heart in the war ; the nation was no longer
really engaged in it, in anything like the sense in
which the campaign of Crecy may be called a
national struggle. Even more decisive, perhaps,
was the reorganization of the French army by the
" Ordonnance " of Charles VII. in 1439. This
established a permanent, numerous and efficient
professional force under the sole command of the
king ; and, at the same time, the States-Genera]
granted a perpetual tax to maintain this army.
"The absolute control of the national force and of the
national revenue, which the action of the States General
of Orleans allowed the crown to assume, enabled the
monarchy to erect a despotism in France. Englishmen
may hold that orderly government and national indepen-
1 Perrens, Etienne Marcel, p. 131 ; Lavisse and Rambaud, Hist.
Qentrale, iii. 93.
FRANCE AND ENGLAND 49
dence were dearly purchased by the sacrifice of all securities
for constitutional liberty ; but it is at least probable that
if they had ever found themselves in such an evil plight
they would have conducted the same bargain on the same
terms." l
The fact that medieval England never found
itself in this evil plight can hardly be dissociated
from the fact that, in medieval England, every man
was something of a soldier. Can we wonder, there-
fore, if the large majority of modern Frenchmen be-
lieve that the best safeguard yet invented against
invasion from abroad, and against tyranny at home,
lies in a system of universal service which will
interest every citizen in self-defence, and will throw
the professional soldier as much as possible into
the background ? Many of the troops thus raised
by the French kings were foreign mercenaries ; and
the complaints of the States-General in 1484 show
that the people realized 'already, to some extent,
how truly they had exchanged king Log for king
Stork. The petition ran :
" France has a numerous population, warlike by nature,
which is glad to do its duty in shedding its blood for the
king. For many centuries the country relied upon its
natural defenders ; and then, far from being exposed to
oppression on the part of neighbouring nations, it gave
the law to all the nations of Europe. The mercenary
1 R. Lodge, The Close of the Middle Ages, 1906, p. 353 : cf. Dussieux, i.
248. The tax was not, at first, theoretically perpetual ; but the king
had a right to exact it so long as he kept his part of the bargain, by
maintaining this efficient army.
50 COMPULSOKY MILITARY SERVICE
armies, which are extolled as so useful now-a-days, were
first erected by suspicious tyrants, who thought they had
no other means of escape from public vengeance. There-
fore, let us not be told now that these mercenaries are the
very arms of the body politic, and that the salvation of
the state depends upon them."
But the mercenary, and the irresponsible tax-
ation which this institution had brought with it,
were firmly riveted now upon France, for as long
as the monarchy itself should endure. Even our
Tudors did not dare, in face of their people, to set
up a real standing army ; if Henry VIII. had quar-
relled with his people as seriously as Charles I. did,
he had no forces sufficient to overawe the whole
nation. In the France of that time, on the other
hand, the king and his army had been masters of
the country for a whole century ; and this despotism
was destined to grow more and more irresistible
until the Revolution.
1 Quoted by Benoiston de Chateauneuf in Annales d' Hygiene Publique,
1833, p. 243.
CHAPTER IV
FRANCE AND ENGLAND (continued)
THE reign of Queen Mary brought a reconstitution
of our national militia, but these changes were
merely superficial. They were mainly intended
to bring the armament and training up to date ;
and their success seems to have been small. The
queen would have liked to form a standing army,
but dared not propose it. Though the old machine
was now thoroughly rusty, it still kept up the prin-
ciple of universal compulsion. 1 In Harrison's valu-
able introduction to Holinshed's Chronicle, written
on the very eve of the Armada, he says :
" As for able men for service, thanked be God ! we are
not without good store ; for, by the musters taken 1574
and 1575, our number amounted to 1,172,674, and yet
were they not so narrowly taken but that a third part
of this like multitude was left unbilled and uncalled.
What store of munition and armour the queen's majesty
1 J. W. Fortescue, Hist, of the British Army, 1910, i. 125. Mr. Fortescue
is chiefly concerned to emphasize the military weaknesses of a citizen
militia, which to a certain extent are undeniable, though we shall have
to consider later on how far they are irremediable. Our concern here
is mainly with the political working of the militia system.
52 COMPULSORY MILITARY SERVICE
had in her storehouses it lieth not in me to yield account,
sith I suppose the same to be infinite^"
This " infinite store," as we now know, existed
mainly on paper, thanks to Elizabeth's parsimony ;
and doubtless there were plenty of frauds in the
register of names ; it has been suggested that Shake-
peare is thinking of these musters when he describes
Falstaff's proceedings in the first part of his Henry
IV. Moreover, though Harrison's numbers show
that the legal accountability of all adult males was
still maintained, the Trained Bands (i.e. the select
men who were supposed to be actually drilled) were
only about one-tenth of these. The discrepancy
between theory and practice, however, was not so
very much greater than similar discrepancies which
have been revealed at the outbreak of war on
far more recent occasions, under the Voluntary
System.
James I., though he set his hand to an act which
practically destroyed the old universal militia as an
organization, did nothing to impair the principle
of universal service ; both he and Charles I., in
fact, pressed men even for service abroad, as Eliza-
beth had done. And, when the Civil War broke
out, this gave the English people a real chance of
asserting their liberties. In the France of that
day, even the peace establishment of the standing
army amounted to 81,000 men, admirably drilled
and equipped, and supported by taxes which the
1 Elizabethan England, ed. F. J. Furnivall (Walter Scott), p. 225.
FRANCE AND ENGLAND 53
people had no constitutional right to refuse. 1 The
people, for their part, had no right to bear arms ;
they were almost as helpless as the modern Ar-
menians are under Turkish rule. 2 It needed the
bloodiest social upheaval known to history, before
this disability of the French population could be
remedied. With us, on the other hand, the duty
of service was also a privilege : "in England,"
said a French cardinal, " they say that the French
peasants are brute beasts." 3 The Long Parlia-
ment even wrested from the king the constitutional
right of raising the militia ; so that, while neither
side began the Great Civil War with a regular army,
Parliament had the right of taxation, right of levy-
ing soldiers, and possession of such arms as existed
in the militia depots of the different parishes on
their side. In this matter of armament, the Parlia-
ment thus started with an actual advantage over
the king. 4 By the time the war had lasted a year,
1 Dussieux, ii. 76.
* Cf. G. Hanotaux. La France en 1614 (Collection, Nelson), p. 375 :
" Even now-a-days, in eastern countries, the conquering peoples keep
government and military service to themselves, suffering the subject
peoples at their feet to go on quietly with their commerce, industry,
and despised trades, so long as they regularly pay their taxes. This
social state has some real resemblance to that of France at the beginning
of the seventeenth century. One part of the nation governed the rest
who supplied its wants. On the other hand, the ruling class had scarcely
more consideration for the working and paying class, than the true
Osmanlis have for Greeks, Armenians and Jews." Cf. again the report
of the English ambassador in 1609, quoted on p. 394 of the same book :
" The French peasantry are kept in such servitude that the Government
dares not to trust them with arms."
3 Ibid. 394.
4 C. H. Firth, Rede Lecture, 1910, p. 21.
54 COMPULSORY MILITARY SERVICE
Parliament decreed the impressment of 22,000 men,
and the king resorted to the same means. In 1645,
more than half of Cromwell's New Model Army
was raised by impressment.
" There was no zeal amongst the men thus forced into
the ranks, and at first they deserted and ran home again
in great numbers, and, as Fairfax complained, with perfect
impunity. But physically they were good material for
soldiers, and after the first few months little is heard of
their desertion. The last great press for the army took place
in 1651, when Parliament ordered 10,000 men to be raised
to reinforce its troops in Ireland. It was then remarked
that the men raised by impressment for that service
were better than those who had voluntarily enlisted." 1
As Prof. Firth has pointed out, our Rebellion of
1642 resembled the American Civil War in this,
that it victoriously maintained the principle of
" government of the people, for the people, by the
people," to use Lincoln's celebrated phrase. And,
in both cases, the victory was decided by the asser-
tion of a people's right to claim actual personal
service from every man who helps to compose that
people. " They showed that democracy and dis-
cipline might be allies, not enemies, and won the
war in the process." 2 This obligation of militia
service, which helped the Parliament to vindicate
our liberties in 1642, was finally abolished only a
1 C. H. Firth, Cromwell's Army, 1902, pp. 21, 36.
2 Rede Lecture, pp. 7, 26. The quotation here given is from words
spoken by Prof. Firth in a different context ; but the transference does
no injustice, I trust, to the reading of his lecture. Cf. p. 27.
FKANCE AND ENGLAND 55
few years ago, when the Territorial Force was con-
stituted by the present Lord Haldane. During
all those intervening years the militia, old-fashioned
though it was, was looked upon as a natural consti-
tutional counterpoise against the dangerous political
tendencies of a standing army ; and even the vic-
torious army of Waterloo contained a' good many
pressed men. Moreover, the abolition of the militia
as a standing force has in no way affected the
common-law liability of every British subject to
fight in case of invasion, as Lord Haldane plainly
reminded his hearers in the House of Lords since
the outbreak of this war.
We must turn now to France, where the story
ends in the creation of the modern Nation in Arms.
Her great wars of the seventeenth century com-
pelled the government to reinforce voluntary enlist-
ment by measures which (like those of the later Roman
Empire), had all the disadvantages of Universal
Service, with none of its more solid advantages.
" All the weight fell upon the common people . . .
all workshops throughout the country were closed ;
and the people, lacking bread, were compelled to
enlist . . . the citizens paid money, and remained
at home. 35 1 The medieval militias were revived,
but under partial and iniquitous conditions ; the
kings, not daring actually to arm the people, or-
dained a cunningly-devised blood-tax which helped
1 Bussieux, ii. 56, 180-1, 193-5, 374.
56 COMPULSORY MILITARY SERVICE
them to fill their professional armies. At the same
time, the most shameful methods were used even
with the so-called " volunteers." The philosopher
Locke, who was at Montpellier in 1675, noted in
his diary : :t These artifices are employed where
pressing is not allowed ; it is a usual trick, if any-
one drink the king's health, to give him press-money
and force him to go a soldier, pretending that,
having drunk his health, he is bound to fight for
him." l Dussieux quotes still worse cases. ^JVen
when, in 1688, Louvois seriously reorganize < a the
provincial militia, it was mainly to furnish recruits
for the foreign wars ; and its class-character, already
sufficiently pronounced, soon became more odious
still ; " the government, needing money, sold
patents of nobility and a thousand different offices
which exempted men from service." We need
not wonder that the Revolution made a clean sweep
of this. The cahiers (i.e. the memorials which
came from all parts of the country to prescribe the
reforms to be carried out by the States-General in
1789), "unanimously demanded the suppression
of the militia and of the provincial regiments."
The States-General abolished all personal obli-
gation of military service in March 1791. No
attempt was made to discriminate : the duty which,
in England, had helped the fight for liberty was
cast off simultaneously with these odious exemp-
tions which had enabled the kings to transform a
1 King's Life of Locke, 1830, vol. i. p. 104.
FRANCE AND ENGLAND 57
national privilege into a class-disability. Yet,
even under the Ancien Regime, advanced political
philosophers had pointed to jfchis as one cause of
the insignificance of the Tiers Etat in France. 1 And,
only a few months after the storming of the Bas-
tille, one of the boldest and most far-sighted Radi-
cals in the Assembly, Dubois-Crance, had proposed
universal service in the name of democratic effi-
ciency (Dec. 12, 1789). " I lay it down as an
axiom," he said, " that every citizen of France must
be a soldier, and every soldier a citizen ; or we shall
never have a real Constitution." And again : " We
must, therefore, have a truly national conscription,
including every citizen, whether he has a vote or
not, except the king. Every man must be ready
to march as soon as the country is in danger." But
the nation, through its unhappy past experience, had
become confused between partial conscription, with
all its obvious defects, and universal military service,
which is really a very different thing. Frenchmen
in 1789, like Britons in 1913, confused all com-
pulsory service with " militarism " ; and Dubois-
Crance's speech fell upon deaf ears, in spite of the
esteem which the speaker enjoyed. 2
1 E.g. Rousseau, Contrat Social, iii. 15, a passage which Carnot
recalled in 1792, when he appealed to the National Assembly to decree
military training for all citizens without distinction. Mably, Rousseau's
contemporary, had written to the same effect : "A country will not
keep its liberty if its citizens pay soldiers to defend it " (quoted by Ed.
Peclet, Conscrit et Conscription, Paris, 1*867, p. 24).
* This fallacy is far more fully exposed by the great French pacificist and
socialist, Jean Jaures, in his Armee Nouvette. See his words in chapter xii.
of Democracy and Military Service (Simpkin, Marshall & Co. Is. net).
58 COMPULSORY MILITARY SERVICE
In April 1792 war broke out with Prussia and
Austria, who were plotting to interfere in the Revo-
lution, and to restore the king's absolute power.
This war went so badly for France that, at a very
early stage, it was necessary to resort to measures
of veiled compulsion. The real voluntary effort,
however, was very remarkable, and for some time
the country hoped that this would suffice. But
the volunteers had engaged for only a year ; and a
large proportion of them refused to serve longer,
though the need was by that time even more pressing.
In February 1793 the Republican Government was
obliged to " requisition 300,000 National Guards"
or (in terms of British conditions), to conscript
300,000 Territorials for foreign service. This levy
produced far less than the 300,000 required ; there-
fore Barere and Carnot, a few months later, per-
suaded the Government to decree a general levy
of all able-bodied men from 18 to 25. It is signi-
ficant that here in France, as later on in Germany,
this first serious effort to utilize the fighting forces
of the nation coincided with an equally serious
effort to found a real system of National Education
(see Appendix 2).
Carnot, of course, was an even more determined
Republican than Dubois-Crance : and it was he
who created the armies of the French Revolu-
tion. In order to gild the pill, both these
levies of conscripts were still called Volunteers, a
name which had been rendered honourable by the
FRANCE AND ENGLAND 59
real volunteers of 1792 ; but this political device
has caused a great deal of misunderstanding in
later histories. These levies of 1793, being the pick
of the national manhood, became magnificent
soldiers, devoted to their country and to the Re-
public ; but very few of them had originally been
volunteers. After a time, France was able to put
overwhelming numbers into the field, and the in-
vaders were everywhere driven out of French
territory. But the national ambition to spread
revolutionary ideas over Europe continued the
war ; and in 1798 Jourdan's law first made this
compulsory service into a fundamental clause of
the Constitution (Sept. 5). It was then that the
name " conscription " was first formally introduced
from Roman into French history ; therefore super-
ficial students have sometimes overlooked the fact
that the thing itself had been in force since 1793,
or even, under a decent cloak of voluntarism,
since 1792. 1 The Revolutionary armies have been
judged very differently by professional soldiers on
the one hand, and enthusiastic politicians on the
other; the truth lies, as usual, between the two
extremes. Dussieux puts both sides fairly (vol. ii.
p. 376).
" In this question of the volunteers, which we must treat
without prejudice, good and evil are intermingled. For
some people, the volunteers of 1792 are everything ; it
was they who did everything. This assertion is false.
1 Dussieux, ii. 374 ff.
60 COMPULSORY MILITARY SERVICE
Well-organized armies cannot be met by feudal mobs, or
by volunteers, francs-tireurs and national guards, ill-
officered, ill-trained, loosely organized and undisciplined.
That was shown in 1793 and 1870, as it had been in the
fourteenth and fifteenth centuries. Those who have
declaimed against standing armies and compulsory service
those who have said, written, and repeated in season
and out of season that France need only stamp her strong
foot, and legions would spring from the ground, invincible
in their patriotism and in virtue of the noble ideas which
inspired them those men have unworthily deceived the
nation; for the so-called Volunteers of 1793 were forced
into the army by the energetic measures of the Convention,
and these masses of men raised and sent into the firing line
in the very throes of war are incapable, at first, of bearing
the burden thrown upon them ; they are sacrificed in vain.
On the other hand, it is not true to assert that the Volun-
teers did no good. They and the National Guards of 1792-3
behaved well at Valmy, Jemmapes and Mayence ; they
took part in the victories of Hondschoote, Wattignies,
Geisberg and Fleurus. They animated the army with
their own ardent patriotism ; they kept it to its duty by
preventing it from following the generals who betrayed
the Revolution ; they formed good auxiliaries to the
regular army. Without the Regulars (it cannot be too
often repeated) the Volunteers could have done nothing ;
but they did really help the army and take an important
part in the victory. The advocates of the Volunteers
commit the mistake of leaving the Regulars out of account,
and vice versd. Both classes of soldiers united to repulse
the invaders of 1792-3 ; neither could have performed this
singly least of all, the Volunteers."
That Compulsory Service saved Revolutionary
France has probably never been seriously denied ;
FRANCE AND ENGLAND 61
Socialists like Jean Jaures agree with conservative
historians in treating it as indisputable. 1 More-
over, Frenchmen may be said to have accepted the
system in proportion to the strength of their
Republican convictions. The only organized re-
sistance to the principle of Universal Service came
from the Royalists. As Gabriel Deville puts it
in the fifth volume of Jaures's Histoire Socialiste,
(p. 534) :
"It was the royalist party which caught at the application
of the Conscription Law as a means of increasing its ad-
herents. Many priests, who had filtered back to France,
. . . preached disobedience to the laws, etc., incited con-
scripts to desert, remained agents of the Royalist reaction,
and kept up the state of war. It was the [political]
ancestors of our present militarists who worked so hard . . .
to hinder the execution of the salutary Conscription Law." 2
But British writers, and especially more or less
irresponsible journalists, look away from all this,
and connect conscription only with the militarism
of Napoleon. The Army, they say, by lending
itself to the imperial tyranny, more than counter-
balanced its earlier service to liberty ; upon this
Republican levy was based the anti-civic policy
of the Empire. This objection, though it will not
1 Lord Acton, Lectures on the French Revolution, p. 330. Cf. the
testimony to the military value of these " commandeered " men in
Lavisse and Rambaud'a great Histoire Generate, vol. viii. p. 269.
2 Cf. Nicolay and Hay, Abraham Lincoln, vol. vii. *p. 24 : " In no
single instance was there a riot incited by drafting wherein Americans
by birth bore any considerable part, nor in which the great body of
the actors were not born Europeans, and generally of recent importa-
tion."
62 COMPULSORY MILITARY SERVICE
bear serious examination, is so important that we
propose to deal with it in the next chapter. Up
to 1795, at least, the same law seems to hold good
for Britain and France which we have already traced
in earlier history. In no case have we found
national or social servitude as a result or a conse-
quence of the Universal principle in military train-
ing. On the contrary, so far as any definite con-
nexion can be traced, it is the free country in which
every man is subject to the duty and can therefore
claim the right of bearing arms and mustering
side by side with all his fellow-citizens. The unfree
population is that in which the central authority
undertakes the whole duty of national defence,
and fulfils this duty mainly through the instrumen-
tality of hired soldiers. In France, in which this
system is most thoroughly worked, political and
social conditions can be seriously compared with
those of modern Turkey. But as soon as the people
win their freedom, and are compelled to fight for
that freedom against foreign interference, they fall
back upon the principle of the Nation in Arms. In
this, they see a principle of political .and social
liberty : how far, then, did the case of Napoleon
really belie this hope ?
CHAPTER V
CONSCKIPTION AND CAESAEISM IN FBANCE
To clear the ground, it may be as well to start with
three very significant facts, which are not likely to
be contested by any student of French history.
(1) Napoleon's government, at its worst, gave
France more freedom and tranquillity than she had
enjoyed under her later kings. Both in material
prosperity, and in freedom of thought or action,
the vast mass of citizens were far better off in the
conscripted France of Napoleon than during the
last years of Louis XIV.
(2) It was not the army which conferred dicta-
torial power upon Napoleon. On the contrary, his
most serious difficulties at first were with the army.
(3) Nor was the army responsible for that* cor-
ruption and misgovernment under the Republic
which made France welcome Napoleon's dictator-
ship with such relief. The army, on the whole,
was the soundest part of the nation.
(1) The first of these propositions is too evident
to need detailed proof; and this, by itself, would
64 COMPULSORY MILITARY SERVICE
suffice to show that we have here no real exception
to the general law. Napoleon's armies were wel-
comed by large populations in Germany and Italy,
who found that the conqueror gave them far more
liberty than they had enjoyed under their own
petty tyrants and their paid armies. The Con-
federation of the Rhine a vassal state formed by
Napoleon out of a multiplicity of German princi-
palities which he had conquered marks one of
the most definite forward stages in German political
liberties : yet the citizens of this state had naturally
rather less freedom than their French conquerors.
(2) Secondly, all the best authorities agree in
emphasizing the Republican spirit of the army with
which Napoleon had to deal. His power over them
until he had become a sort of God of Victory
depended mainly on their belief in his essentially
Republican convictions. His difficulties with the
army are admirably told by the writer whom Lord
Rosebery saluted, just before his death, as " the
first of living historians " of Bonaparte. 1 In the
army of Italy, some regiments were excused from
the oath of allegiance to Napoleon and his fellow-
consuls because " all the commanders felt sure they
would refuse to swear." The greatest of all the
armies, that of the Rhine, was " far less devoted
to Bonaparte than to Liberty," the army in Holland
" did not intend that Prance and the army should
1 Le Comte Albert Vandal, UAvenement de Bonaparte (Collection
Nelson, Is.), vol. i. pp. 467 ff.
CONSCRIPTION IN FRANCE 65
have a single master; c no dictatorship' was their very
plain rallying-cry." Side by side with the judgment
of a Conservative Republican like Vandal, we may set
that of an able Socialist like Jean Jaures, who wrote :
"The grenadiers [who helped Napoleon to overthrow
the Government] in Brumaire were not working for the
profit of a [military] caste. The rise of General Bonaparte
had been rendered possible by the long faction-fights in
which the political parties had exhausted themselves, and
from which the army had stood aloof. Bonaparte himself
affected to remain outside and above the army ; and his
success disquieted his own comrades in arms at least as
much as it did the revolutionaries, who remained faithful
to the Republic." l
(3) Lastly, Vandal insists repeatedly upon the
healthy spirit and true Republicanism of the army
in general, and warns us against the mistaken idea
" that the soldiers and officers of the field-armies,
to whatever category they belonged, were passive
tools in the hands of their commanders " (pp. 8,
10, 19, 250). The army accepted Bonaparte's
1 L'Armee Nouvelle, p. 345. Jaures here devotes ten pages to proving
from history that the French army has almost always been the servant
of the government for the time being ; and that, even at the worst,
" the military organization was not able, by its own initiative or its
inherent strength, to offer serious resistance to the democracy. ... At
the present moment (1910) it is not the inherent force of the military
machine which clogs the democracy. It is the democracy, still more
than half paralyzed by the selfish influence of a timid middle-class,
which is checking or clogging the necessary evolution of military institu-
tions" (p. 355). All this is the more striking, because Jaures had
every natural temptation to exaggerate in the other direction. He had
been one of the earliest champions of Dreyfus against military per-
secution ; and these words themselves were written in the heat of the
indignation which Jaures, as leader of the Socialist party, felt at M.
Briand's mobilization of the railway -men as strike-breakers in 1910.
66 COMPULSORY MILITARY SERVICE
usurpation (though with rather more misgiving
than the rest of the nation), because the fallen
Government was one which had long since forfeited
all title to loyalty or respect. This " government
of lawyers " had shown itself not only complacently
incapable, but thoroughly corrupt (36, 276-8).
" Its task was heavy, but it failed deplorably in
face of this task. It managed to repair nothing,
to create nothing ; it gave France neither order
nor liberty " (6). Though the press was gagged,
and unpopular opinions were bitterly persecuted,
the Government showed only weakness in great
things. The war was disgracefully mismanaged,
yet ministers clung ferociously to their offices (11,
37, 39, 49, 69, 455-460). One of the great factors
which reconciled the troops to Bonaparte's usurpa-
tion was " their growing exasperation against this
Government more ready to talk than to pay, weak
and corrupt, which starved its soldiers and risked
the ruin of its armies" (248). Royalism was
rapidly raising its head again ; in default of Bona-
parte or some other successful general, men seriously
thought of importing a German prince as constitu-
tional king of France (123, 189). Dr. Holland Rose
sums up the whole situation in four sentences :
" The revolutionary strifes had wearied the brain of
France and had predisposed it to accept accomplished
facts. Distracted by the talk about Royalists' plots and
Jacobin plots, cowering away from the white ogre and
the red spectre, the more credulous part of the populace
CONSCKIPTION IN FRANCE 67
was fain to take shelter under the cloak of a great soldier
who at least promised order. Everything favoured the
drill-sergeant theory of government. The instinct developed
by a thousand years of monarchy had not been rooted out
in the last decade. They now prompted France to rally
round her able man and abandon political liberty as a
hopeless quest ; she obeyed the imperious call which promised
to revivify the order and brilliance of her old existence with
the throbbing blood of her new life." l
If we compare this with a remark of Vandal's,
" this race of Gauls had 18 centuries of obedience
in its blood " (p. 57), we shall see how little reason
there is to look upon Napoleon's usurpation as a
crisis of militarism. Not Universal Service, but
the whole past history of the nation, was respon-
sible for the political incapacity under which it now
broke down. In all countries and under all circum-
stances, a breakdown of this kind necessarily ends
the same way. When a country's constitution and
its constitutional representatives prove hopelessly
unequal to their task, then a dictatorship presents
itself as the only alternative to anarchy ; and all
the soundest elements of the nation rally round the
first man who is strong enough to restore some sort
of order. 2
The further story of the French army system can
be told in few words. When the Monarchy was
restored, the law of universal military liability was
1 Life of Napoleon I. vol. i. p. 228.
8 For a contemporary English view of French conscription, see
Appendix 2.
68 COMPULSORY MILITARY SERVICE
repealed ; recruiting was partly by voluntary en-
gagement, partly by compulsory ballot, with the
indefensible permission to buy a substitute (1818). 1
This gangrene of substitution preyed upon the
French army until the present Republic came in.
Soult tried vainly to abolish it. The law of 1832
kept the mixed system, only laying more emphasis
on the ballot and less upon voluntary enlistment.
The short-lived Republic of 1848 did try to abolish
" the plague-spot of substitution," and to organize
a vast militia system behind the regular army : but
it lasted too short a time. The Emperor Louis
Napoleon, during the latter part of his career,
worked definitely backward towards the profes-
sional army system. Substitution was not only
permitted, but encouraged and organized by the
state. " This created a new army, and a new mili-
tary spirit. Soldiers re-engaged for life, or at least
to the age of 45 or 50, when they retired upon a
pension. They thus separated themselves from
the rest of the nation, and constituted the Emperor's
army." The army which was beaten at Sedan was
(as intelligent English observers noted at the timei)
1 Dussieux, iii. 121. For the other statements in this paragraph,
see ibid. pp. 139, 157, 163. The German Revolutionaries of 1848 also
insisted on the necessity of universal military service as one of the
foundation stones of their new constitution : see Cambridge Modern
History, vol. xi. p. 267, and W. Altmann, Ausgewahlte Urkunden u.s.w.
seit 1806, pp. 279 ff. Article 2 of the " Fundamental Rights," as drawn
up by this Radical assembly, ran thus : " There is no class-distinction
before the law. The nobility, as a class, are abolished. All class-
privileges are done away. All Germans are equal before the law. . . .
military service is the same for all : no substitution is here permitted."
CONSCRIPTION IN FRANCE 69
a long-service professional army of a similar type to
that which we then had in Britain. (E.g. Professor
Cairnes in the Fortnightly Review for February, 1871 .)
Yet there were plenty of warning voices. In
1850, H. Redon de Beaupreau published a pamphlet
entitled Quelques Mots sur les Institutions et V Esprit
Militaires, in which he deplored this tendency " to
hark back to the state of things under the ancient
monarchy, by restoring to the soldiers that pro-
fessional, mercenary, and life-long character which
had been destroyed by the law of 1798 " i.e. by
Jourdan's Conscription Act (p. 10). In 1 867, E. Peclet
(I.e. p. 18) exposed the shame of the substitution sys-
tem in words which anticipated the recent indignant
protest of a French Socialist in an English paper. l
But by far the most striking utterances were in
the secret reports of Napoleon's own chosen agent,
Colonel Stoffel reports which the Republicans of
1870 unearthed from the Imperial archives and pub-
lished as a proof of Napoleon's culpable blindness
to the Writing on the Wall. 2
1 The Nation, Feb. 12, 1916, p. 700. Mr. Augustin Hamon, author
of the well-known study Bernard Shaw et Moliere, writes : " When
the Frenchman hears that some Englishmen allege that the British
Empire finances the Allies, then he gets angry, for he thinks that money
does not pay for the dead. And he does not admit that, in this war of
life and death for all the democracies of the world, some are to give
their gold, whereas others are giving their blood. His sense of equality
is stirred up ; for he deems that gold is not so valuable as blood."
* Military Reports, by Colonel Baron Stoffel, translated for the War
Office by Captain Home, R.E. (H.M. Stationery Office, 1872). For
convenience of reference I quote from this translation ; but it omits
StoffePs own most interesting Preface to the authorized French edition
of 1871 (Garnier freres). For brevity's sake, I relegate the fuller quota-
tions from Stoffel to Appendix 4.
70 COMPULSORY MILITARY SERVICE
The Prussian victories over Austria in 1866
produced a veritable consternation in France.
Napoleon at once chose the man he could best trust
to study this disquieting phenomenon, first on the
.actual battlefields and then as Military Attache in
Berlin. Stoffel joined the staff of Prince Frederick
Charles only six weeks after the decisive battle of
Koniggratz, and sent in his first report after a three
weeks' study of the epoch-making events which
were still so fresh. In this first report of September
8, 1866, he strikes the main note upon which he
harps repeatedly in succeeding years, the plainest
warning of all being dated February 28th, 1870.
The Prussian army, he writes, outclasses the French
army in virtue of the superior justice, intelligence,
and efficiency of the system on which it is founded.
" The Prussians " (he writes in his first report), " are
proud to call their army The Nation in Arms ; and
this gives a very just description of it." And, in his
last sad Preface, written after the collapse of France,
Stoffel sums it all up again in the Crown Prince's
epigram : "It was the Prussian schoolmaster
who won the battle of Koniggratz." He empha-
sizes the blunders of the Austrian commander,
and the advantage which the Prussians had in their
needle-gun. But these were only details : the real
cause lay deeper. The Austrians were outclassed
at every point ; Prussia had the better Staff, the
better officers, commissioned and non-commissioned,
and the better privates. And this, again, rested
CONSCRIPTION IN PRANCE 71
on a still deeper and broader foundation ; the Prus-
sian army represented the sum-total of all individual
intelligences and characters in the whole nation.
In his second report, of a month later, he insists
even more emphatically, and at greater length,
upon "two things [which] are very striking; (1)
the intellectual value of the army, and (2) the prin-
ciple of justice and morality which is the basis of
its organization " (p. 11). Over and over again,
in succeeding reports, his words amounted to a
plain warning that France would court defeat unless
she abandoned the substitution system and trained
every citizen as a soldier.
Even more significant in the light of modern
events, perhaps, are his reports of August 12, 1869,
and February 28, 1870.
In the former, Stoffel replies to the Emperor's
confidential question : What do the Germans think
of our new Territorial Organization the Mobiles ?
He points out that this organization, while pro-
fessing to form a Home Defence Force of 500,000
men behind the Regulars, is for all practical pur-
poses a sham. So far as it rests on universal com-
pulsion, and avoids the " plague-spot of substitu-
tion," it is a real step forward. But the law pro-
vides only fifteen drill-days a year, which will teach
the men nothing. Yet (its defenders argue) serious
training will begin when the war breaks out. Stofiel
makes the obvious reply, that a disastrous war (in
which these men would most be needed) would
72 COMPULSORY MILITARY SERVICE
render all serious training impossible ; and he thus
concludes his criticism: " I do not believe that
any assembly in any country ever gave such a
flagrant proof of inconsistency and levity. How
can we be astonished after this, if foreigners criti-
cise us severely ? . . . and if they proclaim with ill-
disguised satisfaction, in books seriously written,
the downfall of the Latin races ? " And he insists
on the weakness of the lawyer-politicians whose
boastful language about the strength of this new
organization, combined with their refusal to take
any real steps towards efficiency, is imperilling
France. This law had been in force two years when
the war broke out, but, as Dussieux says, " the
Mobiles were organized only on paper ; and, in
1870, nothing had been done to put them into
working order beyond naming their officers " (iii.
167). A distinguished French professor has re-
cently recounted to me his personal experience as
a Mobile. Before the war he had never fired a shot
from a rifle. Then he, with some hundreds more,
was bundled into one of the forts near Paris, where
the real soldiers found no time or inclination to give
these greenhorns either firing-exercise or drill.
" The Prussians used to creep at dusk into the
vineyards round the fort, and steal the grapes.
One morning, at dawn, I saw a Prussian not
fifty yards off, and fired at him. A whole squad
turned out and fired as he ran ; not one of us
hit him."
CONSCRIPTION IN FRANCE 73
In the latter report (February 28, 1870), Stoffel
discusses the Emperor's vague scheme of proposing
to Prussia, through the mediation of England, a
plan for reciprocal " disarmament " or rather,
considerable reduction in armaments. Stoffel points
out that Prussia can do no such thing without alter-
ing her political constitution, which is based upon
Universal Service. He continues (p. 173) :
" Would it not be madness to think that any nation
would consent, 'of its own accord, to abandon so fruitful
a principle, which, taken as the basis of one of its funda-
mental institutions, has contributed more than any other
to the development of its greatness ? Now it cannot too
often be repeated that it is compulsory service, joined to
compulsory education, which, for sixty years perseveringly
adhered to, have led Prussia, by slow and imperceptible
degrees, to that moral and intellectual development which
made her the most enlightened and disciplined nation in
Europe, and placed her all at once in the first rank among
Powers. And let it be said, as a digression, that Prussia
having just adopted universal suffrage, no one can foretell
where the destinies of this educated, energetic and ambitious
people will stop a nation having Universal Compulsory
Military Service, Universal Compulsory Education, Uni-
versal Suffrage three immovable columns on which to
support the whole edifice of its institutions. " He concludes :
" it will be seen in what a false position a government will
place itself which is sufficiently ill-advised to send to Berlin
a proposal for disarmament. By such a step it would
voluntarily place itself on the horns of a dilemma ; it
would meet with a refusal, or be cheated." l
1 P. 180, StoffeFs explanation of these test words will be found in
Appendix 4.
74 COMPULSORY MILITARY SERVICE
These plain warnings had very little effect :
smaller reforms were carried out, but none of the
radical reforms by which Stoffel had hoped to oppose
an Armed Nation in France to the Armed Nation
of Germany. If any proof were needed of the in-
capacity of French statesmen to grapple with the
real problem of those years 1866-1870, it may be
found in the elaborate apologetic writings of the
man who was most responsible Emile Ollivier.
The legal subtleties by which Ollivier attempts to
prove that the France of 1870 was " ready," while
in the same breath he admits essential and notori-
ous defects with which no party politician dared
seriously to grapple, do but clinch the real respon-
sibilities of these statesmen who, with their eyes
half open, drifted towards Sedan. Ollivier's own
defence corroborates the most serious accusation
of his enemies ; that he was quite incapable of
distinguishing between facts and words between
things as they really are, and things as they can be
described by a clever advocate to an audience
which has but imperfect means of testing his asser-
tions. From him we can learn, as plainly as from
Stoffel, that the army of Napoleon III. was out of
touch with the national life ; and that, while the
expert knew the hidden gangrene, the politician
might successfully hoodwink successive parlia-
ments. " The nation felt proud to live under the
protection of an invincible army ; and our only
fear was lest the Emperor, intoxicated by his own
CONSCRIPTION IN FRANCE 75
power, should allow himself to be enticed into fresh
warlike enterprises." 1 Parliamentary orators were
sure of applause, so long as they publicly extolled
this new Territorial Army about which Stofiel had
written so plainly in private.
Sedan came in due course, and the Empire fell ;
and the new Republic, among its earliest tasks, had
to raise vast new armies by compulsory enlistment.
The soul of these new armies was Gambetta, who,
eighteen months before this, had been elected to
the Chamber as an antimilitarist, pledging himself
to " the suppression of standing armies, which ruin
national finance and business, create hatred between
nations, and arouse distrust at home." 2 To those
who have called Gambetta ' the Carnot of Defeat/
Captain v. d. Goltz answers with much justice :
" His armies would certainly have been victorious,
if they had found their Bonaparte, and if they had
been pitted against Generals like those of the
Coalition." 3
When the war was over, and the Republic began
to set her house in order, there was no serious differ-
ence of opinion about military organization.
" After the collapse of 1870, when France reconstituted
her fallen military power, necessity compelled her to
abandon the whole organization of the past and to fall
1 E. Ollivier, U Empire Liberal, vol. xi. p. 353. Cf. 345-351. See
further on this subject in chap. viii. of this book.
2 Ibid. 498.
3 Dussieux, iii. 248.
76 COMPULSORY MILITARY SERVICE
back upon the Revolutionary principle : * every Frenchman
owes personal military service.' The National Assembly
of 1871 deserves our emphatic congratulations, for it did
not hesitate to vote the necessary laws and the necessary
money." l
As in the France of 1793, and the Germany of
1807, this policy went hand in hand with a deter-
mined effort to raise the standard of national educa-
tion also. " Our citizens," said Gambetta, " must
think, and read, and reason ; they must also act
and fight. . . . Military education is the very base
of civic education." 2 Moreover, the ripe experi-
ence of the forty years which followed this speech
led the greatest of French democrats to the same
conclusion. Jean Jaures wrote deliberately in
1910 : " Military science is an essential part of the
system of human knowledge " ; and he proposed
that no diploma should be granted to any candidate
for the learned professions who had not qualified
as officer in the Citizen Army. 3 It will be seen,
therefore, that the later history of France fully
justifies the deductions which we have drawn from
her revolutionary history. The tyrant's use of the
Nation in Arms was exceptional and shortlived.
Normally, it is the free governments which have
maintained and carried out the principle of universal
liability ; and, even before this war, voluntary
military service was almost as little within practical
1 Dussieux, iii. 271. 2 Ibid. 273-4.
*L'Armee Nouvelle, second edition, pp. 218, 308, 467, 471
CONSCKIPTION IN FRANCE 77
politics in France as voluntary taxation in England.
The extreme antimilitarism of Gustave Herve ap-
pealed only to a minority even among the Socialists ;
and this War has converted Herve into one of
the most uncompromising champions of national
defence.
CHAPTER VI
CONSCKIPTION AND CAESAKISM IN
GEEMANY (I.)
THE typical British view of German manners and
institutions, a couple of generations ago, may be
found in Samuel Laing's Notes of a Traveller. The
first series of these notes was published in 1842 ;
a second series, under the title of Observations, etc.,
was written in 1848-9 and published next year.
Laing was a Radical in politics ; he possessed a
natural gift of observation and had read widely.
For actual observed facts he is nearly always
trustworthy ; his analyses of contemporary move-
ments are often just and penetrating ; but his
prophecies, like those of even wiser men, are often
absurd. 1 Apart from the direct interest of his
books, they throw incidentally a flood of light upon
the mentality of our early Victorian ancestors.
With all his ability and general desire to get at the
facts, he reminds us sometimes of the travelling
1 E.g. he foretells that the Prussian military system will be found
incompatible with industrial expansion ; that France will beat Prussia
in the next war ; that, in fact, the Prussian military system must lead to
national bankruptcy under any real stress of war, etc., etc.
CONSCRIPTION IN GERMANY 79
M.P. as handed down to us by Thackeray and Dicky
Doyle. Compulsory Education was one of his
bugbears ; and he supplied the keenest weapons
to those well-meaning politicians who, as official
exponents of " what England would think to-
morrow," maintained that any system of universal
state education would " Prussianize " and enslave
us. We know now by actual experience that a
nation may be educated, yet even grow in freedom.
We know that, although professors and school-
masters have contributed enormously to the mili-
tarization of the present generation in Germany,
this of itself does not prove the inherently anti-
democratic nature of schools and universities ; on
the contrary, outside Germany, the net result of
education is on the other side. Again, because
the German book has done much to encourage
pan-Germanism, and because these mischievous
professors could have done little without books,
we do not therefore rush to the conclusion that
printing is an undemocratic invention, and that
democracy would have flourished better under a
manuscript regime. In education, in printing, we
distinguish clearly between the good instrument
and the evil use to which it may be temporarily
put. Let us try, therefore, to look upon the
military question with equal freedom from prejudice.
With strange inconsistency, the very writers who
were least willing in the past to recognize the
international significance of German militarism,
80 COMPULSORY MILITARY SERVICE
are sometimes most intemperate now in their
one-sided emphasis on Teuton iniquities. They
point to " the evil Germany that we now know "
to these "unspeakable savages and barbarians,
quite unworthy to be regarded as belonging to the
family of civilization, surpassing Huns in barbarity,
Turks in wickedness " and ask us how we can
possibly accept a system which has converted a
nation of reasonable beings into such a herd of
brutes. 1
But there is here a gross and obvious fallacy.
Germany is the classic land not only of universal
service, but also of compulsory education and
of printing ; therefore Samuel Laing and Sir
Edward Baines were quite sure that the " evil " in
Germany had its root in Compulsory Education.
Yet, among all modern politicians, it is precisely-
the intellectual descendants of Laing and Baines
who would now most indignantly repudiate this
false reasoning. May we not therefore truly say
that, of all modern politicians, the most inexcusable
are those who try to maintain their position on the
question of Compulsory Service by an exactly
similar fallacy ? If any real moral, political, or
social weakness in Germany can clearly be traced
to the principle of Universal Military Service in
itself, let us by all means note it, and be warned in
time. But to argue " The Germans are hateful ;
and the evident cause of their wickedness is their
1 Normal Angell, Prussianism and its Destruction, pp. 5 and 49.
CONSCRIPTION IN GERMANY 81
possession of an institution which we have always
hated, and have therefore always abstained from
studying closely in detail " to jump thus from a
thing we dislike, and a thing which we .confessedly
do not know intimately, to a conclusion which
flatters our preconceived opinions is clearly un-
justifiable.
Already before this War there was a strong
tendency to exaggerate the contrast between
German Imperialism of to-day and " the Germany
of Goethe, of Schiller, and of Kant." Since the
War this theme has been worn threadbare by
journalists, many of whom seem to know as little
about Goethe as about Goethe's Germany. Under
favour of the utter ignorance of continental history
which reigns in nearly all our schools, and the
extreme insularity which the majority of our
publicists seem even to cherish, there reigns a
general impression that Germany had more freedom
150 years ago, and more culture in the truest
sense, than now. Not one educated Briton in a
hundred has read Voltaire's Mon Sejour d Berlin,
though it is one of the wittiest pamphlets ever
written, and may be bought for a few pence. 1
Voltaire left the Prussian court in 1753, when
Kant was twenty-nine years old. Voltaire's own
France was not exactly the land of freedom in those
days, except in comparison with Prussia under
1 It forma the last 75 pages of the 5th volume of Romans de Voltaire,
separately procurable (Bibliotheque Nationale a 25 centimes. 2 Rue do
Valois, Paris). My quotations are from this edition, pp. 116, 118-120,
82 COMPULSORY MILITARY SERVICE
Frederick the Great's father. Of that Prussia
Voltaire writes :
" It must be confessed that Turkey is a Republic when
we compare it with the despotic sway of Frederick- William. 1
. . . When the king had reviewed his troops for the day,
he would take a walk through the streets of Berlin. Every-
body fled at his approach. If he met a woman, he asked
her why she was idling here in the street ? Be gone to your
house, you slut! an honest woman ought to be at her own
house-work ! And he accompanied this remonstrance with
a sound box on the ear, or a kick in the belly, or a few
strokes with his walking stick. He had a like treatment
for the Ministers of the Gospel, if they ever had the curiosity
to come and see his troops parade."
The future Frederick II. " had a sort of mistress.
. . . His father caused this girl to be marched round
the great square of Potsdam by the public execu-
tioner, who flogged her under the Prince's eyes."
When the Prince tried to run away, and his
bosom friend was executed for complicity in
the attempt, " four grenadiers held the Prince's
head by force at the casement, while his friend
1 In 1784, the celebrated Bernardin de St-Pierre made the same
comparison (Etudes de la Nature, vii.). After speaking of Turkish
society, he adds that similar phenomena may be noted in " Prussia,
whose internal police and victories abroad have been so highly celebrated
by French writers ; though its Government is still more despotic than
that of Turkey, for the Prince [in Prussia] is absolute master at once
in temporals and in spirituals." Edmund Burke, again, wishing to give
examples of tyranny, thought instinctively of Prussia : " Slavery they
can have anywhere. It is a weed that grows in every soil. They can
have it from Spain, they can have it from Prussia " (Speech of March 22,
1775, on " Reconciliation with America "). Even from Carlyle's
apologia, at the beginning of his Frederick the Great, we may gather how
Prussian civilization must have appeared to cultivated French and British
contemporaries.
CONSCRIPTION IN GERMANY 83
was being beheaded on a scaffold erected just
under his window." 1
But Voltaire (it may be said) had quarrelled with
Frederick the Great, and wrote frankly as a satirist.
Let us compare him, then, with an entirely unex-
ceptionable witness a shrewd and plain-spoken
Scottish doctor who described German society in
1779, at a time when Kant and Goethe had already
developed their powers, while Schiller was destined
to burst into fame two years later. Dr. John Moore
was father to the hero of Corunna. He wrote in
1779, after witnessing a review in Berlin :
" A review, such as that which I endeavoured to describe,
is undoubtedly one of the finest shows that can be exhibited :
but when a spectator of sensibility reflects on the means
by which these poor fellows are brought to this wonderful
degree of accuracy, he will pay a severe tax for this splendid
exhibition. The Prussian discipline on a general view is
beautiful ; in detail it is shocking.
When the young rustic is brought to the regiment, he is
at first treated with a degree of gentleness ; he is instructed
by words only how to walk, and to hold up his head, and
to carry his firelock, and he is not punished, though he
1 Compare the stories told by the famous Dr. Zimmermann, who
attended Frederick the Great in his last illness, and was one of his
greatest admirers. He writes of Frederick's royal father : " I do not
know whether his illness had begun when he drove the citizens of Berlin
from the public walk, and sent them to Spandau, merely because they
were fond of walking ; when he reduced the pension of a privy counsellor
from 1,000 to 400 crowns because, passing one evening before his house,
he had seen several lights in it, and because he learned that this counsellor
had company to sup with him ; and, lastly, when he spat one day in a
lady's bosom because he found it too openly displayed " (Dr. Zimmer-
mann' s Conversations with the Late King of Prussia, translated from the Last
Edition, London, 1791, p. 95).
84 COMPULSORY MILITARY SERVICE
should not succeed in his earliest attempts : they allow his
natural awkwardness and timidity to wear off by degrees :
they seem cautious of confounding him at the beginning,
or driving him to despair, and take care not to pour all the
terrors of their discipline upon his astonished senses at once.
When he has been a little familiarised to his new state, he
is taught the exercise of the fire-lock, first alone, and after-
wards with two or three of his companions. This is not
entrusted to a corporal or serjeant ; it is the duty of a
subaltern officer. In the park at Berlin, every morning
may be seen the Lieutenants of the different regiments
exercising with the greatest assiduity, sometimes a single
man, at other times three or four together ; and now, if
the young recruit shows neglect or remissness, his attention
is roused by the officer's cane, which is applied with aug-
menting energy, till he has acquired the full command of
his fire-lock. He is taught steadiness under arms, and
the immobility of a statue ; he is informed, that all his
members are to move only at the word of command, and
not at his own pleasure ; that speaking, coughing, sneezing,
are all unpardonable crimes ; and when the poor lad is
accomplished to their mind, they give him to understand,
that now it is perfectly known what he can do, and therefore
the smallest deficiency will be punished with rigour. And
although he should destine every moment of his time, and
all his attention, to cleaning his arms, taking care of his
clothes, and practising the manual exercise, it is but barely
possible for him to escape punishment ; and if his captain
happens to be of a capricious or cruel disposition, the
ill-fated soldier loses the poor chance of that possibility.
As for the officers, they are not indeed subjected to
corporal punishment, but they are obliged to bestow as
unremitting attention on duty as the men. The subalterns
are almost constantly on guard, or exercising the recruits :
the Captain knows that he will be blamed by his Colonel,
CONSCRIPTION IN GERMANY 85
and can expect no promotion, if his company be not as
perfect as the others : the Colonel entirely loses the King's
favour if his regiment should fail in any particular : the
General is answerable for the discipline of the brigade, or
garrison, under his immediate command. The King will
not be satisfied with the General's report on that subject,
but must examine everything himself : so that from his
Majesty, down to the common sentinel, every individual is
alert. And as the King, who is the chief spring, and
primum mobile of the whole, never relaxes, the faculties
of every subordinate person are kept in constant exertion :
the consequence of which is, that the Prussian army is the
best disciplined, and the readiest for service at a minute's
warning, of any now in the world, or perhaps that ever
was in it. Other monarchs have attempted to carry
discipline to the same degree of perfection, and have begun
this plan with astonishing eagerness. But a little time, and
new objects, have blunted their keenness, and divided their
attention. They have then delegated the execution to a
commander in chief, he to another of inferior rank, and thus
a certain degree of relaxation having once taken place, soon
pervades the whole system ; but the perseverance of the
King of Prussia is without example, and is perhaps the most
remarkable part of his extraordinary character." l
He recurs to the subject in his next letter (p. 155) :
" As to the common men, the leading idea of the Prussian
discipline is to reduce them, in many respects, to the nature
of machines ; that they may have no volition of their own,
but be actuated solely by that of their officers ; that they
may have such a superlative dread of those officers as
annihilates all fear of the enemy, and that they may move
1 View of Society and Manners in France, Switzerland and Germany,
London, 1779, vol. ii p. 144 (Letter 65).
86 COMPULSORY MILITARY SERVICE
forwards when ordered, without deeper reasoning or more
concern than the fire-locks they carry along with them.
Considering the length to which this system is carried, it
were to be wished that it could be carried still further, and
that those unhappy men, while they retained the faculties
of hearing and obeying orders, could be deprived of every
other kind of feeling.
The common state of slavery in Asia, or that to which
people of civil professions in the most despotic countries
are subject, is freedom in comparison of this kind of military
slavery. The former are not continually under the eyes of
their tyrants, but for long intervals of time may enjoy life
without restraint, and as their taste dictates ; but all the
foreign soldiers in this service, and those of the natives, who
are suspected of any intention to desert, and consequently
never allowed furloughs, are always under the eye of
somebody, who has the power, and too often the inclination,
to controul every action of their bodies, and every desire
of their hearts."
Again, in letter 67 (p. 161) he reports a long
conversation with " a Prussian officer of character " :
" I then mentioned a fact which appeared to me still more
extraordinary. A hussar, at the last review, had fallen
from his horse at full gallop, and was so much bruised, that
it was found necessary to carry him to the hospital ; and
I had been assured, that as soon as the man should be
perfectly recovered, he would certainly be punished for
having fallen. Now, continued I, though a man may be
a little careless about his hat, it cannot be imagined that
this hussar was not seriously inclined to keep his seat ; for
by falling, he might have broke his neck, or have been trod
to death : Or, even if you choose to suppose that he did
not ride with all the attention he ought, yet, as he received
one severe punishment by the fall, it would be cruel to
CONSCRIPTION IN GERMANY 87
inflict another. I have nothing to oppose to the solidity
of your argument, replied the Prussian, but that General
Seidlitz, who was the best officer of cavalry in the world,
first introduced this piece of cruelty, since which it is
certain that the men have not fallen so often. The King
imagines, continued the Prussian, that discipline is the soul
of an army ; that men in the different nations of Europe
are, in those qualities which are thought necessary for a
soldier, nearly ou a par ; that in two armies of equal numbers,
the degrees of discipline will determine how far one is
superior to the other. His great object, therefore, is to
keep his own army at the highest possible degree of perfec-
tion in this essential point. If that could be done by gentle
means, undoubtedly he would prefer them. He is not
naturally of a cruel disposition. His general conduct to
officers of rank proves this. Finding that the hopes of
promotion, and a sense of honour, are sufficient motives to
prompt them to their duty, he never has had recourse,
except in cases of treachery, to any higher punishment than
dismissing them. In some remarkable instances, he has
displayed more mildness than is usual in any other service.
Some of his Generals have allowed towns of the greatest
importance to be taken by surprise ; others have lost
entire armies, yet he never was influenced by popular
clamour, or by the ruinous condition of his own affairs in
consequence of those losses, to put any of the unfortunate
generals to death. And when any of them have been
suspended for a certain time, or declared, by the decree of a
court-martial, incapable of a military command under him,
he has never aggravated the sentence by any opprobrious
commentary, but rather alleviated it by some clause or
message, which spared the honour of the condemned general.
The common soldiers cannot be kept to their duty by
mild treatment. Severe and immediate corporal punish-
ment is found absolutely necessary. Not to use it at all, or
88 COMPULSORY MILITARY SERVICE
to use it in a degree incapable of producing the full effect,
would be weakness. Soldiers are sometimes punished for
slips, which perhaps all their attention cannot prevent ;
because, though it is impossible to ascertain that any
particular man could have avoided them, yet experience has
taught that, by punishing every blunder, fewer are com-
mitted on the whole. This sufficiently justifies the practice
of what you call cruelty, but which is in reality salutary
discipline ; for an individual suffering unjustly is not so
great an evil in an army, as the permitting negligence to
pass unpunished. To allow ten guilty men to escape, rather
than risk the punishing of one innocent person, may be a
good maxim in morality, or hi civil government, but the
reverse will be found preferable in military discipline.
When the Prussian had finished his discourse, I said, You
seem to neglect all those incitements which are supposed to
influence the minds of soldiers ; the love of glory, the love
of country, you count as nothing. You address yourself
to no passion but one. Fear is the only instrument by
which you compel your common men to deeds of intrepidity.
Never mind the instrument, replied the Prussian, but look
to the effect."
Finally (letter 68, p. 172) :
" Instead of saints or crucifixes, the King intends that
the churches of Berlin shall be ornamented with the portraits
of men who have been useful to the State. Those of the
Marshals Schwerin, Keith, Winterfeld, and some others,
are already placed in the great Lutheran Church." 1
The men thus treated were either Prussian
peasants or foreigners. For the Prussian army
1 This is noted also by Bernardin de St- Pierre (Etudes de la Nature.
xii.) who adds, " The military enthusiasm kindled by this sight is incon-
ceivable."
CONSCRIPTION IN GERMANY 89
system of this date corresponded very closely to
that of France before the Revolution. Men were
enlisted partly by voluntary recruiting, partly by
an iniquitous law which fell upon the poor alone.
The Prussian peasant was still a serf : and in that
capacity he owed seivice to the lord of the manor
the Junker. 1 The commissions, therefore, were
reserved for the Junker and his family, while the
ranks were filled partly by peasants taken from the
land, partly by hired outsiders. Out of the 160,000
soldiers in Frederick the Great's armies, 90,000 were
non-Prussians. 2
1 For justification of this and similar comparisons or contrasts in this
chapter, see Sir John Seeley's testimony in Appendix V. of this book.
2 Colonel A. Keene in Nineteenth Century and After, for Feb. 1915,
p. 271. Bernardin de St-Pierre asserts that a large number of these
foreigners were French deserters (fitudes de la Nature, No. xiii.). Moore
describes the extraordinarily stringent precautions which were taken
with all Frederick's foreign soldiers, to prevent desertions. Compare
Comb. Mod. Hist. vol. vi. p. 215. " At the end of Frederick William I.'s
reign half the army, 40,000 men, consisted of foreigners, while the other
40,000 were drawn from home."
CHAPTER VII
CONSCKIPTION AND CAESAEISM IN
GERMANY (II.)
NOR did Prussia stand alone in her militarism ;
some other German states followed much the same
system. The Landgrave of Hesse-Cassel, writes
Moore, "keeps on foot 16,000 men in time of
peace, disciplined according to the Prussian plan " ;
and it is one of his great amusements to drill some
of them " when the weather is very bad, in
the dining-room of his palace." This Hessian
army was at least five times more numerous, in
proportion to population, than the British army
before the Seven Years' War. Moreover, the Land-
grave owed a large portion of his income to the hire
of these soldiers to England, and to the retaining-fee
which England gave him even in time of peace.
For this prince was, of course, the most unabashed
seller of human flesh in the civilized world. His
press-gang worked regularly to pick up recruits,
who were drilled after the Prussian system, formed
into regiments, and sold abroad. No words could
put this more eloquently than the following bald
CONSCRIPTION IN GERMANY 91
paragraph from the Annual Register for the year
1786 (pt. ii. p. 48) :
'Nov. 21. At the bank [of England] 471000 3 per
cent, stock was transferred to Mr Van Otten on account of
the Landgrave of Hesse, so much being due on Hessian
soldiers lost in the American war, at 30 a man."
During the American war, he had supplied us
with 23,000 soldiers from a territory not larger
than the Principality of Wales ; and he received, in
all, nearly 23 million dollars as the price of their
blood. l
Moreover, Moore counts it for righteousness when
he finds a prince who does not sell his men. Of
the Margrave of Baden-Durlach he writes :
"Probably his principles and dispositions prevent him
from thinking of filling his coffers by hiring his subjects to
foreign powers. If he were so inclined there is no manner
of doubt that he might sell the persons of his subjects as
soldiers or employ them in any other way he should think
proper ; for he, as well as the other sovereign Princes in
Germany, has an unlimited power over his people. If you
ask the question in direct terms of a German, he will answer
in the negative ; and will talk of certain rights which the
subjects enjoy, and that they can appeal to the Great
Council or General Diet of the Empire for relief. But, after
all his ingenuity and distinctions, you find that the barriers
which protect the peasant from the power of the prince are so
very weak that they are hardly worth keeping up ; and that
the only security that the peasant Jias for his person or
property must proceed from the moderation, good sense,
and justice, of his sovereign " (vol. i. p. 384).
1 Moore, I.e. pp. 43 fi. ; Meyer's Hand-Lexicon s.v> Hessen-Kassel.
92 COMPULSORY MILITARY SERVICE
An extremely interesting account of this " soul-
selling " system may be found in the autobiography
of a fairly well-known man of letters J. G. Seume.
The book, in spite of its brevity and its extreme
human interest, is so little known in England that
some readers will probably welcome a considerable
extract from it (Appendix VI.). Readers of Thac-
keray will hardly need to be reminded of Barry
Lyndon, chapters v. to vii.
With a military system of this kind, Prussia and
Austria entered upon the wars of the French
Revolution. In both countries (and, in fact,
almost everywhere), the State had the theoretical
right of calling every man out for war ; but, in
fact, custom had long limited this liability to
the poorest and most helpless classes. 1 Things
went well enough with these armies until the
French levee en masse. Then the tide began to
turn ; the Allies were confronted not only with
overwhelming numbeis, but with a new spirit in
the French soldier. Early in 1794, the Archduke
of Austria, as Emperor of Germany, proposed to
meet this general levy of French by a general levy
of Germans. To this, the King of Prussia opposed
an uncompromising refusal. The reasons he gave
were extraordinarily similar to those which have
been more or less officially urged in Britain during
this present war. The King of Prussia pleaded
1 Except in Prussia, where the aristocracy were compelled to send
their sons to serve as officers, Camb. Mod. Hist. vol. vi. p. 217.
CONSCKIPTION IN GERMANY 93
that the present system was working well ; that
the removal of so many hands would ruin agri-
culture ; last, but not least, that to arm all his
subjects would be " infinitely dangerous " in a
political sense. 1 What the King feared as a result
of Universal Service was not despotism, but
democracy the contagion of the French Revolu-
tionary spirit. This flat refusal of Prussia made
it hopeless to attempt any general call to arms
through the rest of Germany ; and the country
drifted steadily on towards military disaster. After
Jena, Prussia was subjected to the most intolerable
humiliations that any great state has suffered in
modern times. The smaller , states accepted the
Napoleonic conquest fairly easily ; they had never
enjoyed real national life, and the conqueror now
brought them an actual accession of social and
political liberty. We all know how urbanely the
great Goethe received the conquering Napoleon,
though few people seem to realize that he afterwards
publicly apologized for this lack of patriotism. 2
But with Prussia it was different. Napoleon knew
that Prussia would not thus be reconciled to him ;
so he set himself to annihilate her. The result, of
course, was a real national uprising ; a people's war
such as Prussia had never fought until now. After
Jena it was all the healthier elements of the nation
which not only accepted, but demanded, Com-
1 For this and the preceding assertions, see documents in Appendix VII.
2 Des Epimenides Erwachen, lines 793, 859.
94 COMPULSORY MILITARY SERVICE
pulsory Service for all. The creation of the modern
Prussian and German armies came from a national
impulse, to which the King lent himself as figure-
head. It was associated (as it had been in the
France of 1793) with an enormous step forward
in the organization of general education. As in
France, it enabled the people finally to drive out
the foreign oppressor. As in France, it abolished
at once nine-tenths of the degrading punishments
which had seemed necessary to discipline under the
old unjust system. 1 It was intimately associated,
again, with the abolition of serfdom. Even in the
strictest military sense, it worked enormously for
the education of the officers, as it has done in all
other countries where so many of the rank and
file are men of education. " After all that has been
said about the intelligence of the modern Prussian
officer and of Frederick the Great as a friend of
enlightenment, it may particularly surprise the
English reader to learn that of all the abuses of
Frederick's army, the worst was the extreme
ignorance of the officers. Yet there is no contro-
versy about the fact." 2 The most prejudiced
antimilitarist cannot read the second volume of
Seeley's Stein without realizing that all this was,
on the whole, a real national regeneration. Nor
1 " During the reign of Frederick William I. there were no fewer than
30,000 desertions, and this in spite of the brutal penalty of flogging
through the line " (Camb. Mod. Hist. vol. vi. p. 214 ; ef. p. 215).
2 Seeley's Stein, ii. 122. Colonel F. N. Maude, again, lays special
stress on this education of the Prussian officer by the privates ( War and
the World's Life, 1907, p. 10). So does Stoffel in his Reports.
CONSCRIPTION IN GERMANY 95
can he, in face of the actual facts, contend that the
Prussia of to-day is less civilized than that Prussia
of a century ago, in which the King was unem-
barrassed by anything resembling a Parliament or
a Constitution, and could therefore shrink from the
idea of arming all his subjects as an " infinitely
dangerous " project, fit only for French Revolu-
tionaries.
But the story must be brought briefly down to
the present day.
Laing, in 1840-50, scents far less political danger
from the Compulsory Service of Prussia than from
her Compulsory Education and her Bureaucracy. 1
He thinks the Prussian system of Universal Service
will break down under stress of war ; but he admits
that, politically, it works in some important
directions for democracy. He sees clearly that, on
the whole, the Nation in Arms is not a convenient
instrument for a war which cannot be represented
as defensive. He notes, it is true, that Germany in
general has now less political freedom than all the
minor German states had enjoyed under Napoleon's
domination ; but he makes no attempt to trace
the influence of conscription here ; for of course
everyone knew that they had been far more
strictly conscripted under Napoleon. He sees
clearly that the main difference between the English
and Prussian character depends upon the slow
1 Notes, ed. 1854, pp. 78-9 ; Observations, ed. 1850, pp. 193, 917, 220,
243, 268-272.
96 COMPULSORY MILITARY SERVICE
development of many generations. With all his
dislike of the German professoriate and their
influence ("as great as that of the medieval
clergy "), he sees that the dynasties would have
had much more power but for these teachers.
:c The German thrones have been undermined by
the German Universities " ; and it was the pro-
fessors who made the Revolution of 1848. 1 Laing
was a strong Radical ; but to him, as to most
British Radicals of that day, the German pro-
fessorial Radicalism of 1848 seemed excessive and
Utopian as of course it was.
The Professors, then, discovered in 1848 that
class-room education is not everything. The school
and the university can do much ; but they cannot,
in forty years, obliterate centuries of political
subjection. The Professor-made Parliament of
Frankfort had undertaken to create a United
Germany ; but its quarrels and its practical
impotence rendered it the laughing-stock of Europe.
German culture, in the most real sense, in the
sense of man's mastery of his environment, was
as yet only skin-deep. 2 Of the Germans even
to-day it may be said as Vandal says of the French
1 Practising lawyers were even more numerous in the Frankfort
Parliament than professors, and more numerous still were the men who,
having taken law-degrees at the Universities, were now stipendiary
magistrates or civil servants. But all these men were the product of
the professor-system, and shared its doctrinaire narrowness.
2 Interesting quotations, showing how the main actors in the 1848
revolution awoke themselves to this national defect, may be found in
K. Jiirgens, Zur Gesch. d. deutschen Verfassungswerkes (Brunswick,
1850), vol. i. pp. 216-9.
CONSCRIPTION IN GERMANY 97
in 1799, that they have centuries of obedience in
their blood. Laing saw clearly that the really
great German literature existed only for the few ;
that even the newspapers were printed for a
comparatively small public, and that the multitude
had far less breadth of outlook than in Britain.
Fichte, one of the greatest German philosophers
and patriots, had already noted this a generation
earlier. 1 Germany was politically unripe, not be-
cause of the Professors or because of the Prussian
army, but in spite of her Professors, and in spite of
the just and democratic insistence upon equality of
military obligation in Prussia.
To Laing, in 1849, German Unity seemed a dream,
and not even a noble dream ; just as the Prussian
army seemed to him a citizen-rabble which the
French Regulars would easily put to rout. Thirteen
years later Bismarck came into office, strengthened
the army in the teeth of Liberal and Professorial
opposition, and with the help of that army won the
three wars which created the German Empire. In
1862, scarcely anybody had taken him seriously,
or imagined that he would hold office for more than
a few weeks. In 1871, the mass of the Professors
had already gone over to his side. 2 They form
even now the backbone of that National Liberal
party which was formed in 1867 out of the best and
1 Notes, pp. 130, 137 ; Observations, p. 275 ; Seeley's Stein, ii. 38.
2 For an interesting British view of this conversion of German Liberal-
ism by what seemed the irresistible logic of continuous victory in war,
see the Edinburgh Review for October, 1870, pp. 480, 490,
G
98 COMPULSOKY MILITAEY SERVICE
strongest elements of the old Liberal opposition ;
a party which puts Imperialism in the first place
and Liberalism in the second. But Bismarck
himself had to make great concessions. In 1867,
he had to base the Confederation, and in 1871, the
Empire, upon Universal Suffrage; because no
colourable excuse could be found for limiting the
vote in a country where all men were educated, and
all men were liable to the heaviest responsibilities
of national service. His old Conservative allies
cooled towards him after this, and broke with him
when he introduced Local Government, civil mar-
riage, and the lay control of schools. To keep his
hold on the people, he introduced State Insurance
for the workers a whole generation before our
British statesmen ventured upon so revolutionary
a step. If the German people has hitherto made
so little use of its opportunities, it is not because
conscription has benumbed democracy. It is
because democracy is, in its nature, a plant of slow
growth ; because, even when outward opportunities
of freedom are offered, it still needs inner experience
to make a man really free. On the whole, the wars
which created modern Germany under Prussian
leadership were just and essentially defensive.
These wars have been followed by a period of almost
unexampled expansion, prosperity, and inter-
national prestige. If, therefore, even the German
democracy allowed itself to be persuaded into war
in 1914, this is not because the Nation in Arms is a
CONSCRIPTION IN GERMANY 99
normally aggressive institution, but because it may
become exceptionally aggressive, as the French did
after the success of their Revolutionary war. 1 The
French have gradualty learned their lesson ; nobody
who knows that country can question its essential
pacificism in 1914, or the patience, dignity and
freedom from chauvinism with which France has
faced her terrible trials since then. When the
history of this war is written, and People is com-
pared with People by impartial historians, the palm
will probably be given by universal consent to the
great nation which invented the modern Armed
Nation in 1793, and regenerated herself by re-
asserting the universal principle in 1871. 2 And it
was a great Frenchman, a great Internationalist
and Pacificist, who protested before this war against
the superficial theory that Universal Service works,
in the long run, against Democracy. Jaur&s, who
knew the history of modern War and Peace move-
ments better, perhaps, than any statesman then
living, wrote in 1910 :
" There has never existed any democracy, however
pacific it might be, which could take root and endure
without guaranteeing its national independence. On the
other hand, no nation, however militarist it might be, has
ever been able to organize or save itself but by appealing
1 We must remember that the Frankfort democrats of 1848, in drawing
up their statement of the " Fundamental Rights " of all citizens, and
claiming equality for all before the law, added also that all must be liable
to military service.
2 See Seeley's remarks on a similar subject in Appendix VIII.
100 COMPULSORY MILITARY SERVICE
in some degree to the revolutionary forces of liberty. True,
the peoples have sometimes been duped, and have been
baulked of the democratic reward which by their national
effort they had earned. This was the case in Germany after
1815, and even after 1866 and 1870. But here, even they
have not been altogether baulked. The national victory
has always brought with it some share of democratic
victory. There is a great gulf between what Bismarck
proposed at the beginning of his career in the Prussian
Landtag, and the system of universal suffrage which he
had to grant to Germany in order to concentrate all its
forces. That universal suffrage, it is true, was neither so
dominant nor so free as it should have been ; yet, even
thus, it is essentially a democratic and revolutionary force
whose effects are slowly but invincibly developing." 1
Here, then, is the deliberate verdict of a man
whose temptations were all on the side of our
British pacificists. But, in the clear light of
history, he does not hesitate to admit that both
the Napoleonic episode, and the case of modern
Germany, are merely partial exceptions to the
general rule ; and that equality of military obliga-
tion spells, on the whole, not tyranny, but further
freedom.
1 UArmie Nouvelle, 2nd ed. (1915), p. 439, translated in Democracy
and Military Service (Simpkin, Marshall and Co.), 1916, chap. xii.
CHAPTER VIII
BEITISH DEMOCRACY AND VOLUNTARISM IN
THE GREAT FRENCH WAR
I. THE INITIAL BLUNDER
WE must now deal with a second class of apparent
exceptions to the rule that Universal Service is a
Democratic principle.
/e have seen that, in the cases of Napoleon and
(>f Imperial Germany, the connexion between
DJiscription andJlespotism proves, under analysis,
be temporary and accidental and incomplete,
lepends more on the defective political develop-
ment of the people, than on their over-development
in the direction of military organization. In many
ways, Napoleon would have found the British
system far better for his purposes a professional
army, an officer-caste, and recruits to be had in
proportion as the general could offer them greater
glory or increased pay. Even so advanced an
antimilitarist and socialist as Jaures, therefore,
agrees with other historians in treating the cases
as exceptions to the general rule.
But it is often urged that we have more serious
102 OtlMPULSOEY MTLITAEY SEKVICE
exceptions in the other direction ; that the great
Anglo-Saxon democracies are the most advanced
communities in the world ; and that in Anglo-
Saxondom the people not only dislike Universal
Service but what is more to the point have
succeeded precisely in virtue of their Voluntarism.
This argument, on the face of it, begs one very
important question and blinks one very striking
fact.
It begs the question of progress in civilization.
Outside our own borders, it is extremely probable
that the majority of voices will proclaim France
to be the most civilized power in the world. In any
case (to put the objection in its mildest form), it
is dangerous to base an important argument upon
a postulate which is so obviously liable to falsifica-
tion by national vanity. 1
Again, the argument entirely blinks the very
obvious and very inconvenient fact that Anglo-
Saxondom is not solid for Voluntarism. Our two
1 Compare Mr. Edison's words, printed in the Observer for Dec. 10,
1916. Mr. Edison does justice to Britain's share in this war, while
speaking very frankly of the conservative outlook which has so often
trammelled us. He adds, " But it is in France that we find the finest
phase of the tragic spectacle of the war. To me this war has proved that
France is the banner-nation of the world. In her we see a nation
really governed by the people, who really love it and will fight and
sacrifice themselves for it with an unselfish enthusiasm not seen else-
where. It may have been paralleled by the deeds of our Americans
in the days of our Revolutionary war ; but I doubt even that. ... In
France I see a nation which has sought and found more of the real
than any other nation in the world." A few months earlier, so sincere
a voluntarist as Mr. H. W. Massingham expressed almost equal admiration
for the French spirit as he had just seen it in Paris. He added : " Demo-
cratic France, bravest of the brave, fights on " (The Nation, March 26,
1916, p. 897).
DEMOCRACY AND VOLUNTARISM 103
most democratic colonies, on the contrary, have
for some years past been frankly Compulsorist ; and
in South Africa, again, Mr. Botha raised a forced
levy very early in this war, not only on grounds of
convenience, but also on principle. There were, he
explained, many burghers, the pick of the fighting
population, who would very naturally reason, " If
the national need is really so great as to justify our
leaving our farms, then it is for Government to say
so, and to call us out. Until then, we shall go on
minding our own business."
But, for the sake of argument, let us meet the
objector on his own ground. Let us stand, with
him, upon that assumption of Anglo-Saxon superio-
rity which is so flattering to our vanity. Let us,
again, with him, blink the fact that the most
democratic States of the British Empire are also
the most definitely Compulsorist. And let us see
whether, even after these concessions, the argument
from Democracy is not just as superficial, and just
as untenable, as the argument from Caesarism. It
ignores practically all British and American history
except that of the last generation or two ; it appeals
mainly to that class of mind which unconsciously
assumes that, for all practical purposes, the world's
experience began about the time that we ourselves
were born. It ignores also the attitude of America,
in the face of possibilities of war which have arisen
since . these words were first penned. Here, for
instance, are two newspaper-cuttings taken almost
104 COMPULSORY MILITARY SERVICE
at random. The Daily News wrote already on
December 12th, 1916 :
" In the turmoil of the Presidential election the vast
scheme of organizing the entire nation for war, which is now
being carried on in the United States, has not attracted
on this side of the Atlantic half the notice it has deserved. . . .
There are recommendations made for the [military] training
of America's 2,000,000 children between the ages of 14
and 18."
And in the Times of May 12th, 1917, we find at last:
" An agreement has been reached by the Committees of
the Senate and House of Representatives upon the various
amendments to the Army Bill. The clauses authorizing
the raising of an expeditionary force by voluntary enlist-
ment have been eliminated, and the age of the men liable
to selective draft has been fixed at from 21 to 30 years
inclusive. The agreement is welcomed by the entire
Press, which urges Congress to ( hurry up ' with the rest
of the Government's programme."
That Anglo-Saxon democracies have succeeded
with the Voluntary principle in peace-time is, of
course, perfectly true. Nothing is easier than to
create an army on paper, and to maintain the
legend of its efficiency in Parliament. Under long
peace, the nation becomes profoundly disinterested
in the army as such, and begins to doubt, as
the years wear on, whether it is even a necessary
nuisance. In any case, the severest criticism
naturally takes the form of reduction in expendi-
ture. It is an incontrovertible fact, open to
verification by any one who, studies Hansard and the
DEMOCRACY AND VOLUNTARISM 105
division-lists, that many of the men who insisted
most emphatically on Naval reductions were the
same men who voted military reductions on the ex-
press plea that the Navy is our one safeguard. Such
absurdities are easy in normal times of peace.
The real trial comes at the exceptional time,
the time of war. Does Anglo-Saxon experience really
show the superiority of Voluntarism for bring-
ing war to a speedy and satisfactory conclusion ?
While avoiding present controversies as much as
possible, we may fairly refer to present events
so far as they are undisputed and indisputable.
One such event is this : that the British Parlia-
ment, by an overwhelming majority, did at last
pass a Compulsion Bill, and that those who
withdrew their opposition at the second reading
did so avowedly on the grounds that if a Dissolution
had been resorted to, the overwhelming majority
of votes would have supported the measure. Let
the reader calculate how far we must look back to
find a real parallel to this a measure so definitely
reversing the policy of more than two generations,
calling upon the country to accept not a gift but
a burden, and involving even personal humiliation
to three-quarters of the members who voted for it ;
since it was notorious that, a few months earlier,
they would have scoffed at such a measure. How
long is it since the Nation or the Parliament has
been called upon to give such a proof of sincerity as
was involved in this reversal of policy ?
106 COMPULSORY MILITARY SERVICE
A still more significant occurrence, perhaps, is
the extraordinary unanimity of the United States
in following our example when they found them-
selves at war.
When the events of this war are studied in detail,
it is probable that facts will be published which
will even strengthen this argument. But it is better
to turn back to our last great war, which can be
studied without bitterness of controversy, and in
which our policy has been minutely analyzed by
one of the best living authorities on Military
History. Mr. J. W. Fortescue has published, as
a supplement to his great History of the British Army,
a volume entitled The County Lieutenancies and
the Army, 1803-1814- Into these 300 pages he
has compressed his studies, not only of all the
printed sources available, but also of nearly a
hundred thousand manuscript documents, of
different sorts, now at the War Office and at
Windsor Castle. It is impossible to tell the story
better than by summarizing Mr. Fortescue's account,
which should certainly be read in the original by
all who can find time to study this subject. And
let the reader keep in mind from page to page,
not only the question whether Voluntarism proved
successful during this crisis of our fate, but also
the further question how far real Voluntarism
survived at all, and how far it gave way to a
pseudo-Voluntarism whose advantages were purely
political, while, from the points of view of social
DEMOCRACY AND VOLUNTARISM 107
justice or military efficiency, it combined the
defects of Voluntarism and Compulsion.
When war broke out again with France in May,
1803, the Prime Minister was Addington, who had
been Speaker, and one of the best Speakers that
had ever sat in the Chair. But his gifts were
mainly parliamentary ; and, in this matter of
recruiting, his main object was to take the line of
least parliamentary or popular resistance. The
result was a weak compromise which not only failed
under Addington himself, but left a fatal heritage
to his successors. Compulsion was freely applied,
but in odious and unbusiness-like forms. Like
France before the Revolution, and Prussia before
Jena, we practised conscription with a cynical
partiality which made it morally indefensible, while
crippling its efficiency as a military system.
In Mr. Fortescue's pages, we see Parliament first
passing an Act of the kind already tried under Anne,
to levy a certain number of men for the Regular
Army and the Navy from every parish in the
country. The parishes, of course, produced their
least desirable inhabitants ; and these Acts operated
mainly upon " the criminal and vagrant classes." l
" The measure was a total failure so far as the Army
was concerned, and in the Navy it was generally
considered, from the bad character of the men
1 See p. 2 of Army Blue Book (Militia Ballot), published July 29,
1875. This gives a brief, and generally trustworthy, history of British
experiments in military compulsion. Where no further indication is
given, references in the text are to pages of Mr. Fortescue's book.
108 COMPULSORY MILITARY SERVICE
produced, to have been the chief cause of the
Mutiny of 1797 " (4). This was already under the
younger Pitt. Then, under Addington, came a
series of acts which testify to the folly of temporizing
under crisis of war. Three Acts were passed
between March 24 and the end of April. A fourth
and fifth were passed on June 11 ; this last " on
the face of it, a half-hearted measure " (pp. 23-25).
" Then came a new complication," and two new
Acts on June 24 and July 8 (26). "Meanwhile
the Government had decided, or thought it had
decided, upon a definite plan for Volunteers " ;
hence another Act (July 6). " This Measure had
not been law for a fortnight when, on the 18th of
July, Government brought in yet another bill to
amend the Defence Act of the llth of June."
This was called the " Levy en Masse Act," and was
carefully calculated to render any real levy of the
whole people, as in France, impossible. A tenth
Army Act was passed on the same day as this
(July 27) : " Then, though the Levy en Masse Act
was the second of its kind, it had hardly been passed
before it was found to need amendment " (llth
August). The same day, another Act was passed
" ordaining the qualification of an effective Yeoman
to be twelve days' exercise, and of an effective
Infantry Volunteer to be twenty-four days' exercise
in the year."
Another Act, of the same date, patched up a hole
in one of its predecessors (pp. 33-35). This made
DEMOCRACY AND VOLUNTARISM 109
thirteen Army Acts in a single session ; and yet the
problem was not half solved. For, even in face of
Napoleon, the Ministry were less concerned for
absolute efficiency than for choosing the line of least
parliamentary resistance. In those days when even
the lower middle classes were scarcely represented,
the line of least resistance was undoubtedly that of
allowing money-payment as an alternative to
personal service.
The "plague spot of substitution " was now even
worse in Britain than it had been in despotic France
and despotic Prussia. " Throughout the whole of
the vast correspondence upon the subject the most
remarkable point is, that no one, from the parish
overseer to the Secretary of State, ever expected a
principal to accept service in the Militia. It was
assumed in every quarter that substitutes would be
provided practically in every case ; and, in fact,
in 1803-5, the ballot was simply an instrument for
compelling the parishes 'to organise at their own
expense recruiting depots for the Militia " (p. 40).
" It is an actual fact that in the ranks of the Middle-
sex Militia, whose quota (including the Supplemen-
tary Militia) was over 4500 men, there was but
one principal to be found ; and when his time of
service expired in 1808, the Lord Lieutenant begged
to be allowed to keep him as a curiosity " (47). l
1 Compare the earlier experience of 1759-60 (Blue Book, p. 2). " The
quota fixed by the Act was 32,100 men, but of these, in July 1759, only
17,436 were raised (6,280 being in embodied service), and in December
1760, only 24,093, Lord Barrington (who prepared the Parliamentary
110 COMPULSORY MILITARY SERVICE
A class of crimps was created who dealt openly
in men for sale. " Robert Craufurd said openly in
the House of Commons that, out of 4000 men
raised under the Act by June 1805, 2292 had been
obtained by payment to crimps " (155). The
man thus sold very often deserted in a few days, to
sell himself elsewhere. " At the beginning of April
1803, after endless balloting, the Southwark district
of Surrey had produced only 22 men out of its quota
of 288 ; and the Clerk of General Meeting declared
the task of raising the rest to be hopeless unless the
substitutes could be at once carried off to head-
quarters, dressed, powdered, and furnished with
queues, so as to make them easily recognisable "
(47). The main prejudice against the Militia was
due to the fact that " contrary to the spirit of the
elder Pitt's original act, personal service was not
insisted upon and the Militia was not made a truly
national force " (48). The almost incredible in-
justices as to exemption, due simply to the hasty
and perfunctory character of these Acts, are
detailed on pp. 52-3 of Mr. Fortescue's book.
Meanwhile the difficulty with the so-called
Volunteers was equally pressing. Twelve days'
drill in the Yeomanry, or twenty-four days' drill
in the Volunteer Infantry, exempted a man from
estimate) having recorded that they were almost all substitutes, and
that any success attributed to the scheme was due to the fact that such
officers as joined were ' men of the first nobility and gentry, full of spirit
and fond of the thing their rank and authority having great weight
with the common men.' "
DEMOCRACY AND VOLUNTARISM 111
any further call on his military services. " How
ministers contrived to commit this extraordinary
blunder is a mystery ... it is certain from Sec. 8
of the Army of Reserve Act, and indeed from their
own admissions, that they had no intention of
granting this exemption ; and indeed for some time
they would not confess that they had granted it "
(65). Mr. Fortescue, while quoting one appalling
instance, which shows that it might have been due
to mere ignorance on the part of Ministers, is
inclined to believe certain contemporary indications
that the clause was smuggled in "by some mistake
or conspiracy," though this would have been
impossible, as he shows, without the connivance
of some Ministers, at any rate. By August 18,
1803, this arrangement had called forth such a
multitude of pseudo- Volunteers that the Secretary
for War had actually to issue a circular against
" the Inconvenience which must unavoidably attend
the carrying of the Volunteer system to an unlimited
extent " (67). These regulations provided that the
Volunteers might not, in any country, grow to more
than six times the number of the Militia. But
" the fresh outburst of murmurs which greeted this
new attempt to keep [the Volunteers] within
reasonable limits " proved the decisive factor here.
The direction of the Volunteers was transferred
from the War Office to the Home Office, which
again took the line of least resistance. All not
illegally-constituted Volunteer corps were to be
112 COMPULSOEY MILITAEY SERVICE
recognised ; but the rule of proportion (six Volun-
teers to one Militiaman) must still be kept to
some extent : that is, the extra Volunteers must
be " without any allowance for pay, arms, or
clothing, and without claim to exemption from any
ballot." " Thus," adds Mr. Fortescue, " the ques-
tion was at last decided, so far as rules could decide
it ; and the country was finally committed to the
maintenance of a huge amorphous mass of undis-
ciplined men, subject to two different Acts of
Parliament, two different sets of regulations, and
two different spheres of service, namely, the Military
District and Great Britain at large ; the whole of
them immune from the Militia ballot under one set
of conditions prescribed by the Militia Act of 1802,
and from the Army of Reserve under a second set
ordained by the Billeting Act of 1803 " (68)!
And now the blunder of the Exemption Clause
(which we have already described in his own words
from p. 65) began to produce its effect. The
Ministry attempted to explain the clause away,
and referred in despair to the Attorney General, who
was compelled to decide that the clause actually
gave exemption to all who had done their 12 or
24 drills. They had now to face the indignation
of the real Volunteers, the men who had joined
under no such impression. " The Lieutenant of
Roxburgh announced boldly that he differed from
the Law-Officers ; and many magistrates of the
West Riding of Yorkshire equally declared them-
DEMOCRACY AND VOLUNTARISM 113
selves unconvinced. They could not believe that
the old Volunteers, who had come forward from
patriotic motives, were to be put on the same footing
with the new, who, as the Lieutenant put it, were
only Volunteers under compulsion. In counties
where there had hitherto been hesitation on the part
of Volunteers to present themselves, there was now
great eagerness to form corps, for the sake of the ex-
emption ; and thus the Government found its scheme
for the Volunteers legally defined in a form which
was exactly contrary to its own intentions" (69).
The net result was, that there were 450,000
Volunteers by the end of the year in terms of
present population of the British Isles, this would
be roughly a million and a quarter. But the
effect on the Militia was disastrous ; " the price
of substitutes rose higher and higher, and their
quality sank lower and lower. ... To obtain
recruits at all in North Britain, it was necessary to
violate the law " (70). The confusion was increased
by mismanagement ; " the lieutenant of Berkshire
asked plaintively how he was to distribute 603
muskets among 2673 men " : the Lieutenant of
Pembrokeshire wrote : " Their zeal is cooling ; and
I firmly believe that in the course of a month the
greater part or the whole will go to the right about/'
Mr. Fortescue fills five pages with similar com-
plaints (85-90). He sums up (p. 119) :
" the really amazing thing is that after nine years of war,
from 1793 to 1802, after many threatened invasions of
114 COMPULSORY MILITARY SERVICE
England and one actual invasion of Ireland, the wisdom
of Ministers and of Parliament should have been unable to
produce an Act which could be accepted heartily by the
whole country to govern the training of its population for
defence. The task, it must be abundantly confessed, was
no easy one ; but after review of the proceedings of Adding-
ton's Ministry it can hardly be said, I think, that they shone
in the preparation of England for war. Still it must be
remembered that Addington was preceded by Pitt, and
was working more or less under his protection ; and that it
was Pitt and no other who, under some unhappy inspiration,
originated the whole of the Volunteer system, and started
it definitely and irretrievably in the wrong direction."
CHAPTER IX
BEITISH DEMOCKACY AND VOLUNTAEISM IN
THE GEEAT FEENCH WAE
II. "PAPERING OVER THE CRACKS"
SUCH is a brief history of the attempt of these
parliamentary tacticians to solve the military
problem along the lines of least political resistance.
In May, 1804, Addington went out and the younger
Pitt came in again. Pitt, by universal consent, was
not a great War Minister ; and, though he realized
the necessity of a Reserve to feed the field-armies
steadily with recruits, he attempted this by radically
unsound methods.- His Bill was criticized by
members who foretold its weak points pretty
exactly ; one of them insisted that there was no
remedy but to compel all men to train for home
defence, and then to offer really generous induce-
ments for service abroad. 1 But "the arguments
1 How little Pitt rested upon democratic principle in his avoidance
of general compulsion may be gathered from his earlier measure of 1796.
In this, he had attempted to compel all the game-keepers in Great
Biitain (estimated at about 7,000) either to " volunteer " for military
service at home, or to throw up their licences. See Annual Register
for 1797, p. 120; and Monthly Magazine for Oct. 1796, p. 742.
116 COMPULSORY MILITARY SERVICE
of the opponents of the Bill were thrown away.
Pitt thought that he had made a master-stroke by
turning the parish officers into recruiting-sergeants,
and would listen to no prophecies of evil" (131).
It was practically the last of his great legislative
enactments, and it was a failure. It was patched
up later on, but " nothing could galvanize that
unhappy measure into life."
An analysis of its working, at the end of 1805,
showed " that of all the men obtained under the
Act, three-fifths had been produced by ten counties,
and two-fifths by eighty-one remaining counties of
the United Kingdom ; and, further, that five-sixths
of the whole had been supplied by twenty counties,
while among the rest, twenty-five actually had
not furnished a man. The reasons put forward
to account for this failure of the Act were various ;
though all the Lieutenants concurred in the opinion
that the parish-officers, from ignorance and negli-
gence, had made but indifferent recruiting agents "
(154). Like all half-measures of the kind, it had
overdriven the willing horse, and left the shirker
untouched. " The Lieutenant of Caermarthen
reminded the Government that in the American
War a battalion had been raised in his county and
had been sent to Goree, from which not a private
returned home, and added that in Merthyr-Tydvyl
there were to be found not only high wages, but
total impunity for all deserters, no man daring to
execute the King's warrant therein " (Ibid.). Nelson
DEMOCRACY AND VOLUNTARISM 117
saved us at Trafalgar, while we were still blundering
at home. As the Blue Book puts it with legal
caution on p. 4 : " [Pitt's] Act was repealed at the
instance of Lord Grenville's ministry ; and, as the
counties were relieved from the fines then due to
the Exchequer, amounting to more than 1,000,100
sterling, the Act was not (I apprehend) a success."
The actual amount of the fines was, in fact,
"1,800,000, a sum which could never have been
collected " (164).
Windham, as War Minister under Grenville,
proposed compulsory national training for all,
except such as had already volunteered. " In fact,
despite a few vehement protestants to the contrary,
the House appeared to favour some form of com-
pulsory training. The one doubtful point was,
how should that training be carried out ; and
Windham left far too much to chance " (169).
This would, in fact, have been conscription for home
defence, and the Blue Book frankly uses that
word ; but it resulted only in another juggle with
the Ballot. " The Act was put in operation to the
extent of balloting and enrolling the men in the
Militia, but no men were ever trained under it "
(Blue Book, p. 5). It became law in July, 1806 ;
in March, 1807, the Ministry fell, and Castlereagh
had to take up Windham's task.
In his first statement to the House, Castlereagh
proposed to drop the training part of Windham's
scheme, and only to utilize its machinery for the
118 COMPULSORY MILITARY SERVICE
Militia Ballot (181). The injustices of this new
Ballot at least equalled those of the old. Mr.
Fortescue tells in detail the wearisome story of
expedients and after-thoughts, of blunders and
subterfuges, through which the Government led a
people which would have welcomed a more decided
lead. Only by such cumulative evidence, (as he
rightly contends), can the historian "show how
infinitely the natural obstacles to the levying of
recruits may be increased by hasty and ill-considered
enactments, and even more by additional Acts
passed to amend and explain the same. The root
of the matter, of course, lay in the absence of a
definite policy, the inevitable result of which was
the hurried abandonment of one set of expedients,
and the equally precipitate adoption of another
set. ... It is a reproach to our statesmen that
such fiction should still have abounded after
fourteen years of almost unbroken war " (190).
Crimping became worse than ever ; even Army
officers added to their income in this way. " In
one case a man was engaged for the Warwick
militia by a corporal for a bounty of 10 ; the
corpora] sold him to a sergeant for 18 ; the
sergeant made him over to a crimping publican for
some unrecorded price ; and the publican finally
disposed of him to a parish officer for 27 6s." (191).
In this same district " two hundred children had
been furnished as substitutes, who might grow into
men, but were at present only fit for drummers.
DEMOCRACY AND VOLUNTARISM 119
And, beyond all question, vast numbers of the
so-called men, all over England, were even as these
children of Warwick " (Ibid.).
As to the rest of the home force, " whatever the
volunteers may have been in 1804, they stood
revealed in 1807 in their primitive condition as an
armed rabble." " With this stern fact before him,
Castlereagh spent the winter of 1807 in devising
means for replacing this rabble by something which
should return better value for the money expended
upon it " (200). He really did abolish substitution
in the Ballot for the Local (as distinguished from the
General) Militia, and did something to utilize the
force for a scheme of general compulsory home
training, modelled upon Windham's. His measure,
says the Blue Book, on the strength of official figures
published, " may be considered as having been
successful " (6). At any rate, it seems to represent
the high-water mark of success during the whole
war. But Mr. Fortescue, who goes far deeper
in 1909 than the Blue Book had gone in 1875, has
no difficulty in showing that even this measure,
after all our experience, was neither just nor really
efficient. The Ballot, though used with a procras-
tination and a leniency which left much to be desired
from a military point of view, was met with resis-
tances and evasions which still further increased
its inherent injustice. Men took every advantage
of the muddle in which ministerial indecision had
involved the whole business : "It is so intricate "
120 COMPULSOEY MILITARY SERVICE
(wrote the Lieutenant of Nairn), " that scarcely
two counties have acted under the same construction
[of the law] " (237).
In Lancashire, " the mercantile community at
large had come to an amicable agreement that
apprentices should enlist when trade was slack, and
be claimed by their masters when trade was brisk.
The rest of the population, stricken with envy of
so happy a solution of a difficult problem, bound
their sons, brothers, and cousins apprentices pro
forma, so as to be afre to claim them likewise
whenever they were wanted. Thus in Lancashire
military service was converted into a kind of outdoor
relief, which could be repudiated as soon as suited
the convenience of the recipient " (239). There
were riots and mutinies in many places : yet the
militia remained 26,000 short of its establishment.
But, in justice to Castlereagh, Mr. Fortescue adds :
" It must be remembered always in connexion with
Castlereagh's scheme [for the Volunteers] that he
had inherited the ' fleeting and inapplicable mass '
from his predecessors, and that its existence was a
perpetual bar to any but a very gradual reorganiza-
tion of the people for military purposes " (211).
These measures, however, just tided us over to the
Peace of 1814. By that time, the system was
showing signs of a final breakdown. Behind the
victories of our Navy, we had at last produced a
great general in Wellington ; but, if the Navy had
broken down only for a short time if the Mutiny
DEMOCRACY AND VOLUNTARISM 121
at the Nore had lasted a few months (or perhaps
weeks) longer the wasteful incoherence of our
military system would in all probability have led
to utter disaster.
Mr. Fortescue's own summary is unsparing
(pp. 282 fi.). Addington falsified the whole prob-
lem, for himself and his successors, by treating it
rather from the point of view of home politics than
of military efficiency. His other blunders were
bad enough, but the Volunteer blunder was fatal.
" As he was unprepared with rules to govern this
mob of men, which had sprung into existence
against his wish, his Home Secretary was obliged to
introduce, by side-winds and sly devices, regulations
which gave rise to endless friction and discontent,
and yet were powerless to enforce discipline. It is
not too much to say that to the end of the war our
military system never recovered from the mischief
wrought by Addington and his Secretary for War,
Hobart, during the year 1803. It was no fault
of theirs that England was not ruined both in a
financial and a military sense, so unspeakable were
their blindness, their weakness, and their folly "
(283). By the grace of Addington, the Crimp
reigned supreme ; and " Pitt took over the military
administration in a state of utter chaos." The
system Pitt invented might have succeeded in
time of peace, after preliminary trials and failures ;
but, under the actual circumstances, " it was a
complete and dismal failure."
122 COMPULSORY MILITARY SERVICE
" Then came Windham, the great reformer, who
held firmly by three sound principles : first, that
the Regular Army was the ultimate end for which
all our military organization existed ; secondly,
that the whole nation ought to be trained to arms ;
thirdly, that a Volunteer who received anything
from the State besides his arms was no Volunteer.
His practice, however, fell short of his theory. . . .
The national training, as he projected it, was
impossible ; and the one great service which he
rendered was the suppression of such Volunteers as
were not self-supporting. Nevertheless, his brief
administration marked a real turning-point in the
history of the war, for he had at least upheld
principles that were sound.
" Then came Castlereagh, better known for his
work at the Foreign Office than at the War Office,
and better remembered, unfortunately, for the Six
Acts than for his part either in war or diplomacy.
Grasping at once all that was good in Windham's
teaching, he started from the postulate that
' learning the use of arms should be imposed as a
positive duty upon all individuals within certain
ages, to be enforced by fine. . . .' The question
was immensely difficult. Time might have brought
the answer if, in accordance with Castlereagh's
ideal, every able-bodied man had been compelled
to serve his time with the Local Militia upon
entering his eighteenth year. But this is no more
than to say that things might have been carried
DEMOCRACY AND VOLUNTARISM 123
on very efficiently if a proper system had been
evolved and practised in time of peace, which, of
course, is the indubitable fact, though the British
nation, in spite of a thousand proofs, steadily
refuses to believe it. Improvisations in time of war
can never be thoroughly efficient, and must always
be unduly expensive. The wit of man can hardly
devise a scheme of military organization for so
complex an Empire as the British Empire, which
shall be devoid of faults ; and it is far better and
cheaper to discover and to correct these faults in
time of peace " (284-287).
" For the rest," adds Mr. Fortescue, on the last page of
his book, " the broad lessons to be deduced from the
foregoing pages seem to be the following :
England cannot, any more than any other nation, fill the
ranks of her Army in a great war without compulsion.
Compulsion cannot be applied for service outside the
British Isles.
The admission of the principle of substitution in any
scheme of compulsory service leads to ruinous expense,
demoralisation, and inefficiency.
Compulsory personal service for home-defence has been
tried and not found wanting.
The ultimate end for which all our military organisation
must exist is the maintenance of the Regular Army, our only
offensive land force. (Windham.)
The true basis of such an organisation is National training.
(Windham, Castlereagh.)
' Learning the use of arms should be imposed as a positive
duty upon all individuals within certain ages, to be enforced
by fine.' (Castlereagh.)
124 COMPULSORY MILITARY SERVICE
A Volunteer who asks more from the State than his arms,
except on active service, is no Volunteer. (Windham.)
False Volunteers are alike troublesome, expensive, and
useless.
England felt the false measures of Pitt from 1793 to 1798,
and of Addington in 1803-4, until the very end of the war
in 1814. All measures of National Defence and military
organisation must be thought out and tested as far as
possible in time of peace. Improvisation doubles the cost
of war, while imperilling its success."
No man who is really concerned for the defence
of this Empire, and who wishes to see the present
War in its true perspective, should omit to read
in full the admirable book from which I have
taken the liberty of quoting so largely.
CHAPTER X
BEITISH VOLUNTAEISM SINCE 1815
THE compromise between Voluntarism and Com-
pulsion in Britain may now be brought down to
present date.
Castlereagh, while abolishing the substitution
system for the Local Militia, had kept it for the
General Militia, with the usual result that the
Ballot " produced substitutes rather than Con-
scripts " (Blue Book, p. 6). This system was
retained even after the peace ; but in 1829 the
Militia Ballot was suspended by Act of Parliament.
It was not revived even during the Crimean War,
when the Army was so weak that we made des-
perate attempts to hire German regiments, and
Disraeli achieved a succes de scandale by describ-
ing these military guests as " hireling cut- throats."
The Militia disappeared altogether with Mr.
Haldane's reforms of 1907.
We are therefore still in an anomalous position.
Lord Haldane, as Lord Chancellor, has lately
reminded us that, by British common law, every
citizen is bound to help, if required, to fight in
126 COMPULSORY MILITARY SERVICE
defence of his country. This common-law obliga-
tion is very clearly defined in the 1875 Blue Book :
" The Crown has an inherent right to the service
of all men to defend the realm, under which
prerogative seafaring persons can be lawfully
impressed to man the fleets (as in the first line),
and other able-bodied men (with few exceptions)
to defend the coast or shores (as the second line
of defence)." Moreover, by the authority of
Parliament they may be sent even abroad. Well-
meaning statesmen and journalists, who often
talk of freedom from conscription as " the birth-
right of the Briton," are simply ignorant of one of
the fundamental principles of the British Constitu-
tion. We in this country have no more constitutional
right to escape conscription than the Prussian has.
It only happens that (partly by accident, but
mainly owing to the enormous supremacy of our
Navy since Trafalgar), we have, in fact, escaped
conscription for a long time. Government exercised
its right of pressing men with considerable hesitation
even during the Napoleonic wars, and found no
need to assert it again until the year 1916.
But the anomalies created by this habit of
ignoring, in peace time, a constitutional principle
upon which, in case of war, the whole question of
victory or defeat may turn, was admirably illus-
trated by Mr. St. Loe Strachey's speech on the
deputation to Mr. Asquith only a few weeks before
the Serajevo murder. " Mr. St. Loe Strachey said
BRITISH VOLUNTARISM SINCE 1815 127
that in a month's time he would be the Sheriff of
his county. He had been looking up his duties, and
found they were almost entirely ceremonial except
one. Under a statute of Henry VI. he had, in
case of invasion, to call out all the male population
of his county over fifteen. Unfortunately the
State had provided no training to enable these
to carry out that duty " (Morning Post, Feb. 28,
1914). To this and similar representations, Mr.
Asquith replied that " the more this matter [of
Compulsory Service] is discussed, and the more
public opinion can be brought to bear upon the
aspects which you have put to me to-day, the
greater will be the advantage to the community,
both from the point of view of safety and of
educational and social problems." Yet one of
the ablest and fairest of our daily papers, com-
menting upon this speech, declared in the name of
the political party which it represented, that this
party would never seriously consider the question
which its own leader had seriously begged the whole
country to consider! Such are the results of a
system which aims at divorcing peace-time politics
from the future contingencies of war.
Mr. Asquith, in that same speech, had given
figures with regard to the Territorials. With
every effort to put the best face possible on the
existing state of things, and without mentioning
explicitly the actual shortage of men 50,000 out
of a nominal 315,000 he pleaded that, if the
128 COMPULSORY MILITARY SERVICE
very unusual rate of recruiting of the last seven
months were kept up, the Force would be up to
its establishment " in a very short time." In
plain words, if admittedly exceptional conditions
continued steadily to prevail, we should in a little
more than four years have attained the very
lowest numbers compatible with national safety,
this exceptionally favourable rate of increase
being 1,000 per month. Again, he admitted that
one of the great deficiencies was the lack of rifle-
ranges, and that, even of the men we had, over
40,000 had not been able to pass the very lenient
musketry-test. Again, nearly 80,000 of these men
had not gone through that full fortnight in camp
which is the lowest limit compatible with real effici-
ency. Thirty per cent., admitted Mr. Asquith, had
failed in this obligation ; but he compared it with
the worse deficiency of about 36 per cent, in 1912,
and added complacently, " That is not bad."
If he had judged by the only true standard, and
asked himself how far these 80,000 men were fitted
to face those emergencies of war for which alone
they existed as Territorials, he would have said
on the contrary " That is very bad." It was most
disquieting that, six years after the formation of
this body by a very able organizer, we should
still be 50,000 men short ; that there should be
no prospect of making good this deficiency, even
under the most favourable conditions, before the
summer of 1918 ; and that, even if we had all the
BRITISH VOLUNTARISM SINCE 1815 129
men, there should still have been such deficiencies in
their training as are tolerated in no other European
country. And to this we must add what perhaps
was the most disquieting consideration of all
the fact so often officially proclaimed, that the
whole constitution of the Force was calculated on
the basis of a six months' serious training after
embodiment that is, under modern conditions,
after the outbreak (and perhaps after the end), of
the actual war.
When so able a minister can find encouragement
in statements of this kind, and so large a proportion
of the community can accept encouragement from
them, must we not echo poor StoffePs despairing
words ?
" I do not believe that any assembly in any country ever
gave such a flagrant proof of inconsistency and levity !
How can we be astonished, after this, if foreigners criticise
us severely ? How can we be astonished that, in all Ger-
many, they tax our nation with ignorance and vain pre-
sumption, and that they proclaim, with ill-disguised
satisfaction, in books seriously written, the decadence of
our race ? "
For it must be remembered that Mr. Asquith's
apologia, and the dozens of similar apologias during
the last ten years, were not conceived from the moral
or ideal point of view : they were not pleas for
pacificism, but purported to be business statements.
Ministers did not argue then, as less responsible
people have sometimes argued since, that our
130 COMPULSOEY MILITARY SERVICE
military unpreparedness has been one of our
greatest moral assets. They insisted that, under
the existing voluntary system, we were prepared
for all probable emergencies ; and a special military
value was always officially attributed to the
system in itself. Not eighteen months before the
war broke out, our War Minister publicly assured
his own constituents that one volunteer is worth
ten conscripts. Even after four months of war,
Sir John Simon declared, with the political weight
of a Cabinet Minister, that in actual war one
volunteer was worth three conscripts, and that
" the Kaiser already knew it." l
The obvious deficiencies of Voluntarism for war
in our generation are defended exactly as the
deficiencies of Voluntary education were defended
by our fathers. In each case the public has been
told that, where faults exist, they must not be
whispered abroad. It has been asserted that the
Territorials have never had fair play, because
Compulsorists have publicly quoted the actual
figures of their numbers and their days of training
which Government publishes every year. The
same argument was used long ago by the educational
Voluntarists ; though these gentlemen were quite
ready to admit the damaging statistics in private,
and though some of the worst statistics came
from the very cities which they represented in
Parliament, or in which they lived. In each case,
1 F. S. Oliver, Ordeal by Battle, 1915, p. 262.
BKITISH VOLUNTAEISM SINCE 1815 131
the cry comes from the last ditch " Wait a little
longer ; give Voluntarism a fair chance ! " Let
us answer them now from Macaulay's answer to
the educational Voluntarists of 1847.
" I do believe that the ignorance and degradation of
a large part of the community to which we belong ought
to make us ashamed of ourselves. . . . Only this morning
the opponents of our plan [for State Education] circulated
a paper in which they confidently predict that free com-
petition will do all that is necessary, if we will only wait
with patience. Wait with patience ! Why, we have been
waiting ever since the Heptarchy. How much longer are
we to wait ? Till the year 2847 ? ' Or till the year 3847 ? . . .
The cause of the failure is plain. Our whole system has
been unsound. We have applied the principle of free
competition to a case to which that principle is not
applicable." *
Military Voluntarism has succeeded in Britain
only during those generations which have been
privileged to ignore the terrible contingencies of
a great war. We have kept up an appearance of
solvency by drawing bill after bill for a remote
date which we hoped would never arrive. By
thus ignoring present realities by postponing
every fresh liability to be met some other year,
or to fall upon the next generation even a system
of Voluntary taxation could be kept up for a little
time with some pretence of success ; and, when
it broke down at last, there would doubtless be
1 Speech in the House of Commons, April 18, 1847, republished in
Miscellaneous Writings and Speeches, 1878, p. 742.
132 COMPULSORY MILITARY SERVICE
pathetic complaints that it had not been given a
fair trial.
As Macaulay based his most serious accusations
against voluntary education upon the admissions of
its defenders, so it would be difficult to condemn
the voluntary army system more strongly than it
stands condemned, by implication, in the actual
pleas of two of its ablest and most determined
champions. Sir Ian Hamilton asserts, with all his
authority as a late Quartermaster General, that
it produces a class of recruit far below the general
average of the population. He writes :
"the majority of eighteen-to-nineteen-year old regular
recruits enlist because they have just ceased to be boys and
are unable to find regular employment as men. About
four-fifths of them come to us because they cannot get
a job at fifteen shillings a week. . . . The reluctance of
employers to take weedy, overgrown youths of 17 and 18
has markedly increased since the introduction of the
Workmen's Compensation Act. This is good for recruiting.
But if, under altered conditions, hungry hobbledehoys knew
that they would be called up for continuous housing and
feeding during the winter, the Regular Army would begin
to shrivel from the roots. I know that all this is not very
glorious, but it is true." 1
1 Compulsory Service, with an Introduction by Viscount Haldane, 1910,
p. 106. An array chaplain wrote to the Spectator (July 10, 1915),
questioning the accuracy of this statement. For five years it was his
duty to interview every Church of England recruit at a large artillery
depot ; "I made a special point of eliciting the lad's reason for enlisting,
and these reasons, in the case of some thousands of recruits, are on
record to-day." Less than thirty per cent, were " out of work." More
than forty per cent. " were country lads of 18 to 20 years of age who had
been in regular employment on farms and in gardens, but who were bored
BRITISH VOLUNTARISM SINCE 1815 133
Voluntary recruiting, therefore, is based upon
popular starvation ; under the better state of
things to which most of us look forward in the future
when none but actual undesirables will fail to get
their 15s. a week, or will be thrown upon the
streets during the winter, our Regular Army will
begin to shrivel up from the roots ! And the same
melancholy truth is put still more nakedly by an
even more determined opponent of Compulsory
Service for Great Britain by Colonel F. N.
Maude, whom the Westminster Gazette called in
when it needed a Balaam to prophesy against the
National Service League. In his bulky and ela-
borate book on this subject, Colonel Maude writes :
" Ultimately, hunger is the greatest stimulus to human
action that can be conceived. Keep men hungry, just
hungry enough, and they will swarm to the Colours to end
their misery ; keep them well supplied, and they will prefer
to attend to their own affairs, and will clamour for others to
do the fighting for them. But in no case must the hunger
be allowed to become excessive, nor must the people be
allowed to perceive that they are being played with." 1
Here then we have, expressed with the frankness
of a soldier, the real foundation of Voluntarism.
to death with the life they were leading." " It was not the lack of
employment that drove the ordinary recruit to enlist, but the dreariness
and hopeless monotony of the life of an agricultural labourer." It is
evident, however, that this experience may be reconciled with Sir lan's
statement on the essential point. These labourers were probably not
getting 15s. a week ; and, if the determining cause was not poverty,
but hopeless monotony, the indictment against society and the Voluntary
System remains practically the same.
1 War and the World's Life, 1907, p. 405.
134 COMPULSORY MILITARY SERVICE
It is an admirable system so long as a sufficient
proportion of the population is kept hungry enough
to escape from misery by bearing the blood-burden
for other people. It is admirable, again, so long
as we can disguise from the people that they are
being played with ; so long as we can persuade
them that a society which starves men into adopting
the army as a profession (with only an infinitesimal
chance of promotion from the ranks) is " demo-
cratic," and that it would be " undemocratic "
for the State to pass every citizen alike through
a six months' training in which all recruits would
be " rankers/' from the peer to the peasant. It
is admirable, above all things, so long as we have
no real war. In short, it is admirable on paper,
admirable as a line of least resistance for politicians ;
but it is a broken reed in the time of trial. With
real Voluntarism we should never have won the
Napoleonic war, even behind our protecting Navy.
In the Peninsula, and at Waterloo, Wellington's
armies were fed by partial compulsion ; and
complete compulsion would not only have fed his
armies better, but also would have been less
inimical to political and social liberty.
CHAPTER XI
AMERICA AND MODERN FRANCE
IN April, 1861, the Civil War broke out in the
United States of America. Posterity has endorsed,
on the whole, Lincoln's claim that the Northern
States were fighting " in order that government of
the people, by the people, for the people, might not
perish from the earth." Volunteers came forward
freely at first, on both sides. The South, however,
resorted to forced levies quite early in the war,
not because the volunteer spirit was weaker in
the South, but because the population was so much
smaller only nine millions to twenty-three. The
Southern states put an enormous proportion of
their manhood into the field ; and for nearly two
years they had, on the whole, the best of the
fighting. 1 The rush of Northern volunteers during
1 It has been estimated that " reducing the figures to a three-years'
average, the North furnished about 45 per cent, of her military popula-
tion, the South not less than 90 per cent, for that term " (Encyc. Brit.
llth ed. i. 818). Though this disproportion was very much reduced by
the fourth year, when the South was thoroughly exhausted, yet the
average of the whole war shows a decidedly larger proportion of
Southerners than of Northerners in the armies (E. B. Andrews, History
of the United States, 1895, ii. 170).
136 COMPULSORY MILITARY SERVICE
the first few weeks had proved more than Govern-
ment could cope with ; recruiting was officially
" damped down " because the authorities were
not prepared to drill or arm so many at so short
notice. " On the 6th of June, 1862, [recruiting]
was .reopened ; but the enthusiasm had abated,
and it was hard to fill up the ranks " ; l yet
the war had as yet scarcely lasted more than a
year, and it was destined to last nearly three
years longer. Already the Governors of most of
the Northern States were beginning to call for
compulsion in some form. A Militia . Ballot was
tried in other words, the Voluntary Principle
was abandoned and compulsion was applied in
a form more satisfactory to the politician than
to either the soldier or his commander. The
crisis was far too grave for such palliatives ;
and Livermore quotes the following contemporary
verdict :
" It was evident that the efforts of the Government for
the suppression of the rebellion would fail without resort
to the unpopular, but nevertheless truly republican measure
of conscription. . . . Fortunately, the loyal political leaders
and press early realized the urgency of conscription, and,
by judicious agitation, gradually reconciled the public
to it." 2
1 J. C. Ropes, The Story of the Civil War, vol. iii. p. 102. This third
volume is in fact by Livermore, who had the use of Ropes's papers
and continued the work after his death. Livermore's account agrees
in all substantial respects with the much longer story in Nicolay and
Hay, Abraham Lincoln, vol. vii. pp. 1-55.
2 Ibid. The quotation is from Fry, in Official Messages and Docu-
ments.
AMERICA AND MODERN FRANCE 137
Unfortunately, one of the means by which this
" reconciliation " was effected, was a clause per-
mitting substitution for drafted men. The country
in general unquestionably approved of this action
on the part of President and Congress, but there
was naturally a strong opposition. The more
moderate opponents were the men who already
began to despair of victory, and were willing to
grant peace to the Southerners almost upon their
own terms. The famous editor and politician,
Horace Greeley, whom modern anti-conscriptionists
sometimes quote in their favour, may be found
declaring publicly, very early in 1863, " in favour
of entertaining proposals for peace if, at the end
of another three months, the Rebellion remains
in full vigour " (Illustrated London News, Feb.
28, 1863, p. 214). At this time the Southern
States, in spite of their absurdly disproportionate
population, had 690,000 men in the field, not far
short of the Northern forces in number. 1 About
two months after this, the Draft Act was finally
passed by Congress. Four months later again,
came the victories of Gettysburg and Vicksbuig,
from which the South never really recovered. By
sheer weight of numbers they were gradually
worn down. Before the end of the war, the North
had more than a million men under arms, while
the South, exhausted by draft after draft, was
1 E. B. Andrews, History of the United States, 1895, ii. 170 ; cf. Encyclo-
pedia Britannica, llth ed. vol. i. p. 818.
138 COMPULSORY MILITARY SERVICE
unable to maintain the unequal struggle ; when
the final surrender came, she had only about
200,000 men in the field.
There have been frequent attempts in British
journals, during the last few months, to explain
these facts away. The most distinguished, perhaps,
of these special pleaders is Sir Roland K. Wilson,
who conducted a lengthy correspondence on the
subject in the London Nation (June 12 to August
7, 1915) and the Daily Chronicle (August 23 to
September 3, 1915). Yet, in both of those corre-
spondences, he made no attempt, even under a
definite challenge, to dispute the following facts,
which I here reprint from The Nation of July 3
and the Daily Chronicle of August 28 :
" (1) Congress passed the Compulsion Bill because,
however unpopular, it seemed the only waj? of raising the
numbers needed, before it should be too late. (2) The
violence offered to those engaged in working the Bill was
almost, if not altogether, confined to aliens and ' undesir-
ables.' (3) The country, shortly afterwards, strongly
endorsed Lincoln's policy, one of the most controversial
points of which was his support of this Bill. (4) The South
having adopted conscription earlier, had for some time been
able to offer unexpected resistance to the far more populous
North. (5) Lincoln himself expressly pleaded this fact as
a compelling necessity, writing of the Southern compulsory
method that ' it produces an army with a rapidity not to
be matched on our side, if we first waste time to re-experi-
ment with the volunteer system.' (6) After the passing of
the Compulsion Bill, the necessary numbers were at last
forthcoming, and the North won."
AMEEICA AND MODERN FRANCE 139
For the paradoxical arguments by which anti-
compulsionists, while admitting these facts, have
attempted to find in them a triumph for Volun-
tarism, I must refer the reader to Appendix 9.
It ought to be conclusive that Lincoln, true lover
of freedom though he was, refused to experiment
any longer with Voluntarism ; that he frankly
and openly defied his most determined political
opponent upon this very question, and that he
drew up a formal plea to the nation (which, after
all, he never needed to publish) justifying Con-
scription by the precedent of the War of Independ-
ence, and ending " Are we degenerate ? Has the
manhood of the race run out ? . . . I feel bound to
tell you that it is my purpose to see the Draft
Law faithfully executed." 1 Moreover, when his
term of office expired, and the opposition to his
re-election was based to a great extent upon this
contentious law, the nation gave Lincoln an
overwhelming majority.
Those who would minimize the effect of this law
because it was to a great extent indirect, have
forgotten a very recent experience in British
politics. It is notorious that the sums that were
regularly collected for " voluntary " schools, until
the late changes in our Education Law, were only
semi-voluntary at the best. Men gave without
1 Nicolay and Hay, vii. pp. 34, 39, 40, 55. " I am unwilling," wrote
Lincoln to his adversary Seymour, " to give up a drafted man now, even
for the certainty, much less for the mere chance, of getting a volunteer
hereafter."
140 COMPULSORY MILITARY SERVICE
legal compulsion, for the simple reason that,
behind the modest request for a voluntary contri-
bution, stood the Board School with a compul-
sory rate which would prove far more onerous.
Thousands must have said in America as they said
lately among us : " We won't wait to be fetched."
A friend has kindly permitted me to give here two
extracts from some unpublished family letters,
which give a more vivid impression than any
formal history. The mother of a Scottish family,
who had emigrated to the United States less than
fifteen years before the war broke out, writes,
Sept. 8, 1864, to a son in England :
" The war draft going on ... cannot tell if your brothers
will be drafted. I know that they do not want to fight, but
I know also that they will not try any mean way to get
rid of it."
She returns to the same subject on Jan. 9, 1865.
" I know how anxious you will be about your brothers.
You will no doubt have heard of the heavy drafts made.
Some of our neighbours hired a substitute for themselves
at the rate of 500 or 600 dollars. But last week this town
(Waltham, Illinois) had a meeting and agreed to give so
much apiece, and they gathered 7,000 dollars. Some old
men that were not subject to the draft gave 180 dollars
to this good cause . . . they think they have money enough
to pay for substitutes. The draft will not come due till
Feb. 15, so they have time to get men before that . . . ,
but, dear R , if your brother J had health and no
family, he would have been in the war long ago. . . . When
I look at the thing, there is something cowardly in hiring
AMERICA AND MODERN FRANCE 141
others to go and fight for you to defend our hearths and
homes when we could do it better ourselves."
Most honest young fellows must have been in
this frame of mind ; and the actual efficiency of
Lincoln's Draft Law would probably never have
been disputed by modern writers but for over-
powering political temptations.
It is well, in this context, to read the verdict
of a man who fought through this war as a volunteer,
and who deliberately recorded his impressions
a quarter of a century later. As one of the last
survivors, he felt that many things still needed
chronicling, while time and opportunity were
fast slipping away ; and he passes a severe judg-
ment on the compromises by which the politicians
of that day had tried to strike a mean between
Voluntarism and Compulsorism. 1 He writes, of
course, simply from a citizen-soldier's point of
view, and without considering whether, in the
case of a nation which has been caught unprepared,
any uncompromisingly efficient reform is politically
possible at the actual moment when it is most
needed. From that point of view, therefore, his
judgment must be discounted ; but this does not
affect his evidence on the question which underlies
this present book. The main question is whether,
in times of peace and quiet opportunity for reforms,
it is wiser to base the national defence on a voluntary
1 Recollections of a Private Soldier in the Army of the Potomac, by
Frank Wilkeson. Putnams, 1897, reprinted in London 1898. It is
from this reprint that I quote.
142 COMPULSORY MILITARY SERVICE
or a compulsory basis. From that point of view,
the author's verdict in his preface gains still
greater force from his later description of his own
experiences under training and in war. He writes
on p. x :
" I am conscious of imperfect performance of the task
I set to myself in the writing of this book. . . . The limited
compass of the book forbade the consideration of two
subjects about which I feel deeply, and which I propose
hereafter to treat with what strength I possess. For much
thinking over my experience as a private in the Army of
the Potomac has confirmed me in the belief I then enter-
tained, that the two capital errors in the conduct of this
war on the Union side were :
First, the calling for volunteers to suppress the rebellion,
instead of at the outset creating armies by drawing soldiers
rateably and by lot from the able-bodied population,
between the ages of 20 and 40, of all the free States and
territories.
Second, the officering of the commands in the various
armies with West Point graduates by preference, on the
assumption that they knew the art of war and were soldiers,
and were therefore the fittest to command soldiers.
It is my purpose in the future edition of this book to show
how the resort to volunteering, the unprincipled dodge of
cowardly politicians, ground up the choicest seed-corn
of the nation ; how it consumed the young, the patriotic,
the intelligent, the generous and the brave ; how it wasted
the best moral, social and political elements of the Republic,
leaving the cowards, shirkers, egotists and money-makers
to stay at home and procreate their kind."
The moral degradation of the " bounty-jumpers/'
and of the miserable crimps who bought and sold
AMERICA AND MODERN FRANCE 143
them, is described on pp. 1-17 and 151-2. Of the
crimps Wilkeson writes :
" After gathering the foul creatures, they kept them in
pens and private prisons. Over the doors of these dens
swung signs, and blazoned on them in gilt letters were
shameful legends which announced that within a man dealt
in alleged men, and that the honour of townships could be
pawned there. A Mississippi slave-dealer was a refined and
honourable gentleman in comparison with a Northern
bounty-broker, who sold men to the townships which filled
their quotas by purchase."
His description of the men themselves, evidently
true in the main, though tinged with the exag-
gerations natural to a true volunteer, is almost
impossible to reprint. They, like the English
crimp sold substitutes of the Napoleonic wars,
constantly deserted to sell themselves again, and
regarded the whole business as a failure if they
were finally brought into the actual fighting-line.
"When I entered the barracks, these recruits gathered
round me and asked ' How much bounty did you
get ? V c How many times have you jumped the
bounty ? ' . . . the social standing of a hard-faced,
crafty pickpocket, who had jumped the bounty in
say half-a-dozen cities, was assured." Wilkeson
calculates that, of the 500,000 men nominally
raised by these drafts, only 169,000 ever stood in
battle-ranks (150). But, disgracefully as the main
objects of the Draft were falsified by this bounty-
jumping, the Law did finally enable the North
to utilize something of her enormous numerical
144 COMPULSORY MILITARY SERVICE
superiority, and created a moral impiession from
the very first. As Professor Spenser Wilkinson
says of the French drafts in 1793 : " These measures,
which, of course, took time in execution and did
not instantly produce troops, were an expression
of the national determination not to be beaten."
When a Government has taken heavy political
risks and given a clear political lead, then the
whole people are braced up to a greater effort.
The mere recital of Hooker's work in the early
months of 1863 the work of reorganization and
discipline by which these armies were formed
which turned the tide at Midsummer suggests
inevitably a strong government in the background.
Without such support, the army would have
continued to " muddle on " as it had already done
for the two years which preceded the passing of
the Draft Law. 1
Finally, in illustration of these two human
documents from the American war, let us take
one from our own. A Fellow and Lecturer of a
Cambridge College, who in peace time had been
an anti-compulsionist, volunteered when the war
broke out and obtained a commission in the Buffs.
1 Ropes-Livermore, iii. 113. Hooker's official report runs : " At the
time the army was turned over to me, desertions were at the rate of
about 200 a day . . . my first object was to prevent desertion. . . .
During the time allowed us for preparation, the army made rapid strides
in discipline, instruction, and moral, and early in April was in a condition
to inspire the highest expectations." Hooker had been appointed
at about the date when it became practically certain that the Draft Act
would pass. It finally passed on March 3.
AMERICA AND MODEEN PRANCE 145
He joined his brigade shortly after, and wrote a
letter home which was published in the Cambridge
Daily News of June 14, 1915, over his full signature.
Here are some extracts :
"A fortnight ago I listened to Commander-in-Chiefs
congratulations to the Brigade to which my regiment
belongs. Those who had done the work were not those to
hear it. A week later, after one more bout of the trenches,
another 30 per cent, of the faces were absent and this sort
of thing at this pace has gone on for several months. ... All
this squabbling about freedom or compulsion, the merits
of this man or that, reads like a grisly jest. . . . We are
fighting a mighty people exquisitely specialised in all the
machinery and organisation that makes for victory. The
other evening I read aloud a newspaper extract from a
Cambridge lecturer to the effect that many Englishmen
would suffer even death rather than be compelled to fight.
The reading of the extract was greeted with jeers. The
lecturer is quite safe. He knows we can't afford to start
killing our own folk, but he ought also % to know that he's
doing his best to kill his pals who are not endowed with that
conscientiousness which secures at once safety and a sense
of martyrdom. I hope I'm not bitter. But my main
point is this. We shall in any case drain through the major
portion of our young manhood. If we do it stupidly or
disjointedly or with friction, we shall lose our manhood and
at the same time miss the prize. But if the whole of
England plunges into the task with the unanimity and
devotion of a religious crusade, beside which no interests
or so-called principles are of the slightest consequence, then
we shall indeed lose men, but we shall win our prize, and the
next generation will be glad for it, seeing that this prize is
nothing less than the life of England. Between the two
there is no middle course."
146 COMPULSOEY MILITARY SERVICE
It is only in the light of such present events
and utterances that we can fully understand the
position of Voluntarism in the American Civil War.
So much, then, for the experiences of the great
Anglo-Saxon Republic. The South, taking early
to conscription, seemed likely at one time to win
the war, in the face of enormous disadvantages.
Half a year after the North had met conscription
with conscription, the tide turned for, as readers
may see in Appendix VIII., conscription had become
a practical certainty even before the end of 1862.
Lincoln, as we have seen, never doubted the
military success of the Draft Act, so far as it went.
No attempt, I believe, has been made to produce
the evidence of any responsible statesman or soldier
who, under actual experience of the Act during
the remaining two years of war, denounced it as a
real failure; though there were doubtless many
who, like Wilkeson, denounced the Substitution
Clause which politicians had smuggled into it.
Even in Britain, such a thesis could scarcely
have been maintained unless the question had
become one of party politics.
But let us now forget, for a moment, our assump-
tion that Anglo-Saxondom is the only standard
of healthy political life ; and let us face the sup-
position that Republican France may conceivably
point the real line of progress, in certain directions,
even to the United States and to Great Britain.
We are here at once on firm ground, because the
AMERICA AND MODERN FRANCE 147
lost elaborate and the most valuable of all recent
books upon this military problem was written by
a French Republican of the most uncompromis-
ing type Jean Jaures. An abbreviated English
translation of Jaures's Arme'e Nouvelle has lately
been published. 1 What this leader of the Socialist
party, this pacifist and internationalist, thought
of the relations between Compulsory Service and
Democracy, may be found in that book. I have
already summarized his views, and those of other
Continental Socialists, in a penny pamphlet
(Workers and War. Cambridge : Bowes). My
references here will be to the abridged English
edition already mentioned. The neglect of this
book in Britain admirably exemplifies the con-
spiracy of silence, even in democracies, against
all truths which are politically inconvenient. The
Liberal Nation was honourably exceptional in
welcoming the French original with warm praise
(May 26, 1911) ; and quite lately, again, Mr.
H. W. Massingham has referred us to " Jaurfes's
great book, L'Armee Nouvelle " (Nation, March 25,
1916, p. 896). Yet, meanwhile, among the floods
of correspondence contributed to the Nation on
this subject, scarcely a single sentence betrays the
vaguest suspicion that Jaures and his fellow-
socialists in France have always been compulsorists.
1 Democracy and Military Service (Simpkin, Marshall and Co., Is. net).
The full French original may be obtained at 2 f. 50 (by post, 3 f. 50) from
the office of UHumanite, 142, rue Montmartre, Paris.
148 COMPULSORY MILITARY SERVICE
Mr. Ramsay Macdonald, in the obituary article
which he wrote on Jaures, betrayed the same
ignorance (Contemporary Review, Sept. 1914).
There would be a certain logic, of course, in con-
sistently acting and thinking upon the assumption
that Continental thought never concerns free-born
Britons, and that insularity is a prime political
virtue. But the opponents of compulsory service
are, on the contrary, perpetually appealing to a
Continental opinion which they imagine to be in
their favour. Such self-deception would have
been quite impossible but for the subtlest political
temptations ; under any other circumstances, the
truth must have leaked out somehow during the
last ten years. 1
Jaures writes, he tells us, " from the point of
view of National Defence and International Peace "
(p. 1). " In fact, the organization of National
Defence and the organization of International
Peace are but two different aspects of the same
task " (5). Again, " I confess that it is this hope,
this certainty of peace, which enables me to deal
with the ideas regarding war which I am obliged
to examine and discuss " (end of Chapter V.).
Again, " [Let] the whole nation [be] a vast army
for the maintenance of national independence and
the preservation of peace ; in that way and in that
way alone can France be truly free " (21).
1 Cf. the present writer's article in the Fortnightly Review for July,
1916, " Continental Democracies and Compulsory Military Service."
AMEKICA AND MODERN FRANCE 149
From this standpoint, he has to meet the objec-
tions of extremists on both sides. He wants his
Nation in Arms to be democratically organized ;
and militarists object that this will ruin her chances
of success in the field ; while extreme pacificists fear
that he will militarize the nation. The militarist
objections will be dealt with later on in this present
book ; the pacificist objections alone concern us in
this present chapter.
For Jaures (and for practically everybody in
Republican France except those few extremists
who, before this war, talked of total disarmament
as a possible policy) the connexion between
Democracy and Universal Military Training is
beyond all serious dispute. As a Socialist he
repudiates the idea of "leaving the formidable
monopoly of armed force to paid troops," and
continues : " The whole instinct, the whole thought
of the working-classes, in every country, goes in
the contrary direction. Everywhere it is the
workmen and socialists who demand military
service for all " (77). Of course, he recognizes the
exception of Great Britain ; but he confidently
predicts that unless we can boldly enter upon
such a venture of faith as would be implied in
disarmament Britain also must finally follow
suit, as her self-governing colonies have shown
her the way " (Chapter XV.).
Though he wrote under the immediate impression
of M. Briand's mobilization of the army to break
150 COMPULSORY MILITARY SERVICE
the Railwaymen's strike in 1910, he called upon
the workers to face the fact that hired soldiers
could be used still more unfairly, and that the
people's one chance of avoiding oppression by the
army is to make that army their own : in other
words, that if only democracy will venture to
come to grips with militarism, she will always
prove the stronger power. Moreover, he confidently
claimed the assent of the French workmen in
general to this truth. " The workmen know also
that, if they wish to act upon the army, it must
be from within ; they know that it is a source of
strength to the proletariat to bear arms, even under
the command of the bourgeois State " (78). He
scornfully disposes of the parrot-cry that " the
workman has no country" (82, 89, 97). "The
proletariat," he argues, " is more truly in the
Fatherland than any other class " ; and it is
absurd to suppose that we are even dimly in sight
of the time when class-differences will obliterate
political frontiers (Chapter XL). In short, France
(and with her, the world) runs always a double
risk of war. If too offensively organized, France
might follow aggressive foreign policies, and drop
a match into the powder-magazine. On the other
hand, a France which was not organized for
defence to the utmost extent of her resources,
would be risking invasion for herself, and a general
conflagration for Europe.
Jaures tries to steer an even course between the
AMERICA AND MODERN FRANCE 151
militarist who dreams of conquest and the crank
who argues that all military preparations are
dangerous. It would be treason to the democratic
spirit to assume that a great self-governing people
cannot be efficiently armed without proceeding to
make an attack upon some other nation. On the
contrary, the one hope for world-peace is that
democracies should be strong enough to repel
aggression. " Assuming that a nation is firmly
bent on following a policy of peace and justice,
and that her only object in view is self-protection
. . . why should such a nation and such a govern-
ment hesitate to call on every man in the country
for the common good ? . . . A nation in Arms is
necessarily a nation actuated by justice and
uprightness." Jaures dares to enunciate this as a
general principle, though he knew the facts of
Napoleon T and of Imperial Germany better than
most of his readers. But he knew also that, if we
are to cast away every institution which has been
used as a tool for tyranny, we shall have to return
to the state of the noble savage. Jaures knew too
much of history, and was too good a democrat, to
fear the final victory of militarism in a democratic
military organization. 1
1 It has repeatedly been asserted that this policy of Jaures was purely
opportunist, and that, if his proposals for democratizing the French army
had succeeded, he would then have gone on to fight against the Compul-
sory Principle. This argument is never used by those who have actually
read his book, or who really know French Socialist conditions : I have
exposed its inaccuracy, and the bad faith which often underlies it, in
my Workers and War.
152 COMPULSORY MILITARY SERVICE
In all this, Jaures is only amplifying what had
already been said by Vaillant, who at one time
divided with him the allegiance of the French
Socialist Party. Sixteen years ago, I had occasion
to point out how Bebel was using similar language
in Germany. 1 Many more instances are quoted
in a Times article of December 31, 1915. The
first Social Democratic Congress, in 1891, pro-
claimed "it is our desire to establish a national
system which will guarantee real universal service,
and provide that Germany is armed against any
enemy." The Cologne Congress of 1893 put it
still more plainly : " Every young man capable
of bearing arms should receive preliminary pre-
paration at school and in his youth ; and this
should be supplemented by a short course of
military training, so that if necessary he may be
able to take part in the defence of the Fatherland."
And the Times writer finally quotes the following
from p. 58 of a recent pamphlet published at the
Vorwdrts office by a Socialist member of the Reich-
stag, Dr. Paul Lensch, German Social Democracy
and the War. He writes :
"That which we Social Democrats understand by Mili-
tarism, and what the English mean by it, have about as
much to do with each other as the Great Bear in the heavens
and the ordinary bear on earth. Fifty years ago Friedrich
1 A Strong Army in a Free State : a Study of the Old English and
Modern Swiss Militias (Simpkin, Marshall and Co., 1900). Bebel's
pamphlet, Nicht Stehendes Heer, was published at Stuttgart in 1898 ;
it is now out of print.
AMERICA AND MODERN FRANCE 153
Engels said that our military system is the only democratic
institution in Prussia ; and this universal service is what
the English are pleased to call ' slavery. 5 In regard to
universality the system is by no means so far-reaching as
we socialists wish."
Finally, for those Britons who are such good
democrats that they cannot believe any foreign
democrat's mere word on this subject, we may
cite the actual deeds of the Radical-Socialist bloc
in Belgium. For thirty years, the Radicals in
Belgium took the burden and the odium of working
for Universal Service ; the Conservative Party in
Belgium has for thirty years been the so-called
Peace Party. Universal Service, with far fewer
exceptions than those allowed by our present
Military Service Act, was finally introduced by
a Conservative Government under pressure from
the Radicals and the King. In this propaganda,
the only difference between the Radicals and the
Socialists was that the latter would have preferred
the Swiss system. As to the Compulsory Principle
in itself, there was no difference of opinion.
, Jtfnave now completed our historical survey.
jr * f *
We have seen that no instance has yet been pro-
duced by opponents to prove that Universal Service
throws a country backwards in civilization or in
political liberty. We have seen that even the two
strongest among the apparent exceptions those
of French and German Imperialism have not
shown anything like those abuses of despotism
154 COMPULSORY MILITARY SERVICE
which were common in France or Germany before
Universal Service was introduced. We have seen
that the military tyranny in both cases was not in
accordance with, but contrary to, the normal
operation of a Nation in Arms ; that Napoleon,
Bismarck, and the present Kaiser could have ruled
far more tyrannically if they had obtained equal
military successes by means of a voluntary army
paid for its work at profitable market rates, instead
of having to apply to the nation at large for each
fresh draft of men. We have seen that these
facts, so new to most Britons even of the educated
classes, are assumed as commonplaces by con-
tinental writers. Whatever may be the final
decision of this country, it is incontestable that the
Voluntarists have too often based their arguments
upon an appalling ignorance of past history and of
modern political conditions on the Continent ; and
that thousands of people, whose very principles rest
upon freedom of thought, have for years violated
the freethought principle by practically refusing
to listen to any serious discussion of this subject.
Deepest of all, perhaps, has been the general
ignorance upon that point which might most easily
have been cleared up for nothing is easier for an
editor than to institute a brief enquiry among his
continental brethren. The opposition of French
Socialism to the Three Years' Law, and of German
Socialists to such abuses as were revealed in the
Zabern case, have been thoughtlessly construed
AMERICA AND MODERN FRANCE 155
into attacks upon the Compulsory Principle.
It would have been almost as reasonable for a
Frenchman to infer from the opposition of the
House of Lords to Mr. Lloyd George's celebrated
Finance Bill, that the peers were fighting for the
Voluntary Principle in taxation. Apart from the
handful of visionaries who advocate general dis-
armament, the Voluntary Principle for the army
has only a small minority of civilized adherents
in the whole world outside Great Britain, in the
insular sense, and the United States of America.
If these great States needed a third voluntarist
ally, we should have to go to China, where the
soldier is indeed a rare and despised phenomenon,
but where the pious paterfamilias puts his super-
fluous girl-babies to death, and where the late
Revolution has displayed a quite unprecedented
lack of political sense. Those who believe that
the Voluntary system goes naturally hand in hand
with steady democratic progress, should study
the confession of Mr. G. Lowes Dickinson, a deter-
mined Voluntarist and an ardent admirer of Chinese
civilization in general. He writes :
" It is remarkable, and, so far as my knowledge of history
goes, unique, that in a great revolution in a nation of
four hundred millions one man only should emerge with
the capacity of government. . . . The young men have ideas
in plenty, but they have no experience, and, it would
seem, no practical capacity. Too often they have not
Character " (" An Essay on the Civilization of India,
China and Japan," 1914, pp. 5, 7, 58).
156 COMPULSORY MILITARY SERVICE
Compare with this John Stuart Mill's illuminating
remark towards the end of the last chapter of his
essay On Liberty :
" A very different spectacle is exhibited among a people
accustomed to transact their own business. In France,
a large part of the people having been engaged in military
service, many of whom have held at least the rank of
non-commissioned officers, there are in every popular
insurrection several persons competent to take the lead,
and improvise some tolerable plan of action."
In all civilized States but two, therefore, the
people are overwhelmingly in favour of the Com-
pulsory Principle ; and the Continental Socialist
differs from the Conservative not as a Voluntarist,
but as an advocate for the Swiss system of
compulsion. We must pass on, therefore, to study
briefly the working of this model Citizen Army.
CHAPTER XII
THE SWISS MILITIA
WE have seen that in all countries common-law
has proclaimed the duty of every citizen to take
as full a share as possible in the work of national
defence. The logical corollary of this obligation
is, that every able-bodied citizen should also be
trained in the use of arms, and should be embodied
in some military formation, however rudimentary,
in time of peace. The two things are, in principle,
inseparable ; to assert military liability without
providing military training is defensible neither
from the practical nor from the moral point of
view. To call out unarmed and untrained men,
even for the simplest labours of home defence,
would be not only absurd, but ciiminal. On the
other hand, if it be politically objectionable to
introduce military training into our schools and
our national life if it be true that the progress of
democracy and civilization demands the abolition
of compulsory training on moral grounds, then
those same moral considerations would dictate
the formal and unqualified abrogation of common-
158 COMPULSORY MILITARY SERVICE
law military obligations which have become (ex
hypothesi) not only meaningless but mischievous.
Among all the mistakes committed by those who
object even to the mildest forms of military com-
pulsion, one of the worst has been their persistent
blindness to this obvious principle. If liberalism
were really incompatible with what has been
called Compulsory Territorialism, then the majority
of British citizens, with their political leaders,
would stand self-condemned. A statute should
long since have been passed to remove the old
common-law liability ; the sheriffs should long
since have been relieved of their obligation to call
out citizens for home defence amid conditions
which would amount to wilful murder. The more
strongly the anti-compulsorist bases himself upon
principle (as opposed to mere military expediency),
the more definitely he condemns his own lack of
political foresight. 1
Yet this divorce between military liability and
military training, however indefensible in principle
and in practice, has in fact too often been made.
1 An admirable example is supplied by a letter to the Nation (Nov. 27,
1915). The writer calls upon the British people to take care that " a
national nuisance once booted from our door be not suffered through
our neglect to sneak in at the window." This, of course, states very
pithily the exact opposite of the actual facts. Military compulsion, so far
as it has disappeared, has simply oozed away almost unperceived has
sneaked out at the window, whereas the recent Military Service Bill has
brought it back again with the greatest possible publicity, through the wide -
opened constitutional door, and with the approval (as even Mr. Redmond
admitted), of the large majority of the voters. Yet the Nation correspon-
dent wrote in obvious sincerity, and his blunder is typical of the laziness
with which the nation has ignored inconvenient facts for so many years.
THE SWISS MILITIA 159
We have seen how steadily the French kings,
retaining the legal obligation to serve, cut it adrift
from all practical possibilities of useful service ;
how regularly they called for masses of men who
simply bought themselves off with money, and
were never expected to do anything else. Or, in
that minority of cases in which actual military
service was enforced upon the Frenchman, we have
seen that this was done with a deliberate negation
of the universality and equality which are the
very corner-stones of the compulsory principle.
We have seen a similar tendency in modern Britain,
not under the dictates of any consistent or logical
political thought, but simply under a policy of
drift, and in the hope that voluntarism would
always enable us to muddle through. Britons of
the last few generations have thus foimed a false
idea of liberty, as if it were a capital which we
could inherit, and lay up in a bank, and live upon
the interest of this treasure which we have not
won for ourselves. In a world of constant changes
and chances, freedom must always be hard to win and
hard to keep ; and England was most truly a Nation
in Arms during those centuries when she most
definitely outran her continental competitors in
the long race for liberty. Our naval successes of
the eighteenth century have tempted us to forget
that, enormously as sea-power may outweigh
land-power in importance for the defence of our
Empire, we still cannot afford to neglect our land
160 COMPULSORY MILITARY SERVICE
forces indeed, that our navy can never attain
to its full development, or its full freedom of
action, unless the military resources of the kingdom
are adequately organized behind it. We have
more and more accustomed ourselves to putting
all our eggs into one basket, and have accepted
with placid fatalism the idea that a single great
naval defeat must necessarily bring us to our
knees. (^To find the national militia which did so
much to save British liberties in the past, we must
now go to Switzerland? There we find a Nation
in Arms that has come down from the Middle
Ages ; a compulsory and universal militia system
which is as ancient as the state itself, which has
been the foundation-stone of Swiss liberties from
the very first, and which will endure until wars
and rumours of wars are no more.
If, then, the German soldier of to-day is a con-
script, so also were the Swiss soldiers who won
freedom for the Confederation in so many fights
against Austrian or Burgundian invaders. Foreign
observers have always been interested in this
Swiss compulsory militia ; and many details were
recorded by Coxe on his journeys of 1778, 1785,
and 1787. At his first entry into the country he
wrote : "It will perhaps give you some idea of
the security of the Swiss republics when I inform
you that Schaffhausen, though a frontier town,
has no garrison, and that the fortifications are but
weak. The citizens mount guard by turns ; and
THE SWISS MILITIA 161
the people of the canton, being divided into regular
companies of militia which are exercised yearly,
are always prepared to act in defence of their
country." * The single canton of Zurich, he notes
later on, had 28,235 effective men, while in Soleure
and Berne all the males from 16 to 60 were embodied
in the militia. In the territory of Geneva the
militia was one of the " ancient liberties " sup-
pressed by its powerful neighbours in 1782, and
regained by a popular revolution in 1789. The
strictness of obligation in those days may be mea-
sured by the proportion of militiamen to the total
population. In Zurich it works out at 16 per cent.,
in Soleure at 20 per cent., and in Uri and Schwyz,
the earlist homes of Swiss liberty, even at 24 per
cent. In terms of the modern population of the
German Empire, these figures would mean from
eleven million to sixteen millions and a half of
armed men. 2 John Moore, who was so much
impressed by the militarism of Prussia in 1779,
was equally struck by the democratic working
of the Swiss system. He wrote from Berne (letter
36) : "A people who have always arms in their
hands, and form the only military force of the
country, are in no danger of being pressed and
1 Travels in Switzerland, 4th ed. 1801, 3 vols. vol. i. pp. 7, 79 (cf. 66),
229 (cf. Ixiii.), 300. Other references to militia occur on pp. 28, 249, 287 ;
vol. ii. pp. 249, 402, 408.
8 Rather less than half of these numbers, however, were reckoned fit
for immediate service. In 1782, the Canton of Berne had " 63,637 fit
for bearing arms, but only 27,218 fit for active service in the field "
(Julian Grande, A Citizen's Army, p. 22).
L
162 COMPULSORY MILITARY SERVICE
irritated with taxes." Adam Smith, about the
same time, pointed out the value of general military
training for national liberty : " where every citizen
had the spirit of a soldier, a smaller standing army
would surely be requisite. That spiiit. besides,
would necessarily diminish very much the dangers
to liberty, whether real or imaginary, which are
commonly apprehended from a standing . army.
As it would v,ery much facilitate the operations
of that army against a foreign invader, so it would
obstruct them as much if unfortunately they
should ever be directed against the constitution
of the state " : and he goes on to instance Switzer-
land as the country which approaches nearest to
this ideal (Wealth of Nations, Book v. pt. iii.
art. 2 ad fin).
When the French conquered the country, and
reorganized it as a vassal-republic, they apparently
did what they could to restrict the basis of this
military service : "in time of war, the contingent
of all the cantons is to be about 15,203 men "
(Monthly Magazine, 1806, p. 388). The population
was then about 1,600,000 ; this war-contingent for
Napoleon's armies works out at only 1 per cent.
This militia had, of course, been unable to
withstand the seasoned armies of the French
republic, though Swiss political discord had also
facilitated the task of the conquerors. When the
Congress of Vienna restored Swiss independence,
one of the first acts of the Confederation was to
THE SWISS MILITIA 163
reorganize the army (1817). Other reorganizations
followed in 1850 and 1874, the latter being a direct
result of the Franco-German war. Finally, in
1907, the country accepted by referendum a slight
increase in the period of training, with a propor-
tionate increase in the military budget. In its
present form, it would be difficult to describe this
army better than it has already been described by
observers whom the Swiss themselves commend
for their accuracy and their sympathy :
"The army is organized on what has been called the
' voluntary-compulsory ' system, to which the Swiss of their
own free will resigned themselves in order to maintain the
independence of their country. ... In Switzerland the
army is an essentially citizen force, one which is thoroughly
representative of the nation. . . . The Swiss army may
be compared in many respects to our militia and volunteer
force, but the qualifications of each man in his civil capacity
are utilized to a far greater extent." l
The Swiss army system is thoroughly national,
thoroughly popular, and thoroughly efficient.
It is national in a sense in which very few British
institutions can claim that title. The obligation
of service is as strict as in Germany, except that
the Swiss make more allowance for emigrants or
citizens working abroad. A Swiss citizen abroad
is not compelled to come home for his service ;
he may repair the omission on his return, or (if
then beyond the military age) pay the same tax
1 Sir F. 0. Adams and C. D. Cunningham, The Swiss Confederation
(Macmillan, 1889), pp. 142-3.
164 COMPULSORY MILITARY SERVICE
as is paid by the physically unfit. About 48 per
cent, of the recruits are rejected as physically
unfit for active service. 1 These are liable to a
tax in peace-time graduated in proportion to their
income from six francs a year upwards, though
the poorest of all are in fact excused from any
payment whatever. Since the outbreak of war in
1914, this tax has been doubled, to keep some
proportion with the increased service demanded
from the able-bodied (J. G. 28). The Officers,
like the men, are citizens in the first place ; there
are less than 250 professional soldiers in the whole of
Switzerland (D.-R. 27). When we remember that,
at times of emergency, even those who have been
rejected in peace-time may be called up for different
services, we shall realize how truly the Swiss Army
has been described by Socialists like Vaillant and
Jaures as simply one aspect of the Swiss nation.
It ensures equality of sacrifice so far as this is
possible in any efficient military system. And
a fact too often forgotten by those opponents of
compulsion who harp upon the fact that no system
can arrive at complete equality of sacrifice the
military service has an appreciable effect in re-
dressing the inequalities of civil life. Everybody
starts in the ranks ; with the result that many
1 Lt.-Col. C. Delm6-Radcliffe, M.V.O., A Territorial Army in Being
(Murray, 1908), p. 34. This is still the best book on the Swiss army
which has been published in English, though the reader will find much
of interest in Mr. Julian Grande's A Citizen's Army (Chatto and Windus,
1916). I refer to these henceforward as D.-R and J. G. respectively.
THE SWISS MILITIA 165
subordinates, and even workmen, are promoted
to command their social superiors. The following
experience, related by a Labour Member in the
House of Commons, would be impossible to match
in British social life. In the debate of March 11,
1910, upon the Army Estimates, Mr. John Ward said :
" I can give the House an illustration of what conscription
means in one little State. Recently I was engaged in
making some investigations in Switzerland ; and I went
into a big engineering works at Ziirich. I asked the
manager what position he occupied in the Swiss army, and
he replied that he was a private. I said ' What ! a man
of your ability and education a private in the Army ? '
He answered 'Yes.' I then enquired. 'How is that ? '
and his reply was ' I cannot shoot. I have always failed at
shooting, and as that is considered an important item, in the
advancement of the Swiss officer, I am only a private.'
Then I enquired ' Who is the Officer in command of your
battalion ? ' and he told me he was a fitter in his shop.
There you have a country where an opportunity is given
to the working-man to be an officer over the manager of his
works when they happen to be out for training. Of course,
such a thing as that is opposed to all our ideas of exclusive-
ness. . . . Aristocratic ideas are gradually encroaching
upon the military organization of the country, as is the case
in other branches of our national life " (Hansard, p. 1831).
A similar instance had been given by another
Labour Member, Mr. Seddon, who also opposed
the idea of compulsion for Britain. He said (House
of Commons, March 4, 1909 ; Hansard, p. 1654) :
" In visiting a continental country where they have a
citizen army, what struck me most was the fact that many
166 COMPULSOKY MILITAKY SERVICE
of the officers who were at the manoeuvres were the servants
of the soldiers who were there as well. I had one concrete
case where a major in the Swiss Army was giving orders
to a non-commissioned officer, and it turned out that the
major was a commissionaire at the bank and the non-com-
missioned officer was the manager of the bank."
This is what we get constantly in a truly national
army ; and from this it follows that the Swiss
army is as truly popular as it is thoroughly national.
I collected testimonials to its popularity among
all classes during a tour in Switzerland in 1900,
and printed the results of my enquiries with the
names of my informants. 1 Fuller testimonials,
but without names, are given in Chapters VII. and
VIII. of Mr Grande's book. In July, 1914, less than
three weeks before the outbreak of war, I had the
opportunity of, interviewing six prominent Swiss
socialists and antimilitarists, including MM. Wull-
schleger of Bale, who had moved a reduction of
the military budget in 1900, and Jean Sigg of
Geneva, who had been imprisoned for four months
for refusing to turn out when his battalion was
mobilized to police the city during a strike. Both
of these gentlemen explained that their quarrel
was not with the compulsory principle, but with
details of its application ; and M. Sigg went out
of his way to remind me how much the compulsory
army system had contributed to screw up national
1 A Strong Army in a Free State (Simpkin, Marshall and Co., Is. net),
pp. 27 ff. The substance of their evidence is reprinted in Appendix X.
at the end of the present volume.
THE SWISS MILITIA 167
education to greater efficiency. Three of the
others two editors and a printer were strong
pacificists, and had convinced themselves that
something like progressive disarmament was already
possible for all European countries. But even they
did not venture to claim that they could command
the votes of half the Socialist party in Switzerland ;
that is, they thought that 12 per cent, at most
of the total register might be on their side. This
was early in July ; and in August one of the first
official acts of the Socialist party was publicly
to proclaim its hearty approval of the national
mobilization, and to add " we have never com-
bated our Militia system in itself." 1 Even strong
opponents of compulsion for Great Britain have
admitted freely that in Switzerland it is the rejected
recruit who bewails his fate ; and Colonel Seely
was substantially right in telling the House of
Commons " The Swiss Minister of War assured me
that the Swiss system is not now at all a compulsory
system. Far from it ; any man who is rejected
regards it as a disaster, and there is great competi-
tion." 2 Mr. Grande has done good service by
printing, in Chapters VII. and VIII. of his book,
1 Berner Tagwacht, Aug. 3, 1914; cf. Appendix XI. here below: "Swiss
Socialists and the Swiss Army."
2 Debate of April 11, 1913. Cf. Mr. Harold Cox in the Nineteenth
Century and After for Oct. 1907, p. 524. " That the system is popular
with the Swiss people appears to be beyond question. . . . French and
Germans, in probably at least 9 cases out of 10, look upon their military
service as a painful obligation from which they would gladly escape.
The Switzer, on the other hand, likes his service, and voluntarily under-
takes even more than is imposed on him by the State."
168 COMPULSORY MILITARY SERVICE
the military experiences of many of his Swiss
friends, and their cordial tributes to the national
army-system.
As the popularity of the Swiss army is based
upon its thoroughly national character, so its
efficiency is based upon both. Enlisting all the
business forces of the nation, it naturally sum-
marizes all the business ideas. It would be difficult
to find any commercial or industrial concern which
is run upon more strictly practical lines than the
Swiss army. The time spent in training is not
very much more than the theoretical training-
course of a British Territorial ; but the average
work done in this time is, beyond all dispute, at
least twice as great. 1 One very good rough test
of business management is the test of economy.
Switzerland spends on her army 8s. lOd. per head
of the population, or less than half what she
spends on her education, which is probably the
most thorough in the world. The cost of each
Swiss soldier in 1907 was only two-thirds of the cost
of a British Territorial; yet this included heavy
expenditure on fortifications, and a far more up-to-
date armament than has ever been supplied to our
Auxiliary Forces ; and this difference in economy
1 A Territorial officer, under exceptionally advantageous conditions,
remarked to me about three years ago : "The irregularity of attendance
is such that, for every ten drills done by my men, I calculate that we
officers have to attend twenty drills." I repeated this to another officer
whose company was only a little above the average ; and, after a few
minutes' reflexion he replied : "I should say that we put in three drills
to one drill of the average private."
THE SWISS MILITIA 169
has since rather increased than diminished. 1
The extraordinary ingenious system by which
the Swiss, under great natural disadvantages,
have kept up an efficient cavalry force, has often
been singled out for special praise. Yet it is
modelled on a system evolved in Hanover while
Hanover was under our Crown ; the Swiss business-
man has picked up what the Briton has neglected
and forgotten (D.-K., 31-4). Finally, nothing
but the finest business organization could have
carried the Swiss army so tiiumphantly through
the strain of the present war. In the first week
of August, 1914, the Swiss called out and armed a
total force which, in proportion to the British
population, would amount to more than three
million men ; yet all who, like myself, actually
saw the events of those days, were astounded at
the small amount of dislocation which this effected
in ordinary civil life. Nothing even remotely
approaching this mobilization could have been
managed under a voluntary system : and there
can be little doubt that the efficiency of the army,
even more than the geographical conditions, de-
termined the German choice of violating Belgian
rather than Swiss neutrality. A very good account
of the Swiss mobilization may be found in Chapter
IX. of Mr. Grande's book.
1 Delme-Radcliffe, p. 128 ; cf. Sir Ian Hamilton and Lord Haldane in
Compulsory Service, 1911, pp. 178, 186, and Grande, p. 390 ; also a long
and interesting article in the Times for June 4, 1915.
CHAPTER XIII
SWITZERLAND AND BRITAIN
WE have seen how Democrats of all countries,
for many generations, have been attracted by this
citizen army of Switzerland. Carnot, confessedly,
was directly inspired by it in his reconstruction of
the armies which saved the first French Republic.
Radicals like Gaston Moch and Karl Bleibtreu,
Socialist leaders like Jaures, Vaillant, and Bebel,
have preached the Swiss example in France and
Germany. Adam Smith implicitly, and John
Stuart Mill explicitly, recommended its example
to Great Britain. Mill was one of the first among
distinguished British thinkers to realize the true
meaning of Germany's victory in 1870-1. In spite
of his strong personal sympathy with France,
where he had chosen to end his days, he maintained
uncompromisingly that the Germans were in
the right in this quarrel. This, however, did
not blind him to the military significance of
the German victory, and to the urgent necessity
of reorganizing British defences. He wrote (2nd
Jan., 1871) :
SWITZERLAND AND BRITAIN 171
" Our turn must come. Therefore, our people ought to
arm at once. ... I do not think it safe to trust entirely to
voluntary enlistment for the large defensive force which
this and every other country now requires."
And again, a month later :
"many thoughtful people are now coming round to the
Swiss system (of which Chadwick's school drill forms a
part), but the majority even of army reformers are still
far behind. They are prejudiced against making military
service within the country compulsory on the whole male
population, chiefly because, for want of knowledge of the
facts, they have a most exaggerated idea of the time which
would have to be sacrificed from the ordinary pursuits of
life. ... It will be an uphill fight to get a really national
defensive force ; but it may be a question of life and death
to this country, not only to have it, but to have it soon." l
A distinguished Liberal political economist,
Professor W. E. Cairnes, urged this same necessity
with even more emphasis in the Fortnightly Review
for Feb., 1871, then edited by the present Lord
Morley. This paper is reprinted in Cairnes 3 collected
volume of Political Essays. But Mill and Cairnes
died soon after ; the country settled down into
apparent security ; and the Boer war, which again
revealed the need of army reform, split the country
so definitely on party grounds that national defence
has since been treated, only too often, as a purely
party question. It needed the Great War to bring
home to all fair-minded people the truth of Mr.
Asquith's pronouncement early in 1914, that " home
1 Letters, ed. Hugh Elliot, vol. ii. pp. 291, 303.
172 COMPULSORY MILITARY SERVICE
defence is a common interest to all parties, and
whatever can be proved to be essential for that
purpose ought to be universally accepted, as being
beyond the region of party controversy."
Let us now, therefore, look more closely at the
lesson of this Swiss system for Great Britain. How
would our national life have been affected, in peace
and in war, by the adoption of Mill's proposal in
1871 ? We can best realize this by taking note
of what is actually done in Switzerland, under
political conditions as free as our own, and by
asking ourselves whether there is anything, in all
this, which could not be managed just as easily in
Great Britain.
The fact that every able-bodied man will have
to seive is a standing lesson to him throughout
boyhood and youth. It gives an enormous stimulus
to physical training in the schools, and to the
Cadet Corps, which in some cantons are compulsory
while in others they are still voluntary. In 1900,
I asked Mr. Hermann Greulich, the well-known
Labour Secretary at Zurich, whether there were
any changes which he would suggest in the army
system. 1 After a moment's thought, he replied,
" I would make the cadet corps system compulsory
throughout the Confederation." But, even in the
1 For the Labour Secretary, see Adams and Cunningham, pp. 276-7 ;
there is one for German and one for French Switzerland. These Secre-
taries are elected by the workmen, but paid by the nation, which also
provides an office and a staff of clerks ; their position is that of official
intermediary between Government and the workers.
SWITZERLAND AND BRITAIN 173
cantons where there is no compulsion in the schools,
there are careful systems of physical training which
prepare the boys for their service, and keep the
older men in training for it. Moch quotes statistics
for 1895-6, the last period available when he
wrote. Of all Swiss boys between ten and fifteen,
41*9 per cent, had followed a gymnastic course
during the whole year, 47*3 per cent, during part
of the year, *9 per cent, had refrained by doctors'
orders, and thus only 9*8 per cent, remained un-
accounted for. In 1912 this was so far improved that
91 per cent, of the recruits had previously passed
gymnastic tests. It is vain for British antimilitarists
to insist that equally good results in physical
training nr ght theoretically be obtained in a country
which had- no military drill whatever. They them-
selves have never put this theory into practice ;
and, great as have been the recent improvements
in our elementary schools, the British youth still
lacks anything like the systematic physical instruc-
tion which, by common consent, military drill
would in fact have given him. Even Sir Ian
Hamilton, on p. 106 of his Compulsory Service,
speaking of our " weedy, overgrown youths of 17
and 18," writes : "the immense work of national
regeneration the Army has been unostentatiously
performing, by helping these lads and making fine
men of them, is quite unknown to the average
citizen." Mr. G. F. Shee, in The Nineteenth Century
and After for May, 1903, points out that the British
174 COMPULSORY MILITARY SERVICE
recruit, during his first half-year's training, in-
creases in chest-girth by an average of two inches,
which is distinctly higher than the increase among
French and German recruits. The natural inference
is that this is due to the want of gymnastic training
among the youth of our poorer classes. Yet the
physical education of the poor is still much neglected.
There was a significant episode in a debate in the
House of Lords on Feb. 10, 1913. " Referring to
the remarks made by Lord HerscheU on this subject,
Lord Lansdowne expressed the hope that he was
not mistaken in assuming that the War Office had
some plan under consideration for the compulsory
training of boys at school and for a year or two after
school." Lord HerscheU at once put him right
on this point. " No such plan is under considera-
tion," he said. This, it must be remembered, was
under a War Minister who has interested himself
in national education, and talked publicly about
national education, far beyond any of his pre-
decessors. The Arbitrator pleaded very truly,
nearly a year after this :
" Mr. Acland, who is opposed to conscription, advocated
compulsory physical training in continuation schools.
There is much to be said in favour of such a proposal ;
and not the least argument in its favour, as Mr. Acland
urged, is that, if generally carried out, it would incidentally
destroy the National Service League " (Dec. 1913, p. 136).
In other words, the advocates of Compulsory
Service have had the tactical advantage, for many
SWITZERLAND AND BRITAIN 175
years, of pressing the immediate introduction of
real physical training for our youth ; while their
opponents, for all their philanthropic professions,
have still lagged behind. We are thus brought
round again to those memorable words in John
Stuart Mill's Essay on Comte (1865, p. 149) :
" Until labourers and employers perform the work of
industry in the spirit in which soldiers perform that of an
army, industry will never be moralized ; and military life
will remain what, in spite of the anti-social character of its
direct object, it has hitherto been, the chief school of moral
co-operation."
An army, by its very constitution, is obliged
actually to do the things which even the best-
intentioned theorists are too often content with
merely talking about. In Switzerland, it was the
army which found out a good many deficiencies
even in the class-room teaching at the schools. 1
For, in his twentieth year, every young Switzer
goes before an Army Board not only for a medical
test but for a scholastic examination also. Simple
as it is, this examination has incidentally provided
a very valuable stock-taking of scholastic results
in the different cantons. Considerable local differ-
ences were thus brought out in earlier years ; but
these defects, once brought to light, were rapidly
remedied ; and emulation has now brought the
Swiss cantons very nearly to the same level of
1 See also Appendix XII. for the extent to which even the Swiss recruit,
for all his preliminary physical training, benefits by his military service.
176 COMPULSOEY MILITAEY SEKVICE
education. So uniformly excellent are the elemen-
tary schools, that practically none but the idiots
and weak-minded fail in this examination, which
turns on (1) reading, (2) simple composition in the
form of a letter, (3) mental and written arithmetic.
In the physical test, which is very strict, only 52
per cent, are successful. These are called out for
the next " recruit school " held in their district,
where they are put through a training in barracks,
varying in length from sixty-five days (infantry)
to ninety (cavalry). For the first twelve years of
his service the citizen belongs to the " Elite," and
is called out every other year for a " repetition
course" of eleven days. In the intermediate years
the soldier shoots at his own leisure a minimum of
fifty rounds at the most convenient butts, but
under strict Government conditions ; in default
of which he will be called out to go through, at his
own expense, and at the place and time fixed by
the authorities, a musketry school of three days.
As a matter of fact, the volunteer rifle practice
enormously exceeds this compulsory minimum.
In 1898, 163,409 did their shooting voluntarily, as
against only 2,493 who were called to the musketry
school. In addition to these, there were 49,248
volunteer members of shooting clubs, including
2,166 cadets. Adding to these figures the 75,000
" Elite " and " Landwehr " who did their training
that year, we see that there were 290,000 men who
shot at the butts. The same proportion in England
SWITZERLAND AND BRITAIN 177
would amount to over 3,100,000 compulsory marks-
men, together with 640,000 more who shot entirely
of their own free will (Bericht des Eidgenossischen
Militdrdepartements uber seine Geschaftsfuhrung,
1898,p. 59). Moreover, these figures take no account
of the extra voluntary shooting done, over and
above the compulsory fifty rounds, by those who
are here counted on the compulsory list. 1
These, then, are the military duties of the able-
bodied Swiss citizen from his twentieth to his
thirty-second year inclusive. For the next eight
years he falls back from the Elite to the Landwehr,
or first reserve. Here he is called out only once,
for a course of eleven days' service. During the
other years he must do his shooting classes as in
the Elite, and he must keep his arms and accoutre-
ments fit and ready for inspection at any moment.
With his forty-first year he passes into the Land-
sturm, or second reserve, which is composed of
the whole body of citizens between seventeen and
forty-eight (except, of course, the hopelessly in-
capable, the Elite, and the Landwehr). The
Landsturm is never called out but in case of war or
1 Colonel Delme-Radcliffe (p. 10) gives an excellent contrast between
Swiss and British rifle-practice in 1906. It may be thus tabulated :
Population. No. of rifle-clubs. Membership.
Great Britain - 42,000,000 1,000 80,000
Switzerland - 3,300,000 3,800 228,000
We must also remember that the great majority of the British employ
miniature ranges, such as are used in Switzerland only by boys ; and
in every other respect the Swiss clubs are far more business-like than
any but the very best of ours.
M
178 COMPULSORY MILITARY SERVICE
other desperate emergency. A considerable propor-
tion are armed, the rest are utilized as porters, etc.
Thus, though the citizen is i^ever allowed to
forget his duty of helping in the defence 6f his
country, the actual time required of him is
very short. The overwhelming majority serve in
the infantry, and a life's infantry service totals
only 203 days, a little more than half a year. A
man who has reached his forty-ninth year is no
longer liable to serve even in case of war, and has
spent about a hundredth part of his life upon a duty
which assures the freedom and prosperity of the
country.
The military qualities of this militia will be dis-
cussed later on ; for the present, it is only necessary
to note that it is, in fact, a system of Compulsory
Territorialism. The Swiss citizen performs, by law,
not very much more than the same length of service
which the Territorial performs, or is supposed to
perform, of his own accord. Like the Territorial,
he remains all his life a citizen first, and a soldier
only in the second or third rank. Unlike the
Territorial, his training is taken very strictly ; his
little unpunctualities, voluntary or involuntary,
do not compel the Swiss officer to put in two or
three drills for every one that is put in by the Swiss
private. There is no soldier in the world who works
harder than the Swiss during his short time of
service ; and there is no army in the world that
can mobilize so quickly or so easily. Captain Moch
SWITZERLAND AND BRITAIN 179
prophesied this in 1899, and Commandant Manceau
in 1900 ; Colonel Delme-Radcliffe repeated the
prophecy in 1908, and the actual success of Swiss
mobilization in 1914 even surpassed all anticipa-
tions . It is well described by Mr. Grande in Chapter
IX. of his book.
Moreover, every Swiss soldier starts in the ranks,
and can obtain promotion by military merit alone,
So strict is this law that no exception could be
made for a foreign officer of real distinction who,
in consequence of a duel, had migrated to Switzer-
land and sought service there as one of the 220
professional instructors. He had to do his recruit-
course first among the boys, and was then promoted
major-instructor. As a rule, however, even the
most efficient officer is promoted by only one step
at a time, through all the non-commissioned and
subaltern grades. He receives no fixed salary, but
simply daily pay while called out on army work ;
which time, of course, amounts only to a small
fraction of his life. He must have his own civil
business or profession to live by; and this single
condition, if there were no other, binds army and
nation indissolubly together. The letter of the law
compels every citizen, during his years of service,
to undertake any duty for which he is named ;
but the law provides also that the choice shall be
made strictly by merit, and not by seniority. Now,
nothing would be easier for a soldier than to avoid
distinguishing himself sufficiently to run the risk
180 COMPULSORY MILITARY SERVICE
of promotion. Nothing would be easier ; but I
have been assured over and over again that there
is no serious practical difficulty of that kind. The
rigour of the law is tempered by the sound common-
sense of a people educated by centuries of self-
government ; and a man who finds it already hard
to make both ends meet at home will not be called
upon to sacrifice any more of his time for the army,
if only for the simple reason that such compulsion
would defeat its own ends, forcing upon the man
a task to which he could not do justice, and, there-
fore, upon the army an officer who could not do it
credit. For the officer's additional work is no con-
temptible burden ; a cavalry lieutenant was good
enough to reckon up for me the time that his grade
had cost him, and it turned out that in four years
he had already done more than double that amount
of work which, spread over twenty-five years,
would have earned a private his release from the
army. Yet there is, on the whole, no difficulty
in obtaining officers, and in some cases the compe-
tition is very keen. In the Swiss army, as in any
competition whatever, the higher and better fed
and more educated classes must have a long start ;
but no start which resolution and real merit cannot
overhaul. To anyone who has had the privilege
of conversing with a number of Swiss officers it is
evident enough that the system does, as a matter
of fact, find out a high class of men. Moreover, the
same qualities which thus enable the scratch man
SWITZERLAND AND BRITAIN 181
to run through his field in the army stand him
generally in good stead in the race of life. At
twenty he was, let us say, a private and an artisan ;
at thirty a captain and already his own master ;
at forty-five, colonel in the army and a thriving
man in the town. The one work helps the other ;
and, by a double channel, merit forces its way to
the fore. Here, again, the Swiss militia system
shows itself one of the most powerful and beneficent
factors in the true education of the people.
How cheerfully this extra burden of hard work
is borne by the officers can only be realised by per-
sonal intercourse with the men who bear it. One
of the Divisional Commanders whom I interviewed
in 1900 was also a manufacturer ; his four sons
are officers, from lieutenant upwards. At the
last manoeuvres all these five had been called out
together. One or two of them could doubtless
have got the service put off to some other time
for when you have so willing an army you can
afford to make these little concessions, and I came
across several instances of such consideration for
civil requirements. But no ; all these five officers
turned out together, and were proud to do so ; nor
does the business suffer in the long run. Man is
a queer animal ; tax all his manly resources, and
he will doubly tax himself. These Swiss men of
business who spend so much time and energy on
army affairs, run neck and neck with us in commerce
and industry.
182 COMPULSORY MILITARY SERVICE
Adams and Cunningham, giving statistics of
Swiss trade and industry on p. 227 of their book,
add the following comment :
" When we compare these figures with the statistics of
other countries for the same period, we find no state in
Europe in which there is so great a general trade per head
of population. England and Belgium come next ; then
follow France and Germany. . . . These facts are all the
more striking when we remember that Switzerland possesses
none of the advantages in geographical situation, or in
its topographical features, which would enable us to
account for the remarkable extent and development of the
commerce of the country."
Moch, on pp. 187 ff., gives an interesting table
of the comparative length of service of a private
and an officer, up to their thirty-third year. The
private, until recently, did only half as much as a
sergeant 103 to 145 days, according to circum-
stances, as against 206 to 222. The lieutenant had
done 313, and the captain 488, before their trans-
ference to the Reserve : the Major and Colonel
sacrificed proportionately more time. The slightly
longer service brought in by the Army Reorganiza-
tion of 1907 (which was put to a Referendum and
carried by a considerable majority) leaves these
proportions practically unaltered.
Finally, we must consider the numbers furnished
by this Swiss system, and their military qualities.
In 1895 the army consisted of 415,505 real
effectives, apart from others who could be trained
and utilized in cases of emergency. In 1911 (the
SWITZERLAND AND BRITAIN 183
last for which we have figures) these numbers had
risen to 486,851. (Moch, p. 160; J. G., p. 39.)
Multiplying these by 13, to bring them to terms
of British population, we get 6,330,000 effective
fighting-men available at brief notice for home
defence.
The military value of these soldiers has always
been rated very highly by foreign observers. I
have quoted some of these testimonials in my
Strong Army in a Free State (pp. 24-5) ; more may
be found in Delme-Radcliffe, p. 58 ; Grande,
p. 138, and above all in pp. 267-86 of Moch. The
first judges that, while the system is cheaper than
that of the British Auxiliary Forces, " it would be
infinitely more efficient as an army." * The
second quotes from a neutral military attache who,
after witnessing the mobilization of the second
division in June 1915, decided that " [The Swiss
soldier] has so much benefited by his previous
training in service (from August 6th, 1914, till
March, 1915) as to make the Swiss army probably
the best-trained army, for its size, in the world
to-day." Moch quotes from a French critic who,
though anxious to prove that the Swiss system
would not be sufficient for France, confesses that,
in working military qualities, and apart from mere
parade, the Swiss regiments " are not sensibly
1 This was before Lord Haldane's scheme had begun to take full effect ;
but, greatly as that scheme added to the value of our Auxiliary Forces,
no responsible person would venture to qualify the improvement with
this epithet "infinitely."
184 COMPULSORY MILITARY SERVICE
inferior to those of France or Germany " (p. 275).
After similar quotations from French, Austrian,
and British military attaches, he gives a concrete
instance which is even more significant than these
official testimonials (p. 284) :
" Switzerland took up the repeating-rifle eighteen years
before France or Germany adopted it [i.e. in 1868]. But
ten years later, in 1878, a similar arm was given to the crews
in our navy. And, at the same time, we taught in our
military schools that these repeating-rifles could not come
into general use, since a weapon of that kind was unfit for
troops of less fine quality than the Swiss infantryman or
the French marine."
We must, of course, always proceed with great
caution in arguing from the experience of one
country to another. But are not Britons rather
prone to the opposite fault ? Do we not often
condemn foreign experiences unheard, or at least
catch at very flimsy pretexts for rejecting them ?
The Great War, certainly, has given a real shock
to this complacent insularity, and has swept
certain objections away for ever. Even those who,
a few years ago, protested that British class-feeling
would forbid our imitating the Swiss system of
promotion, will have been silenced by recent facts.
The extreme Conservative who desired no such
equality, and the jealous Democrat who, while
desiring it, protested that British society was too
rotten to permit it, must both have been converted
by the deeds of all classes in the trenches, and by
SWITZERLAND AND BRITAIN 185
the national oblivion of class-distinction in our
admiration for all good fighters for their country.
And it has repeatedly been pointed out that all the
strong points of the Swiss system rest, not on Swiss
geographical or racial peculiarities, but on the
bed-rock of human nature. It is simply " Com-
pulsory Territorialism " ; simply a systematic
exploitation of all available national forces for a
national duty which, in Great Britain, is normally
borne by scarcely more than one man out of ten.
By marshalling all classes to stand shoulder to
shoulder in defence of the country's liberties, it
rubs off many awkward angles, and solves im-
perceptibly an infinity of small social or political
problems. The working of the Swiss Army system
can hardly be better expressed than by saying
that it spreads through the whole nation much of
the same spirit which it is the unique glory of our
Public Schools to foster among our richer classes.
It is the same sort of introduction, rough but
healthy, to the realities of life. Here, as in schools,
the man finds himself commanded by one who has
risen from the ranks in which he still is whom he
himself has perhaps even known in those ranks
and hence there grows that highest and most
living discipline which is compounded of familiarity
and respect in due proportions. The rich learn that
they must work to keep their start of the poor,
while the poor see that rich men's sons have gen-
erally inherited many of the qualities which raised
186 COMPULSORY MILITARY SERVICE
their fathers before them. The Army ensures hard,
healthy, open-air work to thousands who would
otherwise have missed it. It arouses the sluggard
from his sloth, and focusses the superabundant
activities of the energetic man. Without over-
burdening the citizen, it never allows him absolutely
to forget his responsibilities to the country which
bred him ; and, as the greatest of the Roman
popular assemblies originated in a purely military
organization, so the Swiss Army has proved itself
one of the strongest factors in Swiss political and
social education. That nation is confronted at every
step by differences of race and religion as wide as
any in these islands, and further complicated by
differences of language. Yet in Switzerland there
is nothing so bad as our Irish question. It is strange
that British Liberalism has so long ignored the
working, among an exceptionally free people, of
this most perfect existing system of national
defence.
CHAPTER XIV
PRINCIPLE OR EXPEDIENCY?
IN spite of Lord Roberta's activity and personal
popularity, the majority of British citizens were
certainly still against him in 1914. The idea of
compulsion was steadily gaining ground, as Mr.
Harold Cox frankly confessed in his latest and
fullest plea for Voluntarism (Edinburgh Review,
April 1913, p. 485). But, in spite of this gradual
advance, the majority of British voters were far
from realizing the danger which John Stuart Mil]
had foreseen forty years earlier, or from seriously
considering Mill's suggested remedy. This was
doubtless due to many different causes ; but one
far outweighed the rest. It was precisely because
the country did not realize the danger, that it
would not consider the remedy. Lord Haldane, in
an Army Debate of 1909, agreed with Sir Henry
Craik that every able-bodied Briton is still bound,
under common-law, to fight when called upon for
home defence (House of Commons, March 8). He
only differed from Sir Henry Craik as to the actual
need for giving our manhood such training as would
188 COMPULSORY MILITARY SERVICE
enable it to fulfil this existing common-law obliga-
tion. Yet when, shortly after the outbreak of the
war. Lord Haldane again publicly admitted the
common-law liability of every British citizen to
fight in home defence, this suddenly became a
Nine Days' Wonder, and the nation woke up in
astonishment to one of the fundamental laws of
its own Constitution. Nobody had paid any
attention to it in 1909 ; now, everybody realized
its significance. It had needed a European War to
open our eyes.
For indeed this question, which so many people try
to treat primarily as a matter of political principle,
is really one of military expediency. In cold blood,
99 people out of 100 are agreed on the two main
points on which the controversy really turns. On
the one hand they recognize that invasion is one
of the greatest conceivable calamities, and that
scarcely any price would be too heavy to pay for
efficient defence. On the other, they wish to pay
no price, in money, in service, or in change of policy,
beyond what the danger may reasonably be held
to require. These two points are conceded by all
but the negligible minorities who, at one extreme,
desire an extension of militarism because they
vainly hope to gain by it politically or, at the
other extreme*, preach non-resistance, yet never
attempt to construct any coherent theory of the
non-resistant state. To the overwhelming majority,
the decisive question in this problem is to deter-
PRINCIPLE OR EXPEDIENCY ? 189
mine the exact amount of force required for the
defence of these islands or of the Empire. Very great
differences of opinion exist within these limits ;
but those differences, however serious, are only of
degree. The primary question, for reasonable men
on either side, is to find the necessary degree of
military force. This is often lost sight of in the heat
of argument ; but it remains the real dominating
thought at the back of men's minds.
It has been treated as the primary question by
political philosophers. John Stuart Mill, in the
first chapter of his essay On Liberty, insists that the
individual " may rightly be compelled to bear his
fair share in the common defence." Again, in
Chapter IV., he specifies the individual's two main
duties to society, of which the second consists " in
each person's bearing his share (to be fixed on some
equitable principle) of the labours and sacrifices
incurred for defending the society or its members
from injury and molestation ; these conditions
Society is justified in enforcing at all costs to those
who endeavour to withhold fulfilment." Strongly
as Mill objected to unnecessary interference with
individual liberties, he justified compulsory drill
on the same groiinds as compulsory education, of
which he wrote : " I do not see anything short of a
legal obligation which will overcome the indiffer-
ence, the greed, or the really urgent pecuniary
interest of parents " (Letters, vol. ii. p. 107).
And Lord Morley, then Editor of the Fortnightly
190 COMPULSORY MILITARY SERVICE
Review, recognized equally clearly that in both
cases the question was one of expediency ; that
Voluntarism was preferable so long as it would
work, but Compulsion must step in as soon as it
was evident that voluntary effort would no longer
meet the needs of the time. After emphasizing the
notorious deficiencies of British education under
the voluntary system, Lord Morley wrote :
" The disadvantages and inconveniences of legal inter-
ference with parental freedom are more than counter-
balanced by the disadvantages and inconveniences arising
from a parent's abuse of this freedom, to the detriment of
other people. These, or some such propositions, seem to
be the ground on which compulsion is to be defended. The
argument is, in a general way, analogous to that of a country
whose geographical position and the menaces of whose
neighbours make it expedient for every man in it to be
legally compelled to undergo a certain amount of military
training." l
Of all British political philosophers there is
perhaps none who preached peace more consistently
than Cobden. Yet Cobden repeatedly asserted : " I
would, if necessary, spend one hundred millions
sterling to maintain an irresistible superiority over
Prance at sea " (J. Morley, Life of Cobden, letter of
Aug. 2, 1860 : Nelson's edn. p. 387). This recog-
nizes the same fact, that real military necessity is,
at bottom, the paramount consideration.
Our most responsible statesmen, again, have
1 The Struggle for Education, republished in book form, from the
Fortnightly Review, in 1873, p. 139. On p. 25 the author gives a vivid
contrast between British inefficiency, and German efficiency, in education.
PRINCIPLE OR EXPEDIENCY ? 191
followed the political philosophers in treating
Compulsory Service as a question mainly of mili-
tary expediency. Mr. Asquith, replying to Lord
Roberts's deputation, said very distinctly that, if
military necessity demanded compulsion, no politi-
cal principles must be allowed to stand in the way. 1
In the Lords' debate of April 21, 1913, when Lord
Curzon complained that the Government refused
to consider compulsion seriously, Lord Haldane
was careful to explain that his objections were not
political, but military. 2 Ten days earlier (April 11)
Colonel Seeley had spoken even more emphatically
in the House of Commons. After pointing out
that the Swiss system was no longer compulsory in
the invidious sense, but sanctioned by universal
consent, he added :
" But why ? Not because a law was passed, but because
the Swiss War Minister would say, ' if you don't do this
1 " I gladly recognize the truth of what Lord Roberts has said in his
introductory remarks, and of what was repeated by more than one
subsequent speaker, that it is not a matter which ought to divide us
upon what are commonly called party lines ; because home defence is
a common interest to all parties, and whatever can be proved to be
essential for that purpose ought to be universally accepted as being
beyond the region of party controversy. . . . The more this matter is
discussed, and the more public opinion can be brought to bear upon the
aspects which you have put to me to-day, the greater will be the advan-
tage to the community, both from the point of view of safety and of
educational and social problems " (Westminster Gazette, Feb. 27, 1914).
2 Earl Curzon : " If the Government think Lord Roberts's plan a bad
one, why not be willing to discuss the matter with us ? Why regard the
matter as taboo to the Liberal Party, as an unclean thing which in no
circumstances you would touch ? " Viscount Haldane : " Not from the
Liberal point of view, but from the nUitary point of view." Earl
Curzon : " I find it difficult to distinguish between the noble Viscount as
a soldier and as a politician." (Laughter.)
192 COMPULSOKY MILITARY SERVICE
your independence is gone.' I, however, have to say that
the General Staff inform me, after the most careful consider-
ation, that the arrangements we now have [in Great Britain]
are adequate to prevent us suffering from a blow at the
heart which would cause us to lose our national indepen-
dence. Suppose the whole situation were reversed, and
that the only way of saving our hearth and home was by
adopting universal service, there would not be a man in
this House who would not at once be prepared to vote for
it, and whose constituents would not vote for it."
Equally significant are the arguments of an equally
able opponent of Compulsory Service, Mr. Harold
Cox. While admitting that it works admirably in
Switzerland, he contended that we had no use for
it in Great Britain. " By adopting this system we
should undoubtedly obtain, at a comparatively
moderate expense, an enormous number of soldiers.
But do we want these soldiers ? " Later on, point-
ing out that the Swiss system would give us four
millions of trained men, and that the then experts
(this was in 1907) fixed 10,000 as the largest German
attacking force for which we need make serious
provision, Mr. Cox continued, " and we are asked
to create this gigantic machine in order to deal
with a raiding force of 10,000 men ! " l On these
premisses, the argument was, of course, perfectly^
sound ; and it is equally natural that, in the
autumn of 1914, Mr. Cox was one of the first dis-
tinguished voluntarists to admit that the changed
military situation now demanded compulsion. But
1 Nineteenth Century and After, Oct. 1907, pp. 527, 531.
PEINCIPLE OR EXPEDIENCY ? 193
perhaps the strongest instance of all is supplied by
Major-General Sir Alfred Turner, whose Knell of
Compulsory Service was published in 1911 as a
leaflet of the International Arbitration League.
Though emphasizing also the " wastefulness " of
military preparations, it deals almost entirely with
the military and naval aspects of the question,
argues that " our forefathers would have blushed
to own to such fears of invasion," and contends
that " the bottom has been knocked out of the
arguments of the Compulsion party " by Sir
Arthur Wilson's official conclusion that " invasion
on even a moderate scale of 70,000 men is practi-
cally impossible." It is to Sir Alfred Turner's
honour that, when facts threw a new light upon
this problem, he again was among the first dis-
tinguished converts. He wrote to the Times
(May 24, 1915) :
" Everyone who possesses patriotism and common-
sense must agree with Major E. H. Richardson that com-
pulsory service is now essential and only fair to the public.
I There only existed one supposed reason why a large number
I of people myself, I regret to say, among them opposed
I Conscription as unnecessary, and that was that we were
i short-sighted and gullible enough to believe in the good
. faith of the German Emperor and the love of peace and
goodwill towards us of the German nation."
The same plea and the same confession were
I repeated on July 15 ; and Sir Alfred Turner wrote
again on March 29, 1916 :
;
194 COMPULSORY MILITARY SERVICE
" The only reasons which made us apparently safe without
Conscription were that we should not be involved in a
European war, and that the German Emperor was, as he
pretended to be, determined to preserve the peace of Europe.
Both these great illusions have been shattered to atoms." x
This, then, has been the attitude of the most
responsible British statesmen, and of those writers
who have most clearly faced the problem of com-
pulsory service. But it must be confessed that a
very different attitude was taken up until quite
recently by a large section and probably by the
majority of the general public. Sir Alfred Turner's
reason was the real reason at the back of most
minds ; yet many persuaded themselves that this was
a question, not of expediency, but of fundamental
principle. In 1900, as I know by experience, it was
possible to address a large working-man audience
on the subject without prejudice. But a little
later, when Lord Koberts's propaganda brought
it nearer to practical politics, it was more and more
treated as a party question by a large section of
the public and, it must be confessed, especially,
by political Liberals. When, on Feb. 27, 1914,
Mr. Asquith had freely conceded that the question]
of Compulsion or Voluntarism " ought not toi
divide us upon what are commonly called party]
lines," the Westminster Gazette seized this oppor-j
tunity of protesting, in its leading article :
1 Compare the startling change in the general American attitude fronr
the moment that war became a question of practical politics.
PEINCIPLE OR EXPEDIENCY ? 195
" if ever this question becomes practical politics, the
Liberal Party will be as solid for the voluntary principle
as it is for Free Trade. That contingency is so likely to be
deferred to the Greek Kalends that we have no desire to
proscribe anyone who holds a pious opinion on this subject."
It would be difficult to warn the public more
plainly that, however the Prime Minister might
urge us to keep our minds open and discuss the
question in all its bearings, any such discussion
would be waste of time in orthodox party-circles.
A correspondent put this more plainly, if possible,
in the Nation for March 11, 1916 (p. 286): "if
there was an article in the Liberal creed which was
sacrosanct [until this war broke out], it was that
which anathematized Conscription." It is not too
strong, therefore, to say that a large number of
party-Liberals, and of very distinguished party-
Liberals, adopted a purely Conservative attitude
! towards this question in the days before the war.
Both to the Nation and to the Westminster Gazette,
papers second to none in general ability and fair-
ness, the real motto was " j'y suis ; j'y reste ! "
It is greatly to the honour of British and American
politics and character that this impossible reliance
upon abstract principles (crude in themselves and
i incompletely thought-out), was so soon modified
iin the face of new and startling facts. Indeed,
(precious as that power of imagination is which
jsometimes casts upon our minds a shadow of the
icoming reality, still more precious is the open mind
196 COMPULSORY MILITARY SERVICE
which does not hesitate to face the reality when it
appears before our eyes. Our national blindness
to the risks of war was emphasized in the past not
only by compulsorists like Lord Roberts, but by
so militant a voluntarist as Colonel F. N. Maude,
who in 1907, writing about war scares, remarked :
" it is true that under ordinary conditions, though people
read these things, no one allows them to influence his day-
to-day conduct for a moment. House-property in Ports-
mouth, for instance, is not depreciated because a particular
group of dwellings happens to be directly behind certain
batteries ; and the fact that every shell passing over its
guns must of necessity find a final billet in their best bed-
or drawing-rooms does not affect their rent or selling-
price. I have made careful enquiry to satisfy myself on
this point, yet no one can suggest 'that Portsmouth is not
kept sufficiently alive to the possibilities of modern warfare "
(War and the World's Work, p. 408).
The illusion of security has been greatly modified
now in seaside towns ; so also has the whole problem
of National Defence assumed a different aspect
to the nation at laige, though we are still in a \
transition stage here. If the old illusions had now j
completely disappeared, the present book would be
superfluous, since nothing is less profitable than the
gratuitous raking-up of byegones. But we still |
find leading articles here and there, and correspon-
dence and pamphlets in profusion, based upon the f
old delusion that Compulsory Service is contrary)]
to democratic principles. The authors do not,
argue the question ; now, as before the war, they
PRINCIPLE OR EXPEDIENCY ? 197
simply beg it, writing as men who have never
conceived any other idea, and who have habitually
addressed a public unwilling to face any other side
of the facts. In any case, it will be a long task to
drive out the purely insular delusion that the com-
pulsory principle is hated and dreaded by those
millions of continental working-men who have
practical experience of its working. Time and
sober reflection are needed to make our masses
understand that the continental masses may hate
war, and hate many details in their present system,
without dreaming of attacking the compulsory
principle in itself.
We must begin, therefore, at the top as well as
at the bottom. The real facts of history and of
modern continental politics must frequently be
put into a form accessible to those writers who now
dogmatize upon so slender a basis of fact. Then,
and then only, this outcry of " Prussianism "
raised against even the Swiss Citizen- Army system
will soon be confined to that negligible residuum
of writers who cannot or who will not face the
plainest facts. Then the working-classes, no longer
misled by statements which would be laughed out
of court on the Continent or in our own Colonies,
will ask themselves whether it is safer for a demo-
cracy to hold the armed force of the nation in its
own hands, or to depute that force to a paid
minority. They will further ask themselves, with
Jean Jaures, whether a population which accepts
198 COMPULSORY MILITARY SERVICE
the foreign invader with resignation is likely ever
to wage a successsful fight against the capitalist. 1
They will recognize the fundamentally military
character of this question, and will see that a
democracy which dissociates itself from military
questions is committing political suicide.
All public debates, even in the past, have shown
how impossible it is to treat this question mainly
as one of principle. Mr. Harold Cox, good volun-
tarist as he then was, could not resist the tempta-
tion of exposing this fallacy in the Army Debate of
March 8, 1909. He pointed out that some of those
who protested most against compulsion for national
defence, were at the same time determined to
compel their fellow Trade-Unionists to contribute
money for the salaries of the Labour Members.
Here and in similar matters, Labour has actually
insisted upon Compulsion. At the Swansea Railway
Congress of 1914, Mr. A. Whitehead, of Newton
Heath, argued " that it was as just and reasonable
to coerce men to pay for the benefits secured for
them by the Trade Union, as it was to coerce rate-
payers to contribute to the cost of sanitary adminis-
tration for the preservation of the health of the
community " (Manchester Guardian, June 20, 1914).
1 ** Never would a proletariat which had abandoned the defence of
national independence and therefore of its own free development
never would such a proletariat find vigour enough to conquer capitalism.
Having unresistingly suffered the invader's yoke to be added to that of
the capitalist, it would never raise its head again " (Jean Jaures, L'Armee
Nouvelle, 1915, p. 362 ; translated in Democracy and Military Service
(Simpkin, Is.), p. 82).
PRINCIPLE OR EXPEDIENCY ? 199
The most indefensible of all recent proposals for
compulsion, from the point of view of settled principle
and real human justice, have been those for con-
scripting the time-expired Regulars and the boys
of 18, and for violating the express contract under
which the Territorials had enlisted. Nobody will
venture to assert that any one of those three
classes would have been treated with such manifest
injustice if they had not been practically helpless
in the political sense the first two as having no
votes, the third class as unable publicly to express
their opinions during the war, and all three as
lacking either the numbers or the organization
required for anything like an effective strike. Yet
the protests against these unjust proposals of
compulsion came not from the voluntarist but from
compulsionist newspapers ; nor had either Sir
John Simon, or any member who has claimed to
oppose conscription on principle, a single word to
say against these proposals in the House of Com-
mons' debate (April 27, 1916). Moreover, Sir
John Simon's attitude is the more significant
because of his personal distinction. He is the most
prominent of all our statesmen who irreconcilably
resisted the Military Service Bill. Yet Lord Derby
had no difficulty in showing that Sir John had
not only connived at, but actively employed the
principle of Compulsory Military Service in its
least justifiable form, before his final revolt in face
of Universal Compulsion. In other words, Sir
200 COMPULSORY MILITARY SERVICE
John had been guided mainly by military expedi-
ency. So far as the militaiy position seemed to
him absolutely to require it, he had been content
to inflict compulsory soldiering upon numbers of
his fellow-citizens ; when at last he judged that
the Bill overstepped the limits demanded by strict
military necessity, he quitted the Government. 1
In this he was logical enough : it is only illogical
to represent such a revolt against military details,
however important, as a revolt of principle against
Compulsion. But the incident is of extreme
importance, because it exactly exemplifies the
confusion of thought on this subject in the minds
of the general public. This war has at last shown
clearly that 99 men out of 100, when they spoke of
this question as one of pure principle, were really
guided in their reasoning by considerations of
expediency. Before August, 1914, there seemed
to be no military necessity which could weigh
against the general reluctance to inflict, or accept,
such a restriction of individual liberty as this.
The nation has since accepted, on the overwhelming
testimony of the experts, an assurance that the
military necessities of this war do demand com-
pulsion. The ground, therefore, is so far cleared
for discussion after the war, that nearly all dis-
putants will now give due weight to the question of
military necessity. The voluntarist, however earnest,
will no longer merely say " j'y suis, j'y reste!"
1 See documents in Appendix XIII., " Principle and Compromises."
PRINCIPLE OR EXPEDIENCY ? 201
and plead that his principles forbid him to discuss
so distasteful a question. He will confess " National
defence is, after all, the paramount consideration ;
and, so long as I cannot convince myself and others
that voluntarism will give us every reasonable
security, I must bow to the exigencies of a situation
created not by theories, but by facts."
CHAPTER XV
VOLUNTEER RECRUITS
I HAVE tried, up to this point, to prove three main
conclusions.
1. That, in past history, the universality of
military service has been roughly proportionate
to the freedom of the State, while despots have
always relied as much as possible upon voluntary
enlistments, with compulsion in the background.
2. That to-day, in the civilized world, the majority
of democrats treat the voluntary army system as
scarcely more practicable than a voluntary system
of taxation ; that all continental democracies
accept the compulsory principle, and only object
to some of its applications.
3. That even the Briton, while he imagined his
objections to be based upon democratic or indi-
vidualistic principles, knew at the back of his mind
what he now sees plainly enough, that the whole
question is one of degree. The country needs a
certain amount of military and naval protection,
as the child needs education and the workman
insurance. In national defence it is even truer
VOLUNTEER RECRUITS 203
than in education or insurance, that the proved
inadequacy of voluntary effort renders legal com-
pulsion a matter of bare social justice.
It is an invidious task to emphasize the break-
down of voluntarism ; and we may treat it very
briefly. We must begin, however, by dismissing
the random talk about ingratitude. It may safely
be said that in most cases the men who least
believe in the adequacy of voluntarism as a system
are most ready to recognize the generous sacrifices
made by the individual volunteers ; just as those
who object most to capitalism as a system have
often most sympathy with the workmen who bear
its chief burden. Nobody fully appreciates the
heroism of our soldiers on the retreat from Mons,
who does not also realize that these men bled to
redeem other men's miscalculations that they
were pitted against thrice their number of Germans,
because our politicians had accustomed themselves
to assert that one volunteer was worth five con-
scripts and that, even so, their lives were partly
thrown away. For, though that retreat has been
claimed, truly enough perhaps, as our greatest
military exploit since Waterloo, yet nothing can
be more certain than that a few such retreats in
succession would have ruined the Allied cause.
Nor is it much more to the point to insist that no
nation ever has raised such a volunteer army as
this of ours, especially for foreign service. The
fact still remains that our troops were able to hold
204 COMPULSORY MILITARY SERVICE
up only a fraction of the German army ; and that we
have to thank our Allies and our Fleet for the two
years' delay which has enabled us to raise and train
a force really proportionate to our population and
to our stake in the War. Who will promise us
anything like so long a respite on any other occasion?
It is perhaps true that no state was so well edu-
cated, under a purely voluntary system, as ours was
in the first two-thirds of the nineteenth century.
Yet it is certainly true that, during those two
generations, our education was steadily falling
behind that of other countries with their com-
pulsory systems, and that the daily cry of the
British Voluntarists " give us a little longer trial,
and all will be well," was finally silenced by the
irresistible logic of facts. As early as 1847, Lord
Macaulay gave a conclusive answer to this plea.
" Only this morning the opponents of our plan
[i.e. the voluntarists] circulated a paper in which
they confidently predict that free competition
will do what is necessary, if we will only wait with
patience. Wait with patience ! Why, we have
been waiting ever since the Heptarchy. How much
longer are we to wait ? Till the year 2847, or till the
year 3847 ? . . . Our whole system has been un-
sound. We have applied the principle of free
competition to a case to which that principle is
not applicable." l
1 Speech in the House of Commons, April 18, 1847, printed in Mis-
cellaneous Writings, 1878, p. 742.
VOLUNTEER RECRUITS 205
As a matter of fact, the voluntary principle was
tried for nearly a generation after Macaulay's
words, and was finally killed in 1870 by the shocking
and unanswerable disclosures of its inadequacy.
Here, as in the army question, it is comparatively
unimportant to consider whether the voluntary
system in Britain has succeeded better than volun-
tary systems elsewhere. The real point is, has
that system succeeded as well as the compulsory
systems of other nations with whom we have to
compete ? If not, it stands condemned. And,
indeed, it would seem to stand condemned by one
simple historical fact. There is no instance in
history of a country which has won a really great war
on the voluntary system. Even in Great Britain,
compulsion had to be revived before we could
finish our wars against Charles I., against Louis
XIV., and against Napoleon. It is true that these
particular compulsory measures were extremely
partial and unjust, but this fact, so far as it is
relevant at all, tells against the voluntarist plea.
For if, in every great war, the country is driven to
improvise compulsory measures which, being
hastily devised, are almost certain to be partial
and unjust ; then not only does business efficiency
demand a normal and constitutional system of
universal service, but civic justice demands it still
more urgently.
Yet, in spite of this historical fact, which seems
indisputable, it must be admitted that some
206 COMPULSORY MILITARY SERVICE
British military authorities are opposed to com-
pulsory service on purely military reasons. We may
profitably remember that some French experts
opposed that mass-levy which saved Revolutionary
France ; and that still more distinguished experts
in Prussia fought obstinately against that system
of universal service which lies now at the foundation
of German military power. When the king refused
to follow the example of victorious France in 1794,
it was not only because he feared the possible
democratic working of universal service, but also
because he held it incompatible with the peculiar
merits of his then military system. And even in
1807, after all the lessons of the Jena campaign,
there was excellent specialist opinion in favour
of the old system. " For there are few notions
that have been so much ridiculed by military
specialists of the very day to which Scharnhorst
belonged, as this notion of a citizen army." 1
Therefore we must not be dismayed by a certain
amount of military opposition, even though this were
far more important than it is now, or is likely to be
when the war is over. We must accept no adverse
decision which does not take full account of the
fact that great wars have always involved com-
pulsion, or which neglects other equally notorious
facts. And probably the British public, with
1 J. Seeley, Life and Times of Stein, 1878, ii. 109. For the king of
Prussia, see European Magazine, March, 1794, p. 243, or Annual Register,
for 1794, p. 204.
VOLUNTEER RECRUITS 207
its present alert and intelligent interest in the
military pioblein, will be astounded to find the
havoc which voluntarist military writers have
made hitherto with easily accessible facts.
Let us begin with the book most often quoted,
and most highly accredited by the names of its
joint authors. Sir Ian Hamilton's Compulsory
Service was written for Lord Haldane, who pub-
lished it with a preface giving it the stamp of his
high authority. It claims on the title-page to be
' " A Study of the Question in l the light of Experi-
ence." Besides his experience in the South African
war and as an observer in the Russo-Japanese
war, Sir Ian Hamilton had been Adjutant-General ;
that is, Director of Recruiting in Great Britain.
It is true that in 1910, when the book was written,
he was already ex- Adjutant-General : that there
were other ex-Adjutant-Generals who had held
the office far longer than he, even under Lord
Haldane ; and that, of the other four ex- Adjutant
Generals still alive, three at least were pretty
generally known to dissent from Sir Ian Hamilton
on the main issue ; Sir Ian was therefore probably
the only living Director of Recruiting who could
have been found to write against Compulsory
Service. 2 But, when all has been said, we must
acknowledge that Sir lan's authorship, and Lord
1 The actual title-page, by an obvious printer's error, here reads " of."
2 See pp. 7-8 of Fallacies and Facts, Lord Roberts's answer to Compul-
sory Service.
208 COMPULSORY MILITARY SERVICE
Haldane's express approval of the work, justify
the attention which it has always commanded as
the most authoritative expert attack upon the
principle of Compulsory Service for Great Britain.
Nobody, however, who reads that book in the
light of present facts, can fail to realize the con-
fusion of thought which pervades it. The issue
which the author and his patron had to face was
extremely simple. Lord Roberts proposed for
Great Britain what was, in all essentials, the Swiss
system of national defence behind our present*
Regulars and Navy ; or (to put it into other words),
Compulsory Territorialism. Neither Sir Ian nor
Lord Haldane imagined what uncharitable or
unprincipled people have sometimes insinuated
that Lord Roberts was .not sincere here. They
knew perfectly well that, though he personally
would have preferred a longer training, he was
transparently honest in proposing to give a full
and impartial trial to a six-months' system. They
had, therefore, to face an opponent who proposed
keeping the Navy and the Regulars at least up to
their present strength who, in fact, was far more
concerned to strengthen both Navy and Regulars
than either Liberal or Unionist governments, as
a whole, have shown themselves but who wished
to have, behind this Navy and these Regulars, a
compulsory instead of a voluntary territorial
system. Lord Roberts's many speeches, and the
formal proposals of his League, left no room what-
VOLUNTEER RECRUITS 209
ever for doubt upon this point. Yet, on the one
occasion on which Sir Ian professes to state ex-
haustively and with a mathematical clearness the
three possible policies suggested for Great Britain,
he unaccountably avoids this one obvious issue.
The third policy which he formulates bears at firstlTl
superficial resemblance to Lord Roberts's proposal ;
but, when Sir Ian proceeds to refute it, we find that
he is setting himself to refute some scheme which
deliberately proposes the abolition of the Regulars,
and which therefore differs essentially from
anything ever proposed by Lord Roberts. And
his only excuse for this is, that the Editor of
the Observer (if the brief quotation given represents
that gentleman's views correctly) had made some
such proposal on July 8, 1910. Sir Ian makes no
attempt to prove that this was written in the
interests of the National Service League, nor
even that the writer was a member of that League.
The proposal he objects to is expressly contradicted
by the official programme of the League, as printed
on the cover of its Journal and in its leaflets. No
official of the League ever advocated it publicly.
Yet, instead of dealing with the League's actual pro-
posal the only proposal which really commanded
public attention and against which his whole book
was nominally directed he deals instead with an
altogether casual and irresponsible scheme dis-
covered " in the widely-read editorial paragraphs "
of a Sunday paper ! In this passage, which professes
210 COMPULSORY MILITARY SERVICE
an analysis so searching and so exhaustive, we are
left still wondering what Sir Ian could possibly
urge, from a military point of view, against the
proposal of John Stuart Mill and Lord Roberts,
that we should support our existing Navy and
Regulars by a national manhood trained on the
Swiss system.
Let us assume, just for the moment, that Lord
Roberts could have had his way, and submitted
every able-bodied man to a series of military
trainings totalling about six months, without
prejudice to the existing Navy and Regulars. It is
a matter of the simplest arithmetic to show that we
should thus have an enormously larger number
of trained men than our Territorial system gives
us. Nobody who has seen the two systems at work
has ever ventured to deny that the average Swiss,
drilled by law, becomes far more familiar with the
technicalities of his temporary military profession
than the average Territorial ; or that a compulsory
system would enormously improve us as riflemen,
even though we should always lack some of the
Swiss advantages here. At first sight, therefore,
only one conclusion would seem possible. Behind
the same Navy and Regulars as at present, we
should have a body of trained citizens not only
enormously more numerous than anything which
the voluntary system has ever given us, but also
individually more efficient in every way in which
military efficiency can be calculated in times of
VOLUNTEER RECRUITS 211
peace. Therefore, however exaggerated may be
the sanguine expectations of some Compulsorists,
it would seem quite impossible to deny a very
considerable residuum of clear military gain. If
we wish to face the whole truth, these apparent
facts must be clearly stated on the threshold of
the subject, and unflinchingly faced. Yet here
again, though Sir Ian makes a bolder attempt to
face them than in the pages where he sets out to be
more rigidly logical, he deals with them only piece-
meal and confusedly. He takes what seems to be
the only possible line of defence. He pleads (1)
that Compulsory Territorialism would necessarily
and unavoidably hinder recruiting for the Regulars
if not for the Navy, and (2) that legal compulsion,
by destroying the volunteer spirit, would substi-
tute for the existing Territorials a force so deficient
in moral as to render it a feebler fighting-machine
than the existing Territorial Force of less than a
quarter its numerical strength. Before examining
these pleas in detail, let us note that they are
exactly the pleas which were set up for Voluntarism
in education ; though these linger now only among
those frankly conservative spirits who look upon
the Board School as both a symptom and a cause
of national decay. Lord Macaulay, Lord Morley,
and all the old-time champions of compulsory
education, had to point out that the Voluntarists
fell back upon this argument only afte* they had
been driven out of all the plainer ground ; that
212 COMPULSORY MILITARY SERVICE
they tried to excuse the grossest and most tangible
statistics of defective education by pleading these
intangible and delicate spiritual influences ; and
that, if they could find no better arguments than
this, the public would probably judge the " impon-
derable " advantages to be merely imaginary. They
believed in " that blessed word, Mesopotamia,"
because no other belief would save their cause. With
this very close historical parallel before us, we have
every right to look sceptically at the argument that
Britain should be worse off in war-time for having a
peace-establishment of enormously greater numbers,
more efficient drill, and better markmanship.
What real reason can Sir Ian give for either of
these beliefs, upon which (though he avoids ex-
plicitly confessing the fact) his whole military case
rests ? How does he know that recruiting for the
Regulars would suffer ? or that four men trained
under the Swiss system would not be so good as a
single Territorial ? Let us take his arguments
separately.
1. On the recruiting question, beyond all others
in this book. Sir Ian speaks as an expert. And here,
fortunately, he has left us no excuse for ignoring
the main reason which has brought him to his
somewhat pessimistic conclusion. In his fullest-
discussion of the problem (p. 84) he writes : " only
one narrow beam from the searchlight of experience
illumines the dense mist of conjecture wherein we
find ourselves groping. All the more necessary is
VOLUNTEER RECRUITS 213
it, then, that we should make the best use we can
of it." This single illuminating beam turns out
to be this : In April, 1902, the War Office formu-
lated a scheme for inducing Regulars who had served
their three years to enlist for a further extension
of five years, making eight years in all with the
colours. The experiment was tried for three years,
and then abandoned as a failure, because only
about 36 per cent., after serving three years with
the colours, consented to extend their service.
From this Sir Ian infers that we should not get the
number of Regulai recruits we need from a popula-
tion which has been passed through six months of
military training. The first question which com-
mon-sense applies to this argument is : Would this
36 per cent., which the experiment confessedly
yielded, be really too few ? And, after a very
simple arithmetical sum, we find that it would far
exceed our requirements under the Swiss scheme ;
we should need only 23^ per cent, of re- enlistments. 1
1 Under the Swiss system, we should have 191,000 compulsory recruits
yearly (after deducting the unfit, the emigrants, and those needed for
the mercantile marine). From these, we should need 8,000 voluntary
recruits yearly for the Navy and 35,000 for the Regulars : total, 43,000
or 23J per cent, of the whole 191,000. Moreover, this takes no account
of the fact that the majority might enlist in the Regulars from the very
first ; by which (as expressly provided by the N.S.L. scheme) they would
escape compulsory service altogether. And, finally, it is too favourable
to Sir Ian to put the results of the 1902 experiment as low as 36 per cent.,
which is obtained by taking the average of the three years. The first
year yielded 31 '60 per cent., the second 36*53, the third, 40'42. The
ratio, therefore, was rapidly rising ; and it is more than probable that, if
the experiment had been continued, the yearly average would have
exceeded 40 per cent., or nearly double our anticipated requirements
under the Swiss scheme.
214 COMPULSORY MILITARY SERVICE
Neither Sir Ian nor Lord Haldane had troubled
to apply this obvious arithmetical test to the
argument which they put forward as the most
effective weapon in their whole armoury. They
avoid anything like a clear comparison between the
percentage actually obtained in 1902-4 and the
percentage required under a Compulsory Service
Scheme, and obscure the argument by that vague
appeal to the superiority of the Volunteer spirit
which we must presently deal with in detail.
When the " one narrow beam from the search-
light of experience " is so vague as this, we need
not wonder that Sir lan's other reasons are vaguer
still. He argues from the fact that Russia, Ger-
many and France have no professional colonial
force at all comparable in numbers to our
244,000 Regulars ; but he does not deny that the
58,000 kept by France are, in fact, as many as she
wants or attempts to raise ; and he is obliged to
admit that all conditions are so different in all these
countries as to make comparison with Great
Britain very difficult. One single distinction,
which he does not mention, is, in fact, sufficient
to upset his whole analogy. It is notorious that
the brief Swiss system of service, with which it was
Sir lan's real task to deal, is felt by the population
to be incomparably less burdensome than the
prevailing continental conscriptive systems. There-
fore, instead of wandering about among other
continental failures to procure any large number
VOLUNTEER RECRUITS 215
of long-service recruits, it should have been his
first business to- face the fact that Switzerland, in
spite of her compulsory system, never had any
difficulty in providing enormous numbers of volun-
teers for foreign service, until the hiring of Swiss
soldiers was put down by law for weighty reasons
of public policy. And, even if we confine our
attention to present-day Switzerland, the lesson
is the same. The Swiss, in addition to their com-
pulsory service, do as much volunteer military
work as would suffice, if they had our population,
to create a volunteer force equal to our Territorials ;
and many observers have emphasized the fact
that the Service Law has rather quickened than
dulled their volunteer energies. For instance,
Colonel Delme-Radcliffe writes (p. 40) : "I have
heard the argument used that the introduction of
a system of compulsory service in England would
kill all volunteering and the voluntary spirit. If
the Swiss nation is any guide, it would seem difficult
to make a more incorrect statement." These
words were printed in 1908, but already spoken in
1907 before an audience of military experts, in-
cluding several members of Parliament especially
invited to hear it. It is very strange that, more
than two years later, neither Sir Ian nor Lord
Haldane should know anything whatever of this
evidence. It may be added that the Swiss mobiliza-
tion of 1914 produced numerous offers from volun-
teers in the first few days, until the War Office
216 COMPULSORY MILITARY SERVICE
publicly notified that the country had all the men
it needed, and could entertain no more offers.
Sir Ian should have faced, also, facts which were
at once brought forward by his critics, but of which
he took no notice whatever in his second edition.
The Nation in Arms, " Fallacies and Facts "
(pp. 31-4 and 171-181) and the Spectator (Dec. 3,
1910) proved clearly that the general evidence is
strongly against Sir Ian. The U.S.A., the least
militarized of all civilized nations, is the nation
which finds most difficulty in raising an adequate
force of Regulars by voluntary recruiting. Though
the U.S.A. pay the highest price in the world for
soldiers, their numbers are always far below the
establishment ; and WJiitaker's Almanac puts the
situation in a nutshell, " recruiting unsatisfactory,
desertions frequent."
England, again, has never boasted such military
superiority over a first-rate adversary as during
the Hundred Years' War. Yet in those days her
military system was far more strict in its com-
pulsion than that of France, and from these
compulsorily trained men she raised volunteer
armies larger in proportion to her population than
the French.
Again, a case which Sir Ian quotes from Canadian
history tells, in fact, dead against him (p. 139,
note). It has since been pointed out that the men
whom he mistakes for pure volunteers, and whose
glorious exploits he extols, were, in fact, men who
VOLUNTEER RECRUITS 217
had been enrolled in the militia by compulsion,
but had afterwards volunteered for further fighting
in short, that they were just the sort of men
whom we might count upon getting (so far as the
cases are analogous at all) under a system of
Compulsory Territorialism.
Moreover, he ignores still more unaccountably the
notorious facts of the Napoleonic War, as recorded
in the classical book on that subject Fortescue's
History of the British Army. From 1805 to 1813
we raised 227,510 militiamen by a most odious
form of compulsion the ballot, with pecuniary
substitution. These men were treated more roughly
than the French or German conscript of to-day.
Yet 99,755 of them volunteered at different times
for the Regular Army, where the discipline was
just as harsh. That is, 44 per cent, of these men
volunteered after an incomparably more unpleasant
taste of compulsion than any responsible person
has ever suggested for the British population of
to-day. 1
Again, there are three well-known boys' schools
in which military drill is compulsory, and the
whole discipline is military the Duke of York's,
the Royal Hibernian Military, and lastly, the
1 This is fully dealt with in Fallacies and Facts, pp. 30 ff. ; and Lord
Roberts there quotes from a recent letter received from Mr. Fortescue,
in which that historian says, " Sir Ian Hamilton totally ignores the
history of Napoleon's conscript army. . . They had a very hard time
[in the Peninsula] . . . yet there was less desertion of born French (as
apart from foreign contingents in the French service) than of born British
to the enemy not very creditable to the voluntary British soldier."
218 COMPULSORY MILITARY SERVICE
Gordon Boys' home, which is not even, like the
other two, a school for sons of soldiers. From the
first two, more than 80 per cent, volunteered for
the army in 1907, and from the third 60 per cent,
went to army or navy. The case of Colonel Pol-
lock's " Spectator Company," fully described in
the Spectator for Dec. 3, 1910, is perhaps even
closer to the same point, but is too long for descrip-
tion here.
Nor is Sir Ian happier when he stands upon
genera] principles. He writes on p. 88, " which of
us, knowing his own countrymen, will not allow
that the freeborn Briton tends to become incurably
prejudiced against any form of work, or even
amusement, he may be forced into ? ' : The words
I have italicized show great ignorance of every-day
facts. Compulsory games have long become the
rule at nearly all our Public Schools ; the standard
of performance has risen enormously under that
system ; and the few voluntary schools generally
make a poor show beside the rest, in proportion
to their numbers. Moreover, the South African
War brought very interesting evidence as to
military training. The Spectator for Jan. 27-
March 10, 1900, contained a series of letters from
Mr. J. G. Legge, H.M. Inspector of Reformatory
and Industrial Schools ; Mr. A. C. Burmester,
a manager of one of the^e schools ; and Mr. R. F.
Cholmeley, assistant master at St. Paul's School,
where compulsory drill was adopted. All these
VOLUNTEER RECRUITS 219
gentlemen bear independent testimony to the fact
that a reasonable amount of compulsory training
developed a taste for more.
Finally, I have recently written to the Spectator
reciting Sir Ian Hamilton's thesis, and asking
whether any reader could supply real facts in
favour of it. I received no reply, either publicly
or privately. Indeed, his own silence in the second
edition, in the face of the very plain facts brought
forward against the theory by his critics, would
seem tantamount to a confession that lie could not
give definite reasons, though he still adhered to
the theory as a matter of private judgment. In
the abstract, the mere judgment of an ex- Adjutant
General ought, of course, to weigh heavily in a case
of this kind, especially when it is so formally
published and commended by the War Minister
with a preface of such hearty approval. But this
is not a case for abstract considerations. We must
remember firstly, that, of the five ex-Adjutants-
General then living, Sir Ian had held the office for
the briefest period ; and secondly, that he was
apparently the only one of the six who disapproved
of Compulsory Service. Two at least Lord
Wolseley and Sir Evelyn Wood were public
supporters of compulsion ; and Lord Roberts
asserted (I believe without shadow of contradiction)
that the rest were " well-known " to lean the same
way (Facts and Fallacies, pp. 6-8).
CHAPTER XVI
VOLUNTEER FIGHTERS
IF, therefore, we are to accept this theory of
recruiting at all, we must accept it as the general
public did at the time, on the bare personal authority
of the authors. But the war has made us more
sceptical ; and it is important to notice what the
authors published at the same time, with equal
deliberation, on a subject which comes quite as
strictly within their own special province. On
p. 120 we read :
" In the Territorials there is hardly a man who has not
joined for the express object of having a good fight if any
fighting happens to come his way. There is hardly a
Territorial, I believe, who does not, at the bottom of his
heart, hope to go into one historic battle during his military
existence. Otherwise why should he be there, sweating
and toiling during his holiday attacking, defending,
aiming ? Defence of hearth and home ? Yes ; but he will
be delighted, not downhearted, like some others of his
fellow-countrymen, when he hears that the invaders have
landed."
In the light of these words, and of the last two
years, few readers will now feel inclined to attribute
VOLUNTEER FIGHTERS 221
professional infallibility to the writer who penned
them, or to the statesman who gave them his express
approval. Few will be ready to accept without
specific proof, and on the mere authority of the
writers, this theory that the Briton cannot do what
the Swiss does that he cannot serve his country
first by law, and then, if need be, as a volunteer.
The fact is, that the whole idea rests upon a
common but fallacious conception of Voluntary
and Compulsory as mutually exclusive terms. In
strict logic, no doiibt, each excludes the other ;
in human life they are inextricably intermingled.
In almost all our acts there are voluntary and
compulsory elements. Few married men ever
realize that they are living under the strictest
legal compulsion to support their wives and
families a law which makes allowance for no
Conscientious Objector. Compulsion, in this case,
does not break the back of Voluntarism. By
raking among the dead rubbish of the old Com-
pulsory Education Controversy, we may find
plenty of confident prophets who predicted that
you might drive the boy to school, but would never
make him learn. Lord Morley, on p. 127 of his
now almost-forgotten booklet, had to meet seriously
the "alleged danger of discouraging the so-called
voluntary ists."
Let us thank him for that critical " so-called " ;
and let us cast this same critical side-light upon
Sir lan's contention. How much real voluntarism
222 COMPULSORY MILITARY SERVICE
is there, by his own confession, in the old system
which he defends ? On p. 106, he writes :
" The majority of eighteen- to nineteen-year-old regular
recruits enlist because they have just ceased to be boys
and are unable to find regular employment as men. About
four-fifths of them come to us because they cannot get a
job at fifteen shillings a week. The immense work of
national regeneration the Army has been unostentatiously
performing by helping these lads and making fine men of
them is quite unknown to the average citizen. But that
by the way. The reluctance of employers to take weedy,
overgrown youths of seventeen and eighteen has markedly
increased since the introduction of the Workmen's Com-
pensation Act. This is good for recruiting. But if, under
altered conditions, hungry hobbledehoys knew that they
would be called up for continuous housing and feeding
during the winter, the Regular Army would begin to
shrivel up from the roots. I know that all this is not very
glorious, but it is true." *
Compare this with a similar passage from another
expert who is never tired of writing against the
Compulsory System for Great Britain Colonel
F. N. Maude, C.B. On p. 404 of his War and the
World's Life he writes :
" Napoleon in his earlier years fully understood this,
and his campaigns of Ulm and Jena are masterly instances
of the application of this great power, for ultimately
hunger is the greatest stimulus to human action that can
be conceived. Keep men hungry, just hungry enough,
1 For further light on this question, see Appendix XIV,, " The Motives
of Recruits," and the extract from Mr. John Ward which I give a few
pages below.
VOLUNTEER FIGHTERS 223
and they will swarm, to the Colours to end their misery ;
keep them well supplied, and they will prefer to attend to
their own affairs, and will clamour for others to do the
fighting for them. But in no case must the hunger be
allowed to become excessive, nor must the people be allowed
to perceive that they are being played with."
The last two years, however, have made this
nation far more quick to perceive when it is being
played with ; and we must look very closely into
the alleged contrast between the Conscript and
the Volunteer.
We see that the contrast of circumstance is, by
the confession of these Voluntarist experts them-
selves, quite different from what is often assumed
in argument. There are magnificent cases of
self-sacrifice in volunteer armies especially in
war-time, and especially when the sacrifice comes
almost, if not altogether, too late. On the other
hand ? there are terrible injustices sometimes in
conscript armies of the stricter continental sort. 1
But, in the overwhelming majority of cases, the
" volunteer recruit " does not really contrast with
the " conscript " as the patriot contrasts with the
slave. The so-called volunteer, under economic
pressure, has undertaken to do a job which he
would not have touched if he could have got a
better wage for less work. The conscript, nearly
always in Switzerland and often under other more
burdensome systems, goes through his service
1 We must here specifically exclude Switzerland. For the extent to
which civil courts control the Swiss Army, see Appendix XV.
224 COMPULSOEY MILITAEY SERVICE
with no more oppressive sense of compulsion than
an elementary schoolboy ; while he is sustained by
a grown man's sense of the service he is doing for
his country. This experience is admirably analyzed
by Professor Leon Guerard, in a short description
which is by far the best I have ever read ; the
author has great knowledge of the world, great
powers of analysis, and a great wish to say the
exact truth, beginning with his initial confession
that he was, on the whole, a prejudiced witness
against the army. His summary runs : " On the
whole, a very unpleasant experience for any person
of fastidious tastes and habits ; tolerable for healthy
individuals of an adaptable type ; satisfactory for
the great majority." l
In conscripted France, therefore, where the service
is unusually strict, only the minority emerge from it
with a sense of oppressive coercion even in peace-
time. In time of war, nobody but Tolstoy ans and
visionaries seriously contemplate any other alter-
native. In voluntarist Britain, again, while the
majority of soldiers speak well of the army, quite a
considerable minority speak bitterly of it as a job
they would never have touched if they could have
helped it. And what were the feelings of many clerks
in those great firms which, with Lord Haldane's
approval, decided that all new applicants for employ-
1 Printed on p. 237 of Principal Jordan's War and the Breed (1915).
The rest of the book, however, must be read with great caution ; Dr.
Jordan himself is extraordinarily inaccurate, even on the simplest matters
of fact.
VOLUNTEER FIGHTERS 225
ment must " volunteer " for the Territorials, or take
themselves off to some less patriotic employer ?
A well-known journalist confessed to me, early in
the war, that he had been converted to the com-
pulsory system by the extreme prevalence of veiled
conscription : " I have seen cases," he added,
" which have made my blood boil."
Over-zealous writers, therefore, have often grossly
exaggerated the actual contrast between the cir-
cumstances of so-called "volunteers" and " con-
scripts " ; and they have exaggerated still more
fatally the supposed contrast in their behaviour.
We have seen how our Peninsular soldiers deserted
to the enemy in greater numbers than the French
conscripts did. There were many more surrenders
among our troops in the South African War than
among Japanese conscripts in the Russian war.
No doubt special circumstances played their part
here ; the offenders in both cases were, doubtless,
hunger-conscripts under the name of volunteers.
But why, then, do we persist in attributing all the
manly virtues of voluntarism to persons whom,
a few pages later, we find it convenient to describe
as " fourteen to fifteen shillings a week hobble-
dehoys"? (Compulsory Service, p. 116). The
absurdity is patent ; yet a policy of the greatest
national importance has been built in times of
peace upon this very absurdity.
A war-minister like Colonel Seeley told us,
only three years ago, that one volunteer was worth
226 COMPULSORY MILITARY SERVICE
ten conscripts ; it was on some such basis as this
that all our pre-war military calculations were
made. Even a Cabinet Minister of Sir John Simon's
importance and personal responsibility, after the
retreat from Mons, ventured to assert that one
volunteer was worth three " pressed " men
" and the Kaiser already knew it." l Upon this
and similar assumptions was built a great part-
perhaps even the greater part of the opposition
to the Military Service Act. 2
Next to Sir Ian Hamilton and Lord Haldane,,
perhaps the best-known military critic of Com-
pulsory Service before this present war was Colonel
Maude. He also, in his War and the World's Life,
insists upon the difference in moral between the
volunteer and the conscript, though with far less
unreasonable emphasis. He expressly notes, for
instance, the difficulty of comparison, since " there
never has been such a thing as a purely compulsory
army, or a purely voluntary one " (p. 256). He
admits, on comparing voluntarism with compulsion,
" that neither system in itself is a panacea for un-
steadiness in the field, and that other factors must
be searched for if we are to find a satisfactory
answer to our problem " (255). But he decides
1 Speeches at Heanor, April 26, 1913, and Ashton- under- Lyne, Nov. 21,
1914, quoted in F. S. Oliver's Ordeal by Battle, 1915, pp. 262-3.
2 It is of such importance for the public to have an opportunity of
testing the statements of experts upon this point, so hotly debated and
so vital for national policy, that I have collected in Appendix XVI. some
further criticisms on the book Compulsory Service.
VOLUNTEER FIGHTERS 227
on the fahole for voluntarism on this ground, and
quotes as his main instances General MeckeFs
description of Worth, and Hoenig's of Gravelotte.
Both these distinguished writers, speaking from
what they themselves saw, criticize very severely
the general behaviour of German conscript regi-
ments under fire. But (even if we take these
criticisms at their face value, without asking our-
selves whether similar faults might not have been
found in French regiments, and whether frank
spectators of the Boer War have not often told us
similar stories), what do they amount to ? The
individual German conscript, according to the
confession of Meckel and Hoenig, was distinctly
inferior to the individual French soldier of 1870,
who was a long-service man nearly of our Regular
type. Yet this war was not, nor will any war ever
be, a contest of individuals. At Worth, the Germans
brought 100,000 men against the 45,000 French,
and inflicted a disastrous defeat upon them. At
Gravelotte, the German superiority of numbers
actually in action was perhaps as great ; and again
the Germans won. But it was no mere chance or
trickery which enabled the Germans everywhere
to produce superior numbers : it was Universal
Service. Stoffel had given the French Emperor
fair warning : he wrote from Berlin in August
1869, " The North German Confederation will
dispose of 1,000,000 trained, disciplined, and
strongly-organized soldiers, while France has barely
228 COMPULSORY MILITARY SERVICE
300,000 to 400,000 men " (Reports, p. 144). This
expert warning was neglected by those who trusted
the " voluntary spirit." Therefore, though Ger-
many's population was very little larger than that
of France, she began the war with an overwhelming
numerical advantage ; and her victory inaugurated
one of the most marvellous eras of national ex-
pansion in the whole history of the world. If (as
we are told) the Germans outnumbered us at
Mons by five to one, this was because their total
force of trained fighting-men outnumbered ours
in even more than this proportion.
The test of war is victory, and those who oppose
Compulsory Service on military grounds must set
themselves first of all to explain away the damning
fact that the volunteer army has scarcely ever, if
ever, won a great war against a conscripted nation.
So far from meeting this difficulty, they seem
never to have realized its existence ; Colonel Maude
went on repeating MeckePs criticisms from year
to year in the Contemporary Review for July 1911,
and the Westminster Gazette for Dec. 9, 1912
until this present war raised the subject again. 1
Then, in the Nineteenth Century and After for Jan.
1915, he was obliged to strike a different note,
and to admit that " compulsion has carried the
Prussians forward to almost certain death in a
1 Meckel's words play an equally conspicuous part in the official
handbook of the Volunteer Service Committee, formed under Lord
Haldane's auspices in 1913. Nobody who quotes them seems to ask
himself who actually won the battle of Worth, and how it was won.
VOLUNTEER FIGHTERS 229
manner which has excited the admiration of our
men and officers." But this was " machine-made
devotion, carrying the men forward against hitherto
almost unheard-of punishment, only to collapse
and leave them helpless against the bayonets of our
determined counter-attacks" Very few responsible
military authorities would have dared to endorse
the words I have italicized even at the time they
were written ; fewer still would have accepted
Colonel Maude's almost contemporaneous prophecy
that the German reserves of men would be ex-
hausted by the end of March, 1915 (Sunday Times,
Jan. 15, 1915). It seems a ghastly mockery to
read these words, now that the Great War of 1914
has added two more to the great historical instances
of compulsion accepted reluctantly as the only
alternative to bitter defeat.
The only other military specialist whose plea
for voluntarism deserves notice is Professor Spenser
Wilkinson. To the Westminster Gazette for Feb. 2,
1915, he contributed an article discouraging the
adoption of compulsion as an emergency-measure
during this war. It was not then his business to
discuss what might have been done before the
war ; his article, therefore, scarcely touches this,
the real question of all. He does, indeed, plead
that even if we had had compulsion since 1887,
this " would have given us only half a million men
of the best age more than we now have " ; and on
this ground he seems to justify our past military
230 COMPULSORY MILITARY SERVICE
policy. But he omits to note that these 500,000
would have been trained men, available in the
first days of the war ; that there would have been
a further trained 500,000, equally available, of
older men from 38 to 45 ; and that, of the " men
we now have [in February, 1915] " something like
a third were too untrained to send to the front ;
so that he really ought to have described them
as " the men we shall have in from four to six
months."
In short, no ingenious manipulation of figures
can get over the fact that a business-like system
of compulsion in the past would have given us, at
the outbreak of war, at least half a million more
effectives than we actually had : and, (in the
opinion of most unbiassed judges), better effectives
than those whom we counted at the outbreak of war.
By Mr. Asquith's own admission, less than half a
year before the war broke out, our Territorial Force
in 1913 was 49,000 short of its establishment ; and,
even of the 266,000 men on the books, 40,000
(or 15 per cent.) had not qualified in rifle-shooting,
while 80,000 (or 30 per cent.) had not done their
full camp of 15 days the briefest training com-
patible with any pretence to efficiency. Mr.
Asquith might have put it still more plainly, and
said that, out of 4,725,000 days of camp-training
theoretically performed by the whole Territorial
Force, only about 2,237,000 had been actually
done, even in this year for which he claimed so
i
VOLUNTEER FIGHTERS 231
great an improvement. Then he pleaded that
there had recently been still more improvement,
and that if the present very exceptional rate of
recruiting were kept up, the force would " be up
to its establishment " in a very short time i.e. in
about three years. But this is a very vague " if " ;
and nobody can imagine that a Minister of Mr.
Asquith's ability and good intentions could possibly
have been driven to such apologies in countries
like Switzerland or Norway, where the whole nation
accepts Compulsory Territorialism.
There is, after all, a very good test of comparison.
Foreign attaches have come to our Territorial
manoeuvres, as to the Swiss manoeuvres. We have
treasured up and quoted in our papers all the praise
they have given us : none of them has attempted
to give our volunteer force the same serious and
reasoned testimonials which they have given to
the Swiss " conscripts." l And one of the main
grounds on which Professor Wilkinson contested
the advisability of compulsion during this war
implies, apart from mere questions of the moment,
one of the most serious possible criticisms of the
Voluntary System as a national policy. "It is a
matter of common knowledge," he wrote, after
six months of war, " that the supply of arms has
lagged behind the supply of men. If and when
the number of weapons begins to be in excess of
the number of men, it may be desirable if) accelerate
1 See Appendix XVII., " A French View of our Territorials."
232 COMPULSORY MILITARY SERVICE
recruiting." Yet it is also a matter of common
knowledge that Switzerland actually armed, in the
first ten days of this war, a force of from 200,000 to
220,000 men, which, in figures of British population,
would amount to between 2| and 3 millions.
When Professor Wilkinson wrote, it is doubtful
whether we had many more than half that number
fully armed, even counting our sailors and our
Regulars. Indeed, the Professor's whole point of
view would seem to be coloured by the belief ex-
pressed in his next sentence, which facts have now
falsified. He continues : " I am reluctant to believe
that, for this purpose [of recruiting], more can be
required than a simple statement by the Prime
Minister expounding the magnitude of the task,
its urgency, and its vital importance to every man,
woman and child in the kingdom." But how
can ministerial eloquence effectually move a popu-
lation of whom the enormous majority, all their
lives long, have been kept in dense ignorance of
the facts which you now find it vital to force upon
their notice ? One incontrovertible advantage
of the compulsory system is that, in so many
quarters, it substitutes tangible facts for such
vague beliefs and hopes as these which supported
Professor Wilkinson even in February 1915. If
you compel a certain number of men to drill, that
compels you to keep a certain number of weapons
for them ; if you pass the business-man and the
working-man through the army, they, for their
VOLUNTEER FIGHTERS 233
part, will insist upon its being a working business
army ; the privates will educate their officers, and
the officers their Government.
We thus come back to our first point. The only
refuge of the military voluntarist is to build his
whole theory upon the. supposed enormous superi-
ority of the individual volunteer to the conscript :
to this, therefore, we must return for a moment
before finally passing away to non-militarist
objections.
Three considerations of primary importance are
ignored by those who attempt to force this contrast.
(1) Other things being equal, the superiority of
the true volunteer is unquestionable ; but other
things are not equal. No volunteer army, in peace-
time, has ever comprised the cream even of the
artisan and peasant class, let alone the educated
classes. Sir Ian Hamilton puts this very plainly
where his argument requires it, though it never
occurs to him to face the obvious inference in other
places. He enforces with almost brutal emphasis
the native inferiority of the Regular to the Terri-
torial :
" When a large number of the Regular officers are by
degrees brought into contact with our citizen soldiers
they will learn to appreciate the full difference between a
fourteen to fifteen shilling a week hobbledehoy and a twenty-
five shilling to thirty shilling a week man (a type they have
never handled). They will then be in a better position to
understand how more instructi6n than seemed heretofore
possible can be crammed into a period of time which would
234 COMPULSORY MILITARY SERVICE
be of very little value to the regular recruit " (Compulsory
Service, p. 116). 1
Yet even the Territorial, unfortunately, has never
been up to the average standard of able-bodied
Britons. In 1912, 40,000 (or 15 per cent.) were
under nineteen ; boys whom a continental army
would not accept in peace-time. The educated
classes even the better artisans and small trades-
men are incomparably less represented in the
ranks than they would be under any compulsory
system. And, in modern war, education is perhaps
a more important factor than even the volunteer
spirit. It is notorious that Napoleon's army
owed much of its efficiency to the educated privates
whose very presence forced up the standard of
intelligence and education among the officers.
And Stoffel urged this (vainly as usual) upon
Napoleon III. He wrote in April 1868 (p. 44) to
point out the enormous intellectual superiority
obtained under the German system ; and in
August 1869 he urged again, with despairing
emphasis :
1 Compare the words of Mr. John Ward, M.P. (himself a working man
and an ex-corporal in the Engineers) in the House of Commons' debate
of March 11, 1910 (Hansard, col. 1831) : " Is it not a matter of fact that
the Army is looked upon by the working classes to a great extent as
a channel for giving employment to men who are practically unfit for
any other occupation ? There is not the slightest doubt about it that
it is only when there is difficulty in getting employment that the best
men go into the Army. . . . You get the worst type of working classes
in the Army I do not mean as a whole, I only mean that the tendency
is in that direction." Mr. Ward at that time, and until the outbreak
of this war, was a very strong voluntarist.
VOLUNTEER FIGHTERS 235
" [The German Army] embraces all the manly portion,
all the intelligence, all the vis viva of a nation full of faith,
energy, and patriotism, while the French army is almost
entirely composed of the poorest and most ignorant portion
of the nation. The German Army, from the fact that it
does embrace, without any exception, all the manly
portion of the nation, feels itself strengthened and sup-
ported by the unequalled esteem and consideration it
enjoys in the country, while the French Army, looked on
by some as a useless institution, attacked by others, who
sow corruption and insubordination in its ranks, feels itself
bowed down by a want of consideration, and has no
consciousness of the mission it has to fulfil " (p. 144).
If, as Mr. Fortescue has said, Sir Ian Hamilton's
purview " totally ignores the history of Napoleon's
conscript army," it shows equally unaccountable
ignorance of Franco-Prussian history.
(2) Again, military history is full of instances
which prove that a man's behaviour in the field
cannot be gauged merely by his willingness or un-
willingness to enter the field. We have already
seen Professor Firth's verdict on the English levy
of 1651 : "It was remarkable that the men raised
by impressment were better than those who had
voluntarily enlisted." * The standard history of
the French Army tells the same tale of the Revolu-
tionary levies. The best of all, of course, were the
early volunteers the first 84,000 men who came
forward out of a population of 23 millions ; but,
after that, the pressed men developed into the best
1 Cromwell's Army, p. 36.
236 COMPULSOEY MILITARY SERVICE
soldiers. 1 For these first volunteers, Dussieux
quotes the testimonial of General Dubreton (vol. ii.
p. 386) ; but he also points out how brief and
evanescent this truly volunteer outburst was :
" Enthusiasm for liberty and voluntary service gave
one good pull, and that was all." And he sums up :
* We must end this chapter by noting that it was
France which, for the first time in modern history,
established and organized compulsory service ;
and let us add that, after a very confused beginning,
this system gave to France its best soldiers "
(ii. 378, 385). In the present war, when General
Botha called up a forced levy for the campaign
against the Germans, he gave as his reason that
much of the best military stuff would not other-
wise be available ; the men would not come forward
unless Government showed its sense of the need
by taking this most serious measure of all.
(3) Quite apart from good or bad conduct in
the field, a national army is far fitter than a hired
army to conceive and express the real needs of the
nation. A force raised by the compulsory enlist-
ment of all able-bodied men represents the totality
of national feeling and national ideals in a sense
in which no other force could. Among Emile
Ollivier's ingenious attempts to explain away the
failings of the French Government between 1866
and 1870, this truth emerges with startling force.
1 For these figures, and other details, see Appendix XVIII. : " The
Volunteers of the French Revolution."
VOLUNTEEK FIGHTERS 237
The army was out of touch with the nation. 1 The
Government was tempted to content itself with
soldiers on paper, and with the mere mockery of
reform in military organization as, for instance,
when that force of 500,000 Mobiles was created,
without more than the pretence of training, on the
principle of receiving its real military education
after war had broken out. The people, on the
other hand, greedily drank in the flattering assur-
ance that all was well, that the Mobiles would form
a magnificent line behind the invincible Regulars,
and that " all was ready, down to the last button on
the last gaiter." 2 On the strength of the partial
reforms in the Regular Army, and of these 500,000
Mobiles who were to be embodied if war ever broke
out, Marshal Niel presented a brilliant picture of
tlte French Army to the Parliament of 1869. Then
(writes Ollivier, who was one of the ministry),
" these triumphant conclusions were welcomed with
'loud applause in the House and outside. The
nation was proud to live under the protection of
an invincible army ; and only one symptom of un-
1 See Dussieux, iii. 251, for the almost incredible deficiencies revealed
by the war.
2 Ollivier, IS Empire. Liberal (vol. x. pp. 227-367, and vol. xv. pp. 60-64,
579 ff.) and The Franco-Prussian War (tr. Ives, 1913, pp. 81-4). It is
especially important to note the " parliamentary " and unreal sense in
which Ollivier conceives the question of military preparedness. It is a
libel (he argues) to assert that we were not ready : only we could not
mobilize in time ! Such false conceptions as these of Ollivier' s are
inevitable when the nation is technically ignorant, and mainly anxious
to be reassured ; in that case, the Government is tempted to look upon
reassurance as its chief function. From beginning to end, this able and
eloquent lawyer-statesman moves in the region of words, not of realities.
238 COMPULSORY MILITARY SERVICE
easiness sometimes appeared ; men feared lest the
Empire, intoxicated with the feeling of its own
strength, should drift into fresh warlike adventures "
(I.e. p. 353). If the people had also been the army,
they would have known very nearly how things
stood ; and the warlike feeling which did so much
to support Napoleon in his provocative diplomacy
would have been non-existent. 1
1 For this feeling see Acton, Essays on Modern History, pp. 221 ;
Ollivier, IS Empire Liberal, vol. xv. p. 60.
CHAPTER XVII
NON-MILITARY OBJECTIONS
IN turning to meet objections which have been
made on non-military grounds, I shall relegate to
Appendix XIX. one which has been already falsi-
fied by the patent facts of this war. It might seem,
at first sight, superfluous to rehearse such argu-
ments at all, since, for the moment at least, they
linger now only in holes and corners. Yet a brief
record is demanded, not only on the principle of
completeness, but also as a matter of right perspec-
tive. It has often happened, in the past history
of this discussion, that statements of plain fact have
been answered by mere surmises or prophecies.
When we have urged that Switzerland does visibly
steer, with admirable judgment, between the Scylla
of unpreparedness and the Charybdis of militarism,
some have replied curtly that Switzerland is not
Britain : an argument which, of course, ignores
the burden of proof incumbent upon a disputant
who thus asserts that one man will probably fail
where another (whom he generally looks upon
rather as his inferior) has evidently succeeded.
240 COMPULSOEY MILITARY SERVICE
Others, again, equally unable to deny the Swiss
success, have cast about for various detailed reasons
for refusing equal possibilities of success to our
own people. These reasons have often been
of a speculative character, and very plausible
in average times among average people who are
naturally anxious to be reassured, comforted, and
told that there is little call for further effort. It is
true that a speculative reason may really be a
very good one ; it may often correct our too super-
ficial judgment based upon what seemed the plain
fact. But we must judge the speculative philoso-
pher, as we judge the plain man, by his own fruits.
When a disputant tries to explain away the apparent
facts of the present moment by prophecies which
time proves to be ludicrously mistaken, then we
must discount all his other surmises with the same
severity which we should apply to the plain un-
prophetic man whom we have caught tripping over
statements of fact. Therefore, a brief rehearsal
of objections which were treated very seriously
in their own day, however dead they may seem at
the present moment, is essential now to a full
conspectus of this subject.
So far as I am aware, the following are by far
the most responsible anti-compulsorist writings,
apart from those already dealt with. Mr. Harold
Cox published two articles in (i) The Nineteenth
Century and After for October, 1907 and (ii)
The Edinburgh Review for April 1913. (iii) The
NON-MILITARY OBJECTIONS 241
Voluntary Service Committee, formed under Lord
Haldane's patronage, published as their first penny
pamphlet his speech on " Democracy and Military
Service/ 5 delivered at Caxton Hall on November
24, 1913. (iv) The same Committee, about the
same time, issued an official sixpenny handbook,
The Case for Voluntary Service (P. S. King & Co.).
(v) Mr, C. P. Trevelyan, M.P., then Parliamentary
Secretary to the Board of Education, wrote in
.1913 a pamphlet on Democracy and Compulsory
Service, which was published by the League of
Young Liberals at a penny, (vi) In June 1915
the International Arbitration League published
a leaflet by Mr. F. W. Groldstone, M.P., Is Conscrip-
tion Necessary or Desirable ? Let us deal with the
most important objections emphasized by these
writers, who naturally often repeat each other's
arguments.
First comes the " Blue Water " objection. We
are told that, the real bulwark of National Defence
being our Navy, this throws all merely military
considerations into the background.
This is the first, and apparently strongest,
objection which we have to face apparently
strongest, because it always begins by rehearsing
incontestable truths, and only enters upon doubtful
ground where it begins to come to the real point.
All voluntarist writers emphasize it ; and it is
expressed in two forms.
242 COMPULSORY MILITARY SERVICE
(a) Sometimes we are told that we cannot
strengthen our land forces without weakening the
Navy. Either (it is argued) compulsory training
will hinder recruiting, or at least we shall put
ourselves in false perspective ; the attention and
money given to the Army will be deducted from the
Fleet, which will thus be neglected and starved ;
in pursuing the shadow we shall have lost the
substance.
The recruiting question has already been dealt
with. On the other hand, these prophecies of
neglect, and this attempt to represent Army and
Navy as rivals for public favour and money, would
seem as false in fact as they are uncomplimentary
to the national spirit. Before the war, while Lord
Roberts was carrying on his propaganda, seventy-
four retired admirals were on his League, and
of course it is only the retired who are free thus to
take a side. Presumably these seventy-four experts
knew a great deal more about naval prospects
than the writers who invoke the Navy as an obstacle
to any national system of training in arms. Again,
the Navy League and the National Service League
always cordially supported each other : each
appealed to the same class of people those who
were seriously interested in National Defence. 1
Thirdly, if that were not enough, the present war
1 This is confessed, indeed, by the author of The Case for Voluntary
Service, p. 136. "We are aware that the advocates of compulsory
military service profess to be as zealous for the Navy as for the
Army."
NON-MILITARY OBJECTIONS 243
has shown very clearly in which quarter the Navy
must seek its best support. It has been constantly
pointed out that the members of Parliament who
held out longest against compulsion for the Army
were precisely those who had voted most steadily
for naval reductions ; and that the Press showed
exactly the same line of cleavage ; the anti-eom-
pulsorist has also been, in most cases, the little-
Navy man. It was always maintained by the
National Service League that Compulsory Terri-
torialism would immensely strengthen the hands
of the Navy, by setting it free for purely naval
duties.
(6) This brings us to the second argument, which
is perhaps stated most clearly, and with least
exaggeration, by the leading article in the West-
minster Review dealing with Lord Roberts's deputa-
tion to Mr. Asquith (February 27, 1914) :
" The danger can only be that the Fleet is incapable of
protecting us from invasion ; but how, if this were true,
we could be saved by the Army has never been explained
to us. The loss of the command of the sea would be for
this country a disaster which could not be retrieved by
any army, however numerous or however well-trained.
It would stop our supplies of food and raw material, cut us
off from communication with our Empire, reduce us to a
position in which an enemy could impose his own terms
on us. It is doubtful whether in such circumstances
an enemy would take the trouble to invade us ; it is
certain that no resistance to the invader could help us
more than temporarily, unless we recovered our sea
communications. ' '
244 COMPULSORY MILITARY SERVICE
Surely the words I have here italicized convey
the clue to the mystery which " has never been
explained " to this ingenious leader-writer. If we
can recover our sea-communications a by no
means improbable hypothesis then it will have
been of vital importance that, during the period
of collapse, our Army shall have been able to do
its duty. For the theory that no German would
take the trouble to invade us, but would prefer to
wait and take his chance of starving us out, is one
upon which even the most determined voluntarist
would not dare to build after the experience of this
war. With an adequate National Defence Force,
we could say to the Navy : " Even if fortune goes
against you for a while, we can keep our end up."
Otherwise, we are compelled to say : " The Navy
must never make a single mistake it must do the
work of Navy and Home Defence Army in one
or the country may be lost." Is this fair to our
sailors, who, after all, are only men ? Is this kind
of thing really an honour to them ? or is it like
the medieval ideal which put women theoretically
on a pedestal, and treated her in fact with a great
deal of brutality ? What right have we to demand
from our sailors an infallibility more than human, in
order that the rest of us may be free to do less than
our manly share of national defence ? Here again
it is significant to note that this argument is con-
stantly used by politicians and writers who are by no
means enthusiastic advocates for naval expenditure.
NON-MILITAKY OBJECTIONS 245
Common-sense is opposed to treating this as a ques-
tion involving two absolutely opposite alternatives.
In real life nearly all matters of doubt, even the
most vital, are simply questions of degree. Between
absolute command of the seas and absolute loss
of the seas there are thousands of possible degrees :
it is therefore idle to argue that with absolute
command we are triumphantly safe, and with
absolute loss we are hopelessly ruined. The real
crux of the question is that sentence which the
Westminster Gazette slips in at the end of the
argument, and takes no further notice of what
is to happen while we are " recovering our
communications ? ?: We have, before now, lost
command of very considerable parts of the sea,
and regained it afterwards. These bad intervals
have sometimes been long, sometimes short. To
any unbiassed mind, therefore, the real question
here is fairly simple, though not of such geometrical
simplicity as the extreme Blue Water School
tries to imagine. The problem is : By what means
can we ensure the longest possible staying-power
to these islands and to our great Dominions, in
case of temporary or partial loss of sea-control ?
What measures of precaution will enable us to cease
saying to the Navy :
" You must be infallible ; for your first grave failure will
betoken a betrayal of the country's trust in you " ; but
rather " We believe in you as much as man can believe in
man, but, if misfortune should overtake you, remember
246 COMPULSOKY MILITARY SERVICE
that we hold out to the bitter end, for the country's sake
and for yours. Refit when you can ; retrieve your sea-
losses when you can ; we, behind you, have neglected no
wise precaution. Every able-bodied man is prepared to
do on land what we trust you to do at sea ; and the national
system, which organizes these fighters in your support,
has made it easier for us to organize many other equally
necessary means of resistance. 1 We have a national, long-
thought out provisioning system ; the blockade has not
found us altogether unprepared. And, moreover, every one
of us grew up from his boyhood under the prevision of this
possibility ; we have known all our lives that, at any such
supreme crisis, our stake and our work would be as heavy
as yours in the Navy ; we are a disciplined nation, a nation
that has faced the facts ; and no man can say that the
measures of national defence now taken are a breach of
any political truce. In doing what our generals and our
admirals now beseech us to do, we are not ' dividing the
nation.' '
From the technical naval point of view, the
facts can scarcely be put more clearly than they
were stated, early in 1914, on p. 42 of the National
Service League Handbook. Lieut. Alfred Dewar,
R.N., there wrote, in answer to the arguments of
the Voluntary Service Committee :
" This question of degree of control is neglected by
superficial writers, but it is emphasized by men like Mahan,
Corbett and Colomb. A navy does not immediately and
1 Compare an article in the Times for Jan. 5, 1917, entitled, " The
Quartermaster General, a Record of Success." The writer there shows
in detail what an intolerable strain was thrown upon all departments
of national organization by " this sudden expansion of an Expeditionary
Force from 150,000 to 1,500,000 men, and then to the three times larger
figure of to-day."
NON-MILITARY OBJECTIONS 247
at one stroke obtain command of the sea. It may gain a
limited control in one area and lose it in another, and in
the same area the degree of control may vary from time to
time. If a fleet, ' even at its greatest,' has its ups and downs,
it will require intervals of recuperation to regain its position.
It may even sustain a temporary defeat in the North Sea,
and during that time we must be secure against attack.
We must be prepared to see ourselves masters of the sea
for several months and then perhaps by a sudden torpedo
attack lose the command for several weeks. This is wholly
borne out in the history of the Dutch wars, where the
principal theatre of operations was the North Sea. In the
first Dutch war, which began in May, 1652, De Ruyter
commanded the entrance to the Channel and the Soundings
from August 15th to the end of September, but in the North
Sea the command was in dispute till the battle, of the
Kentish Knock on September 28th. From September
28th to November 29th we had a fair degree of command
in the North Sea and Channel, but after the battle of
Dungeness on November 29th we lost command of the
Channel and never properly regained it till the battle of
Portland on February 18th, though the Dutch were not
finally and definitely beaten till the battle of the Texel in
July, where Tromp was killed. In the Mediterranean,
on the other hand, we lost control completely and never
tried to regain it. Here we have varying degrees of control
in different areas, and varying phases of command in the
same area, corresponding to the' ups and downs ' mentioned
by Mahan."
Again he quotes from p. 283 of Mahan's Naval
Strategy (1912) :
" A fleet charged with the protection of bases, whether
at home or abroad, is so far clogged in its movement and is
to the same extent in a false position. An egregious instance
248 COMPULSORY MILITARY SERVICE
of this at the present moment is the fear in Great Britain of
a German invasion. This is due to the great inferiority
of the Army in the British Islands to that of Germany ;
the British Islands are inadequately garrisoned ; they
depend for defence upon the fleet alone and the fleet is,
consequently, tied to British waters. As things are, since
all depends upon the fleet, the fleet must have a wider
margin of safety to ensure a crushing superiority, that is
its freedom of movement and range of action are greatly
impaired by the necessity of keeping with it ships which,
under other conditions, might be spared."
The Extreme Blue Water plea, Lieut. Dewar
rightly urges, is the plea of a fatalist or sluggard :
" Close the door, Tom, there's a draught coming in."
" No use, Dad, for the back door's open as well."
There is, finally, one consideration which no
man has a right to advance publicly without a
strong sense of responsibility, yet which none has
a right to turn away from.
The opposition to Compulsory Service bases
itself on the principle of the Free Contract, not
only from the point of view of justice, but also
from that of efficiency. Mr. Cox puts this with
his usual clearness and moderation (Edinburgh
Review, p. 501) :
" Taxation, if we have the wisdom to observe the canons
laid down by Adam Smith, can be made to press with
approximately equal severity on every member of the
community. Therefore, the fairest way of providing for
national defence is to compel all citizens to contribute
money in proportion to their means, and to employ that
money for the remuneration of those men who voluntarily
NON-MILITARY OBJECTIONS 249
undertake a military career. On these lines the nation
if it is willing to pay adequately can obtain as many men
as it wants for the period for which it wants them, and
such men will make far better soldiers than men forced
against their will to undertake a service which is incon-
venient or repugnant to them. Doubtless, if we were only
separated by a land frontier from a great military Power,
we should be obliged to ignore these considerations of
equity, and to compel every man to give personal service
saliis reipublicae suprema lex. But there is no reason
why we should wantonly throw away the advantages
conferred upon us by our insular position, which enables
us to ignore the magnitude of the armies maintained by
our neighbours, provided only we are careful to preserve
beyond question our naval supremacy. As long as that
proviso is secured and if it fails all is lost England only
requires military service from relatively few of her sons."
The principle is clear : we are to get a juster
arrangement, and better value for our money, by
freely contracting with men to fight for us, just
as we freely contract with others to dig coal for
us. And, on this principle, the sanction of both
contracts is pretty much the same. The miner
sometimes strikes ; why should not the sailor ?
In a sense, we actually invite the miner to strike
by our unwillingness or our incapacity to take his
place underground : that is only human nature,
and, on the whole, human justice also. Is it,
therefore, so inconceivable in human nature that,
after generations of this growing division between
the civilian and the military or naval specialist,
our soldiers or sailors also should find the tempta-
250 COMPULSORY MILITARY SERVICE
tion irresistible ? If we go on preaching to them
"We, of course, are human, but we pay you to be
superhuman," may they not some day ask whether
the wage is proportionate to the requirement ?
One of the stock instances of lost sea-command is
precisely a story of this kind the mutinies at
Spithead and at the Nore. We all know how much
justice there was on the men's side in those cases.
Again, there was a great deal more to be said
recently for the South Wales miners than many
people recognized. Large numbers of them were
honestly unwilling to embarrass the country, and
only followed the rest through the force of class-
loyalty and class-principle. They urged very truly
that society drives a hard bargain with the miner so
long as it has him at its mercy, and that society
cannot reasonably beg for mercy when the miner
gets the upper hand. It is notorious that, even
after the improvements made in our generation,
much might still be done to better the sailor's lot.
Mr. Stephen Reynolds may exaggerate in The
Lower Deck, but many of his criticisms bear the
stamp of reality ; and, indeed, I have heard some
of them admitted by those who know the facts.
In plain words, there have been times when some
of our great ships have drifted into the condition
of sweated factories without Government inspec-
tion.
Let us try, therefore, to view this policy of Free
Contract dispassionately, as it might appear a
NON-MILITARY OBJECTIONS 251
couple of centuries hence to the writer of a simple
school history of England.
" In the Nineteenth Century, our country had very nearly
lost the idea of direct personal service to the State as a test
of citizenship. The large mass of the population paid no
direct taxes, except for their own insurance, and were
equally free from direct personal service of any kind.
Schooling was, indeed, compulsory ; but it ended very
early, and the children probably were less systematically
instructed in the duties of citizenship than those of any
other great State. Alone in Europe Great Britain refused
to recognize the universal obligation of military training.
It was considered a great advance in civilization to have
reduced National Defence to a commercial contract ; and
political philosophers defended this Chinese system as being
juster and more efficient than the Continental, under
which all citizens shared as far as possible in the burden
and privilege of defending their homes. The system broke
down temporarily during the Great War of 1914 ; but,
after the Peace of Paris, the nation settled down into its
former groove. In spite of the great democratic advance
of the years following that Peace, this commercialization
of patriotism went from worse to worse ; because the Army,
and, even in time, the Navy, were thus kept outside the
main current of national development. Old traditions of
loyalty decayed in 'the Services,' as they were called,
because these old traditions had hitherto been intimately
bound up with class-distinctions. No new traditions of
loyalty could form, because military service was now
definitely recognized as one small corner of the labour-
market. Soldiers and sailors at last began to take political
philosophers at their word, and to treat their engagement
frankly as a question of wages. This progress was the more
rapid since the theory of paid patriotism was inseparably
252 COMPULSORY MILITARY SERVICE
bound up with the tendency to put the man of peace upon
a higher moral level than the man of war. It became a
subject of national pride that so vast a majority of the
citizens should be engaged in purely ' productive ' occu-
pations, and that Army and Navy should be cut down to
the narrowest limits compatible with efficiency. Under this
essentially false direction of thought, even the virtues of
democracy tended more and more to accentuate the
national impotence. In all doubts as to this minimum of
efficiency, civilians had naturally the last word, and some-
times almost the only word. The fighting-man was depen-
dent upon civilian paymasters, and the nation was naturally
loth to tax itself in so unpopular a cause. While National
Defence became more and more a question of wages and
money ; while national security depended more and more
upon the hired fighter, few people recognized the inevitable
consequences so long as the Great Peace lasted. The
soldier and sailor grumbled that their pay kept no reason-
able pace with their indispensability : but society, in
peace-time, was too strong for the grumblers. Yet that
same society was frankly organized on the principle of
competition of private interests. The miner, the railway-
man, the builder had long been accustomed to fight their
way onward by refusing to work except for the pay which
they claimed as commensurate with their indispensability
as servants of society. Though actual strikes became less
frequent as the organization of these groups progressed,
yet the potential strike became a more and more definite
factor in the social system : the rival forces stood always
arrayed against each other, waiting for the first favourable
opportunity for action, or (as it more often happened)
of gaining advantage by the threat of action. On the
whole, this worked well in the commercial world, and
tended gradually towards the redress of social inequalities ;
though it was remarked that the strict collective discipline
NON-MILITABY OBJECTIONS 253
necessitated by these' conflicts tended to enforce Com-
pulsory Group-service upon the very men who were most
opposed to Compulsory State-service ; and that, within
the Trade Unions themselves, the individual's freedom
was always severely limited. Those who most frankly faced
the situation admitted that, under stress of another
national war, such a system must either break down itself
or break the back of the nation ; but though people still
went on spending heavily on the Army and Navy, there
was a very common hope and belief that the world had
now settled down into such an equilibrium as rendered
the contingency of a national war very remote indeed.
It was, in fact, this belief which rendered the nation deaf
to the warnings of naval discontent. The sailor, though
theoretically the most indispensable of men, was treated
in fact with far less consideration than the miner or rail-
wayman. When the Great War of 2014 broke out, the
sailors had the further excuse that an active minority of
the nation stigmatized it as a war of aggression under the
cloak of self-defence. If the men had once put to sea and
become hotly engaged, it was still possible that their loyalty
to the splendid traditions of the past would have triumphed.
But several ships mutinied against the first measures of
mobilization, demanding immediate concession of the
just demands which had been steadily refused in peace-
time. The Government temporized, as nine Governments
out of ten would naturally have done. The mutiny spread
to many other ships, while on others, again, it was severely
suppressed and the ringleaders shot. This fanned the
flames, giving the men another claim which it was almost
impossible for the Government immediately to satisfy.
Meanwhile, Admiral X. was forced to sail with such
ships as he could trust, after a delay which might have been
fatal even to his full fleet. If the Battle of the Fifth of May
is in British history what Waterloo is to the French, or
254 COMPULSORY MILITARY SERVICE
Jena to the Prussians, that is because all three battles
found the beaten nation drifting in a false direction. It
seems incredible to us that our forefathers should for
generations have committed their whole salvation to a
tiny minority of paid men ; or that, having thus made
National Defence mainly a matter of pay, they should so
blindly have refused a just wage to those who admittedly
held the fortunes of the nation in their hands."
This supposed history is, let us hope, a mere
flight of fancy. But it, or something like it, must
inevitably come true if we persist in treating this
mainly as a question of Capital and Labour, and
yet deal with it as no sane employer would. If an
employer founds his whole fortunes on the work
of a minority who alone are skilled to use certain
tools, he must pay that minority in some pretence
of proportion for their work. If we deliberately
intend to make the Sailor and the Regular as
essential to national existence as the Westminster
Gazette would have it, then the private or the A.B.
would be ill-paid for his work by the salary of an
average journalist. It is well to see our own
systems as others see them. The Grande Encyclo-
pedic, under the article " Armee," asks why Great
Britain has not adopted compulsory service, and
answers : " because . . . the English, more than
any other nation, treat money as the sinew of war ;
hence their incoherent and anti-democratic system
of enlistment " (vol. iii. p. 1004).
CHAPTER XVIII
EDGED TOOLS
2, PERHAPS the next most influential argument has
been the accusation of "Militarism" or "Jingoism"
or " Aggression " against all proposals for a Citizen
Army.
Here the opponents contradict each other.
Lord Haldane and Sir Ian Hamilton are distressed
to think that a Citizen Army will not be aggressive
enough (Compulsory Service, pp. 41, 50-51, 121,
142, 148). They write of Compulsory Service :
" its tendency is in the direction of the merely
defensive"; and again: "it is less aggressive, less
of a danger to the world at large." Of the Voluntary
System they say : "all the other classes . . . pay
for war, not with their persons but with their
purses. For this very reason the bulk of the nation
views war with less tragic regard." . . . They
complain that this defensive spirit is incompatible
with " the inheritance of our people from Chatham
and from Nelson." They argue again : " there is
hardly a Territorial, I believe, who does not, at
the bottom of his heart, hope to go into one historic
256 COMPULSORY MILITARY SERVICE
battle during his military existence " ; " if a rich
nation turns its mind entirely to defence, it commits
the deadly sin of tempting others to transgress."
And Sir lan's final solemn warning runs : " What-
ever you do, remember, I beg of you, that the best
defence to a country is an army formed, trained,
inspired by the idea of attack. If I have succeeded
in bringing prominently to your notice the dangers
of the mere defence, then, indeed, I shall feel I
have not written in vain."
At the same time as this book was written, Jean
Jaures was writing his Armee Nouvelle. He fully
agrees with the two British authors and indeed
with almost all observers, that the tendency of
Compulsory Service is in the direction of the merely
defensive. But he presses this to a very different,
and (it would seem) a far sounder conclusion.
Jaures, socialist, internationalist and pacificist as he
was, never flinched from the compulsory principle.
So long as armies were needed at all, he saw that
the most democratic and least dangerous army,
in normal cases, would always be the Nation in
Arms. So far is he from quarrelling with this
defensive spirit, that he welcomes it for the people's
sake. It is one of his great glories as a statesman
to have prophesied the enormous advantages of
the defensive, provided that it be a far-seeing, long
thought-out, consistent and deliberate defensive.
His theories on this subject have been startingly
confirmed by this war : nobody doubts now that,
EDGED TOOLS 257
if Germany had known she would be faced with
such trench- warfare as has developed now on every
front, she would have reconsidered her Great
Adventure of 1914. Jaurfes, therefore, welcomes
the defensive spirit, so long as this defence is
really national and scientific, born not of timidity
but of reason. And he insists, with admirable
logic, that our best hope for world-peace must be
to cultivate defensive diplomacy and defensive
tactics, and to interest as many citizens as possible
in the frightful risks of war. To him, it seemed
absolutely immoral that the mass of citizens
should pay for war, not with their persons, but with
their purses. By what process of logic Lord Haldane
and Sir Ian Hamilton propose to reconcile their
own military views with sane democratic opinion,
they have never explained.
But there is no doubt, fortunately, about the
main fact that here concerns us. By almost uni-
versal consent, the normal spirit of a Nation in
Arms is the defensive spirit. Extremists on both
sides have, indeed, denied any real distinction
between the offensive and the defensive in warfare.
Bernhardi on the one hand, and a non-resister like
Mr. Bertrand Russell on the other, argue from the
alleged identity of offensive and defensive. The
one, no doubt, does shade into the other ; even
the outside observer cannot always exactly trace the
dividing line. But so it is also with truth and
falsehood, justice and injustice ; yet here we know
258 COMPULSORY MILITARY SERVICE
very well that a real distinction does exist. A
householder, in the night, may wrest the burg-
lar's knife from his hand and kill him with it ; yet
this action may be purely defensive. There is as
little real doubt about the general morality of
defence, and the general immorality of offence,
as about the general principle that the spirit of a
Nation in Arms is defensive.
A heavy burden of proof, therefore, lies upon
those who would persuade us that a nation which
must pay for war with its person is more likely
than a purse-paying nation to lapse into militarism,
jingoism, or aggression. The objectors generally
evade this burden by ignoring it. They fix our
attention on the most superficial considerations,
and argue that a nation with four million armed
men is necessarily more " militarist " than a nation
with only one million. By this simple calculation,
modern France, which offered arbitration to avoid
this war, is about twice as militarist as the France
of Louis XIV., which deliberately set itself to
dominate Europe by arms : and Frederick the
Great's Prussia was distinctly less militarist than
the Switzerland of that day.
The real question is very different. Would
Compulsory Territorialism increase or decrease
the chances of war ? It might increase those
chances in two ways : (1) by leading us into
aggression, or (2) by leading some rival (let us say
Germany) to attack us. And Germany's attack,
EDGED TOOLS 259
again, might have one of two causes : (a) the
aggressive desire to crush us at once, before our
new system should be ready, or (6) a sincere fear
that WQ contemplated attacking them.
1. It has already been seen that common consent
rules out the first alternative: there is practical agree-
ment on both sides as to the defensive spirit of the
citizen-soldier. It is a libel on the average Briton
to say that, by passing him through six months
of training under a far more democratic officer-
system than that of our present Territorials, you
would turn him into a fire-eater. To cap this
absurdity (if more were needed), the very men
who urge it are the same as those who insist that
such a training would sicken the average man of
military things, and kill the Regulars and Navy for
lack of recruits.
2. There remains the chance of Germany's
attacking us. The argument was not only used
before the war, it is already being urged against
the idea of our continuing the compulsory system
after this war. We should become, we are told,
a danger to our neighbours.
(a) That the German ruling classes would have
looked eagerly for the opportunity, will probably be
conceded now even by those who most doubted it
two years ago. But the question is, Would they have
found a better opportunity than they found in
260 COMPULSOEY MILITARY SEE VICE
1914 ? The Voluntary tService Committee argues
(p. 11 and Appendix III.) that compulsion could not
have been introduced without an " intervening
period of chaos," lasting several years. We were
told exactly the same by some prophets a few
months ago, and with more reason, since the
introduction of Compulsion in the throes of a great
war certainly involves far greater risks of disorgani-
zation. We could, of course, conceivably have
introduced it ten years ago in a manner that would
have disorganized the Forces and provoked Ger-
many ; but what right have we to assume that this
blunder was necessary, or even probable ? There is
a bad way and a good way of doing these things ;
why should we argue on the assumption that
Government and War Office would have chosen
the bad way ? Is it not evident, on the contrary,
that the dangers here emphasized would have been
obvious to our authorities ? Would not our diplom-
acy have been all the more cautious, our transition
from Voluntary to Compulsory Territorialism all
the more carefully managed, and both Triple
Alliance and Dual Entente far clearer as to the
real chances and significance of our intervention
in the case of attack upon France or violation
of Belgium ?
(b) But " the Germans not only their rulers
but the population would have convinced them-
selves that such an increase of our forces was a
direct threat to them." This is urged by those who
EDGED TOOLS 261
tell us in the same breath that the change would
really have weakened us. We may take for
granted that they would have preached this doctrine
very emphatically during the whole critical period.
The Peace Party in Germany would, very properly,
have taken care to circulate these arguments,
as in fact they have circulated similar arguments
in the past. Reasonable and educated Germans,
therefore (on this assumption), would have had a
chance of seeing that we were really weakening
ourselves for aggression ; that we were committing
the error fatal for Britain, but comfortable to all
timid Germans, of wallowing in what Lord Haldane
and Sir Ian Hamilton call " the dangers of mere
defence." They would gladly have left us
wallowing. Other Germans, no doubt, would have
been less reasonable. In spite of Lord Haldane
and Sir Ian Hamilton, they would have thought
that the new system gave us a far better Home
Defence force, with large numbers of trained men
behind who would be of very little use, perhaps,
for a few months, but who could be called up by
law for home training at any moment, and whose
voluntary efforts would supplement those of our
Regulars far more efficiently than the fitful,
unsystematic flow of those absolutely untrained
men who formed so large a proportion of Lord
Kitchener's Armies. That is how all moderate
papers in Germany read the Military Service Act
of 1916, and that is how they would have read a
262 COMPULSORY MILITARY SERVICE
Military Service Act in 1906. But where would
have been the excuse for complaint here ? 'When
all the Imperial forces had been counted, what
neutral expert would have decided that Great
Britain's powers of defence were greater than
those of Germany ? What neutral politician,
again, would have judged that our temptations
to plunge into warlike adventures were greater
than hers ?
Driven into the last corner, the objectors urge
that men are not always reasonable not even
Germans and that Germany would in fact have
considered herself threatened even by our attempt
(however futile) to increase our defensive forces ;
an increase which, if ever war broke out, would
gradually develop into an increase of our offensive
forces also. To put this argument into plain
English, the objectors are here found urging
that this country is not free to take the defen-
sive measures which (ex hypoihesi) her statesmen
have judged necessary for national security, lest
their designs should be misunderstood by the less
reasonable portion of a rival country. We must
trust in the friendly intentions of a Germany
armed to the teeth ; and we must beware of irri-
tating her by taking efficient defensive precautions.
There is something to be said for absolute non-
resistance ; it is at least logical in theory, though
nobody dreams of attempting to practise it. But
there is neither rhyme nor reason in this theory
EDGED TOOLS 263
of spending 90,000,000 a year on national forces
which we dare not reorganize for fear of bursting
our boiler. It is as essentially absurd as the similar,
and thoroughly undemocratic, argument that you
cannot give our people a very brief and simple
training in arms without inspiring them with the
desire to go and kill some one.
CHAPTER XIX
LAST OBJECTIONS
SOME of these can be dealt with more briefly.
3. It has frequently been argued that the Con-
tinental Democrats and Socialists, who almost
unanimously accept the Compulsory system as
the nearest approach to justice yet achieved, are
wrong ; and that there is more justice in the system
which, as a matter of fact, must always end in
devolving the duty of National Defence upon a
small minority. We have seen Mr. Cox urge this ;
it is emphasized also by the Voluntary Service
Committee (iv. 144). The facts of this war have
rendered it really unnecessary to answer this
argument, however plausible it may seem in peace
time. The country has now been able to compare
both systems in this respect, and can be trusted to
make up its mind. But it is important to note that
the very writers who urge this plea of justice are
willing to face the most patent injustices under a
cover of voluntarism. Lord Haldane and Sir Ian
Hamilton both deliberately contemplate the possi-
LAST OBJECTIONS 265
bility of a ballot for compulsory oversea service
one of the unfairest forms of compulsion. 1
A kindred objection is to complain of the term
Universal Service as misleading. The compulsory
system " is not to apply to any woman ; and,
according to the calculations of the National
Service League, it would only affect about half of
the young men who each year reach the age of
eighteen. To apply the epithet * universal ' to
such a system is an abuse of the English language "
(ii. 501). The best answer to this objection is a
further objection stated by the same writer at the
bottom of the same page. " It is therefore in
the highest degree mischievous to speak as if
military service were the only national service."
No reasonable compulsorist ever speaks so ; we
have always insisted that many other services
also should be made national ; and the present
war has shown us the way. Under a well thought-
out scheme in time of peace, places could have
been found for all conscientious objectors to sweep
out the wards of civilian hospitals, and to do a
thousand national jobs as remote as possible from
war, while the rest were training. The physically
unfit, as in Switzerland, would have paid a tax
according to their resources, to equalize to some
extent the burden of sacrifice. Above all, women's
1 Compulsory Service, pp. 40, 135, 146, 202 ff. It is true that Sir Ian
very cautiously decides against it on military grounds ; but Lord Haldane
certainly does not definitely reject it ; and neither writer seems seriously
to consider it from the moral point of view.
266 COMPULSORY MILITARY SERVICE
energies could have been utilized as they are being
utilized now, only far more systematically. It is
dinned into our ears that the man munition-
worker is doing the work of a man in the trenches.
We now confess the same of the woman munition-
worker ; and this war is bringing us far nearer to
agreement on the vexed principle of Universal
Suffrage a term that has always been used as
approximately as the other, yet without deceiving
anybody who does not wish to be deceived. Even
our disjointed emergency-efforts of the last two years
have pioved this. How much more clearly would
any matured measure of Universal National Service
bring out the distinction between the large majority
who are willing to take their share of all national
burdens, and the small minority who, through
conscientious scruples or through other causes,
stand in fact apart from their fellow-citizens.
Perfect justice, perfect universality of service,
are doubtless unattainable ; but let us at least
get as near to both as we can ; and, above all, let
us not find excuses for refusal in two separate
reasons which contradict each other.
4. Again, it is argued that Compulsory Service
is inseparable from immorality. There is scarcely
any point on which objectors collect evidence with as
little discrimination as on this. The fullest treat-
ment of the subject, perhaps, is by Mr. Trevelyan
(pp. 18-21) ; we may examine this as typical.
LAST OBJECTIONS 267
To begin with, all his quotations are taken from
France ; he has not a single word to say about the
working of the system in Switzerland. Considering
that he professes to be dealing directly with adver-
saries who expressly base their propositions on the
Swiss model, and who for years have been vainly
protesting against the rhetorical device of confusing
the Swiss system with that of the great militarist
nations, this argument of Mr. Trevelyan's shows
extraordinary mental confusion, to put it in the
mildest possible terms. It is notorious that
Jaures's attempts to bring France to a system
modelled on that of Switzerland was looked upon
as revolutionary, and by extremists even as treason-
able ; it was this, in fact, which had a great deal to
do with his murder. BebePs similar attempts in
Germany seemed equally revolutionary to the
average German. The Swiss and the Franco-
German systems are both compulsory, as beer and
sherry are both alcoholic ; but they differ both
in quantity and in quality as a glass of beer differs
from a quart of sherry. The Franco-German
training-time is more than four times as long as
the Swiss a quart to a glass. In anti-democratic
organization, in difficulty of promotion from the
ranks, in difficulty of redeeming military injustices
through the civil courts, even France is as much
more " militarized " than Switzerland as sherry
is more alcoholized than beer. Therefore, even if
we admitted without question all that Mr. Trevelyan
268 COMPULSORY MILITARY SERVICE
tells us about France, we should still have to
compare him with one of those well-meaning
temperance cranks who ignore the difference
between a glass of beer and a debauch of strong
wine.
But of his French quotations all are taken
from the debates on the Dreyfus case. It would be
as reasonable to accept Ulstermen or Nationalists
as impartial witnesses to Irish conditions, as to
quote these speeches without making some allow--
ance for their circumstances. To give only one
instance : the notorious M. Drumont, who is Mr.
Trevelyan's " most striking " witness, speaks of a
three-years' barrack system, in the same breath, as
destroying the conscript's morals and his " religious
faith." Mr. Trevelyan knows very well that, if
the modern Frenchman is anti-clerical, military
service is certainly not the main factor in his loss
of faith. Sixteen years ago I pointed out that even
the bitterest critics in France, who knew the facts,
were less random in their denunciations than our
well-meaning fellow-countrymen who are so ignorant
as to treat Swiss and French conditions as identical.
Urbain Gahier's L'Armee contre la Nation had a
succes de scandale in 1899, and earned its author
the honours of prosecution. Yet Gohier, after his
scathing condemnation of the three-years' system,
ends by frankly admitting (p. 18) : " One year of
service at twenty is not unhealthy ; it wakes a
young fellow up and has a bracing effect."
LAST OBJECTIONS 269
The reader may find in my Appendix XII. what
careful Swiss parents think of the brief barrack-
course there. The Labour M.P.'s and Trades Union
representatives who visited Switzerland on the
1907 commission had two private interviews
with representative bodies of Swiss Socialists ;
these had no complaints of moral corruption to
report (ibid.). Jean Jaures, one of the greatest
idealists of our generation, had no hesitation in
prescribing for the French youth a period of six
months in barracks nearly double the Swiss period.
The moral objection has been stated more
recently by Dr. Starr Jordan in his War and the
Breed. Dr. Jordan attempts to make the barracks
greatly responsible for the prevalence of venereal
diseases (pp. 110 ff.). This is " a scourge fostered
especially by militarism " (p. 113). Yet his own
table of statistics, on the next page, shows how
blind the learned professor is to all facts that do
not square with his own prepossessions. The
yearly average of cases among soldiers in Germany
is 19'8 per thousand ; in France 28*6 ; in Great
Britain 68'4, and in the U.S.A. 167'8! Of course
we cannot take these figures altogether at their
face value ; but it is obvious that they warn us
against the rash generalizations of antimilitarist
writers., It is significant, also, that the anti-
militarist description of the German army which
Dr. Jordan prints in Appendix C, does not empha-
size this accusation of immorality. Still more
270 COMPULSOKY MILITARY SERVICE
significant is the particularly straightforward
description of French barrack life by Professor
A. L. Guerard, in Appendix D of Dr. Jordan's
book, which ought to have warned him even more
plainly than the statistics. 1 Professor Guerard
expressly attributes what was worst in his barrack-
life to the fact that he served at Havre, and that
his fellow-conscripts were Normans. In Normandy,
as he explains, alcoholism is terribly prevalent ;
" children seemed to be brought up on cider
brandy. The result can be imagined." He makes
no attempt to trace this alcoholism to militarism ;
in fact, this war has given us the spectacle of
military authorities taking downright measures
against drink which civilian governments have been
too timid to take. At Havre, again, he was in
"the second seaport in France. The barracks rose
right on the quays ; and I could see in all its hide-
ousness the gross immorality which prevails in all
shipping centres." The conscript, that is, learned
his worst moral evil from the voluntarily enlisted
sailor ; and we Anglo-Saxons are to maintain, in
the name of higher morality, an army-system which
infects a proportion of soldiers at least twice as
great as under the conscript system, and a naval
organization which seals the bluejacket to long
years of celibacy or of separation from home.
Thus " the gross immorality which prevails in all
1 1 stated these objections in greater detail in the Eugenics Eeview
for Jan. 1916, p. 288. Dr. Jordan, answering me, on p. 65 of the April
number, made no attempt to defend himself on this point.
LAST OBJECTIONS 271
our shipping centres " is a sort of open sore which
purges the rest of the British population ; nine
pharisees remain moral, because the tenth publican
(Kegular or Sailor) is segregated to immorality ! We
must, of course, have sailors ; we must have a long-
service Army and Navy ; but do not let us pretend
that it is morality which decides us to keep these
things as they are. Dr. Jordan is Principal of an
American University ; Mr. Trevelyan, when he
wrote, was a Cabinet Minister. When men of this
prominence carefully avoid the evidence from a
country like Switzerland, and misinterpret so
extraordinarily even their own chosen witnesses,
we are entitled to judge that they have a very bad
case. I have never seen even an attempt to prove,
by common-sense evidence, that six months of mili-
tary training of which four, at most, would be
in barracks would tend to the deterioration of
British morals.
5. The objection of expense loomed very large
in this discussion before the war. Lord Koberts
calculated the extra cost of such a system at four
millions a year ; Lord Haldane and his advisers
contended that it would amount to eight millions ;
but this contention took strange liberties with the
figures (see Appendix XVI.). Let us, however, for
the sake of argument, accept this higher figure.
It would then have cost us to prepare for this war
(or rather, to do all in our power to avert this war)
272 COMPULSORY MILITARY SERVICE
an annual sum equal to what we are spending
every thirty- two hours at the present time. 1
6. But, it Was argued, this addition to the budget
is not the whole cost. Let us take three typical
quotations, (a) "Neither calculation takes any
account of the expense imposed upon industrial
undertakings by the simultaneous withdrawal of
a large number of employees. This would be a
very important part of the total cost to the nation "
(ii. 496). (&) " There are many employers who say
that if all the men liable to train under a compul-
sory system were called out it would mean shutting
down work for the fortnight, so that five or six
men would be rendered idle for every one called
out for training " (IV. 5). (c) " The profound moral
and economic upheaval which will be caused by
the herding of all the most active of our young men
of 18 to 21 in barracks or permanent camps for
months together " (V. 18). Have we not here
(as the greatest of our political economists com-
plained in 1871) " a most exaggerated idea of the
time which would have to be sacrificed from the
ordinary pursuits of life ? " (J. S. Mill, Letters, II.
303).
Apart from my general enquiry of 1900, I made
special researches in Switzerland three years ago,
addressing 100 printed forms of enquiry to as
1 The rate has risen even since this book began to go to press. It
may be safely said that we are spending now, every single day, a sum
nearly equivalent to the annual cost of Lord Roberta's scheme.
LAST OBJECTIONS 273
many employers, whom I asked my Lausanne
printer to choose at random from his directory.
Forty-six were good enough to reply, together with
a few more who employed only female labour,
and were therefore useless for my purpose. By
choosing the firms thus at random, it was possible
to secure a very great diversity of size and quality
and occupation. One firm, for instance, employed
as few as nine men ; nine others less than 50 ;
the highest total for a single firm was 2,296. The
grand total of men employed by the forty-six
firms was 9,263, a number large enough to ensure
correct generalizations. I had asked in plain words :
" Do you judge Compulsory Military Service to be
disadvantageous to Swiss t^ade and commerce ? ?:
One only returned a doubtful answer : even he
did not quite venture to say Yes. The forty-five
others all said No ; often with special emphasis, as
pas du tout ; or with an enumeration of the causes
which, in their judgment, more than counter-
balanced the small loss of time.
We are here confronted, however, with leaflet
11 of the International Arbitration League, which
distinctly asserts the contrary, and bases the
assertion on the alleged experience of a factory
near Zurich in 1907. With great trouble I suc-
ceeded in identifying this factory as one of the
only two which had been officially visited by the
Commission of 1907. The managers of both
factories energetically repudiated the assertions
274 COMPULSORY MILITARY SERVICE
of the writer of the leaflet. E.g. he had written
that " nearly half " of the hands had been called
out simultaneously for manoeuvres ; the managers
showed by their books that only 7 per cent, had
been called out in one case, and 3J per cent, in
the other. The Under-Secretary of the Labour
Bureau at Zurich, to whom I had previously applied,
answered (italics his own) " such a case [as you
quote from the leaflet] has never happened among
us, and we should never even discuss its possibility'*
Finally, one of the colonels to whom the writer had
appealed for corroboration replied : " The gentle-
man who publishes this story has either been
egregiously hoaxed by his informant in Switzer-
land, or else has misunderstood him." 1 It is almost
impossible to exaggerate the unanimity with which
the Swiss maintain that the energy which they
expend in military training brings its full com-
pensations, even in trade and industry.
There seems little doubt that the same may be
said even of the German system. Professor Hadley,
President of Yale University, lectured at the end
of 1908 to his fellow-citizens on " What we can
learn from the Educational Institutions of
Germany." In this address he said :
" The majority of intelligent and patriotic Germans will
to-day tell you that the German Army gives the German
1 See fuller details of this case in my Main Illusions of Pacificism,
Appendix, pp. xxii-xxviii. The colonel in question is now Commander-
in-Chief of the Swiss Army.
LAST OBJECTIONS 275
nation habits of discipline, cleanliness, and efficiency
which cannot be obtained in any other way ; and that
two years of withdrawal from active industry is a very
cheap price to pay for training which makes a man a more
efficient worker and a more useful citizen for 20 years
thereafter " (Nation in Arms, January, 1909, p. 9).
Similar evidence is given by Mr. W. Harbutt
Dawson in his Evolution of Modern Germany (1908,
p. 151). Speaking of educational influences which
give the German workman an advantage over his
English rival, he says : " The first is the continua-
tion school, and the second is the institution of
military service." " Ninety-nine per cent, of my
men come back to me," said the manager of a large
machine works in the Rhineland, "for I always
keep their places open for them and they are more
valuable to me than before." None of the pre-war
prophecies has been more hopelessly falsified than
the idea that conscription would so disorganize
industrial life as to make a great war insupportable
for more than a few months at most. On the
contrary, it is we who have had to learn from
Germany and France how to adapt industrial
conditions to the exigencies of war. 1
1 E.g. Westminster Gazette, Dec. 9, 1912, where Colonel Maude prophe-
sied : " If any other European nation [than ours] ventures to mobilize, the
paralysis of her industrial system is in precise proportion to her industrial
development . . . the outbreak of war hits more than only the financial
credit of firms it practically suspends their operations altogether." Com-
pare the words I have italicized with the testimony of the very sober
neutral witness in the Morning Post for Jan. 13, 1915, who pointed out
that German industries were showing amazing vitality, and that new
houses were being built in Berlin.
276 COMPULSOEY MILITAEY SERVICE
7. Trade Disputes. " There is another aspect of com-
pulsory service which the experience of foreign countries
is emphasizing. A conscript army makes the central
government much more powerful in case of civil disturbance.
... It is no wonder that the Trade Union Congress has
repudiated the objects of the agitation. The labour world
has recently seen in France the most summary and success-
ful method of strike-breaking invented by the French
Government. During the recent railway strike the railway-
men were simply called out by the government and ordered
to work as soldiers where they had been working as civilians.
They were mobilized to blackleg themselves " (V. 21-2).
This argument, we see, professes to be an appeal
to experience ; yet the system we propose is that
of republican Switzerland and democratic Norway,
in which experience shows the working classes to
be at least as well off as in Britain. The writer
(Mr. C. P. Trevelyan), appeals to one special case, the
strike-breaking in France by M. Briand in 1 910. Yet
French Kadicals and Socialists, who knew far more
of that case than he, and had far more reason to
resent it, were not thereby shaken in their allegiance
to the compulsory principle. Jean Jaures published
his Armee Nouvelle only a few weeks after the
strike ; he speaks very bitterly of the Government
action. Yet he shows very plainly that, so long
as a country keeps up an efficient army at all, that
army will be a more unscrupulous instrument of
Government repression if it is composed only of
paid soldiers ; and he points out that, on the
Continent, " the whole instinct, the whole thought
LAST OBJECTIONS 277
of the working classes, in every country, goes in
the contrary direction " that is, against the idea
of a paid army, and in favour of the Nation in
Arms. 1 These are the words of a man who really
knew the classes in whose name he spoke ; Mr.
Trevelyan's supposed appeal to " experience "
is simply a proof of his own superficial reading of
the facts.
Take the example of Switzerland, again. Public
opinion there would scarcely permit the mobiliza-
tion of troops as blacklegs ; though there is, I
believe, no positive law against it, such as might
easily be passed among us. 2 Troops are called
out only to keep order during the strike, and
especially to ensure that large bodies of strikers
should not be tempted to illegal violence, whether
against the persons of non-strikers or the property
of employing classes. For such purposes a Citizen
Army is not only far more efficient than the
Regulars, but it also provides its own safety-valve.
A classical instance is the great Geneva strike of
1898, described by Moch on p. 276, and on p. 43
of the present writer's Strong Army in a Free State.
It began among the masons (most of whom here,
as elsewhere in Switzerland, are foreigners) ; but
it spread to other trades. The general public were
1 Ed. 1915, p. 357 ; translated on p. 77 of Democracy and Military
Service (Simpkin, Marshall & Co., 1916).
2 The law forbidding the use of Territorials, as such, in labour troubles
might easily be applied also under any system of Compulsory Terri-
torialism.
278 COMPULSORY MILITARY SERVICE
convinced that some of the leaders intended to
make good their violent thrgats, and to attack
persons and property. A battalion was therefore
called out ; the strikers were forbidden to parade
the streets in such numbers as to impede the
business of the city ; and in process of time the
strike fizzled out. But the really significant fact
is that 30 per cent, of the men thus mobilized were
strikers or sympathizers, and that their mobilization
was recognized as an act of exceptional courage
on the part of the City Council. If anything like
half the population had been in favour of the
strikers, no mobilization would have been possible.
The Swiss Militia, therefore, so far frpm being a
tool of social oppression, is a real barometer of
public feeling. It will not be denied that this
calling out of citizens to keep order in their
own city was less objectionable in itself, and likely
to end more pacifically, than the importation of a
battalion of hired soldiers. Nor can the justice
of the proceeding be seriously contested. To
contend that 30 per cent, of the population has a
right to wrest, by violence or threats of violence,
certain concessions from the remaining 70 per
cent., and that this majority has not the right
to keep the peace by a resort to strictly constitu-
tional measures, would seem quite indefensible
on the principles of any civilized state. It is sheer
Larkinism and a reversal to primitive individual-
ism ; and those states are best constituted in which
LAST OBJECTIONS 279
the military system makes it perfectly clear from
the very first what numbers and what organiza-
tion are on the side of law-keepers and law-breakers
respectively. 1 Half our civil conflicts, like half
our international conflicts, spring from gross mis-
calculations on one side or on both.
Therefore, neither experience nor sound political
theory are in favour of this objection. There is
no working-class in continental Europe which does
not prefer the compulsory system, on the whole,
to the system of hiring soldiers.
8. Illusions as to Physical Training.
Although this objection is founded (as will be
seen), upon the grossest misconceptions, yet the
general public, naturally unfamiliar with the
literature of this subject, has hitherto allowed
great weight to it. Let us state it in the words of
Mr. Trevelyan, whose position as Parliamentary
Secretary to the Board of Education naturally
lent his words great authority, and who goes into
more details than most. Following upon his
objections, let us print the official proposals of the
National Service League, against which his whole
pamphlet was directly aimed. These proposals
were not only regularly distributed as leaflets by
1 At a later Zurich strike, a county battalion was sent to keep order
in the city. This certainly lends itself to serious criticism, though
to less than the importation of hired soldiers ; and, in any case, it could
easily be checked by making it a penal offence to import a foreign
battalion unless the order could later be justified in the law courts as a
necessary emergency measure.
280 COMPULSORY MILITARY SERVICE
the League, but appeared also on the cover of
every issue of their journal, in order to leave no
possible doubt in the public mind.
(A) Trevelyan, Democracy and Compulsory Service
(V. 14).
" What becomes, then, of the claim that compulsion will
improve national physique, if the half of the youth who most
need training will not be affected ? Compulsory service
will only train a little more those who are already the
most fit. ... If there is to be a national health campaign
which is sensibly to affect the physique of the rising genera-
tion, it must be undertaken in a far larger spirit. All the
youth ought to come within the scope of the training. It
is even more important that the mothers of the race should
be strong than the fathers. But because they are not
wanted for fighting, the girls are forgotten by the militarist.
And among children of both sexes, it is the weaker who
require most and not least attention. In fact, the course of
national training must have a medical basis. It must
begin, as it is now beginning, in the elementary schools.
It must be continued between fourteen and eighteen, a period
when military training of a serious kind cannot be under-
taken. It must not be merely drill. Indeed, the purely
military exercises are of comparatively small value for
general development. They are being discarded as irrele-
vant by informed and scientific opinion. All these things
can be done by an educational system. The foundations
are now being laid."
(B) Proposals of the National Service League.
These are put as briefly as possible, to occupy only
half the cover of the journal. The detailed proposals
are only three, of which the last runs as follows :
LAST OBJECTIONS 281
" (18) Military and physical training shall be compulsory
for all youths between the ages of 14 and 18, and such training
shall be carried out either (a) as part of the curriculum of all
Schools ; (6) in affiliated cadet corps ; or (c) in organisa-
tions for boys' training duly selected and authorised."
Let readers compare the words here italicized
in both quotations, and ask themselves how Mr.
Trevelyan could possibly have maintained his objec-
tion if he had done the League the elementary justice
of looking at their proposals before sitting down
to attack them. For the mention of girls is alto-
gether beside the point. No member of the League
would have had the least objection to including
better physical training for girls as part of the
school training they advocate for boys ; indeed,
it was taken for granted that girls' schools would
follow the improvements in the boys' schools, as
soon as these could be introduced. Again, even if
the League had tried intentionally to rule out the
girls, it must still have been obvious that their
scheme offered a far bigger loaf than has ever been
given yet to the advocates of physical training in
elementary schools. If Mill could have had his
way, we should have had this system for more
than a generation, as in Switzerland. Compulsory
Territorialism would have involved here, as there,
a real system of physical training in our schools ;
indeed Mill expressly contemplated this. The
voluntary system, meanwhile, has procrastinated
from year to year, and, even in 1913, we get more
282 COMPULSOKY MILITARY SERVICE
promise than actual assurance of progress from this
Parliamentary Secretary to the Board of Education
himself. " All these things can be done by an
Educational system " which has now been running
for nearly forty years ! " The foundations are now
being laid " ; . and, by way of laying these foun-
dations, he refuses even to see what is being done
by a body which, if it had had its way, would have
completed the whole edifice ten years ago ! As the
Arbitrator said only a few weeks after Mr. Trevelyan's
pamphlet was published, bhe best way of destroying
the National Service League would have been to
introduce a system of compulsory physical training
in continuation schools (December, 1913, p. 136).
It must be frankly recognized, therefore, that
the compulsorist has been hitherto the best friend
of physical training, not only for the 58 per cent,
or so of males who would be taken for their recruit
course, but for all children at school and up to the
age of 18. Jaures, for instance, would begin such
training with a definite military purpose, from the
age of 10 onwards. When we speak of military
purpose we do not necessarily imply that the
exercise itself is of an exclusively military character;
far from it. Jaures would compose it of Swedish
and similar exercises, activities of the Boy Scout
description, and finally formal drill squads, com-
panies or regiments. The National Service League,
it will be seen, specially provided also for a similar
variation of activities. To deny that a system of
LAST OBJECTIONS 283
that kind would do more for the national physique
than any voluntary effort has yet succeeded in
doing is simply to ignore facts for oneself, and to
presume on equal ignorance on the part of the
public. For, of course, the general public has
little time to look into these matters, and must
take most of its information either from its news-
papers or from its accredited teachers.
The whole population, under any reasonable
constitution of the Nation in Arms, would be
trained up to the age of 18 ; and if, after that age,
the minority who were not taken as recruits
relapsed into carelessness, that would no longer
be chargeable to the slackness of our educational
machinery. Moreover, even these could never
lose, through mere indolence, all the good which
had been done to them in childhood and in youth.
9. Side by side with other objections which have
been killed by the experience of this war, one has,
on the contrary, sprung into special prominence
recently. " Militarism," it is asserted, is the
deadly enemy of " feminism " ; the soldier-society
is one in which woman cannot possibly come to
her rights. It is not worth while to follow in detail
the arguments by which this thesis has been sup-
ported. The writers do not exactly define either
" militarism " or " feminism " ; and, in the fullest
and most widely circulated pamphlet on the subject,
the former term is used even of our own Volunteer
284 COMPULSORY MILITARY SERVICE
movement in 1859, and of our attempts in the
seventies to raise the standard of Volunteer
efficiency ! * No attempt is made to explain why
Mill, the great champion of Feminism, was also
a champion of Compulsory Service ; why New
Zealand, with its Women's Vote, was one of the
first Anglo-Saxon communities to enforce military
training on the able-bodied population, and again
vote actual conscription during this war; or why
Norway, with a Compulsory Military system, is
more feminist than Great Britain with her Volun-
tarism (pp. 5, 42, 53). The historical side of the
argument is weaker still. All sorts of nations are
cited into court, barbarous and civilized, ancient
and modern ; but the authors ignore two of the
best known ancient Germany and modern China.
1 The German, Tacitus tells us, transacted no public
business but in arms ; his ideals were essentially
warlike ; yet the power and consideration enjoyed
by his women astounded the Roman observer.
China is the least militarized of all great nations
in the modern world ; yet in China woman is
bought and sold, and superfluous female infants
are murdered. Burma, which is taken as the model
feminist state by the authors, is not only defence-
less against any foreign invader, but even against
the invasions of modern commerce ; " everywhere
trade is falling into stronger hands, as elsewhere
^Militarism versus Feminism . . . demonstrating that Militarism involves
the Subjection of Women, no author's name, London, 1915, pp. 40, 53.
LAST OBJECTIONS 285
in the world " (p. 18). To many people, the clue to
this may be found in the passage from Mr. Hall's
travels, which the authors cite with approval ; "his
instincts [i.e. the Burmese man's] make him like
hunting, lead him to kill noxious beasts and reptiles.
But in every home the mother and wife enforce the
prohibition against taking life." He may not, it
appears, even kill a mouse within his own walls.
These brief instances, among many more which
might be given, show how little the authors have
thought out the consequences of their own theories,
May we not say that this war has created many
cross-cleavages in older social ideas, but has given
no justification whatever to those who would find
the main social cleavage in sex-differences ? Did
it not show great obtuseness for these authors to
write " even early in 1915, in war-time, only men
matter " (p. 60, italics their own). Has not the
real cleavage been not between sex and sex, but
between men and women who take national defence
seriously, as against men and women who try to
talk these things away ? Has not the War revealed
to all of us, even the most optimistic, how much
woman can do when her heart is in the matter ?
And will not all this bring us far nearer towards a
solution of the feminist problem ? This, at least,
seems to be the hope of most supporters of the
women's vote ; and when we look critically into
the reasons at present advanced against it, we can
scarcely deny that they rest upon very slender logi-
286 COMPULSORY MILITARY SERVICE
cal and scientific foundations. That unadulterated
Bernhardism is difficult to reconcile with feminism
would be granted by everyone. But common-
sense would rather suggest that sane feminism
has a great deal to hope from any frank recognition
of the fact that all inhabitants of a country are
equally concerned in national defence ; that each
may, if he or she will, contribute a very valuable
share ; and that legal privilege should go hand
in hand with legal responsibility, both in peace
and in war. 1 Man is not, on the whole, a wicked
animal ; and the best hope of avoiding war would
seem to lie in bringing the realities and responsi-
bilities of war home to as many people as possible,
of all possible classes and private interests. For
the general interest is always against war ; let us
therefore generalize as much as possible.
10. The Thin End of the Wedge. This is the last
objection which need seriously be discussed. Others
even some of those urged at length in the respon-
sible publications above enumerated have either
been stultified by this present war, or are calculated
to appeal only to a population unwilling to face
the urgent necessity of military reorganization.
The author of The Case for Voluntary Service, for
instance, spends nearly three pages (127-129) in
attempting to prove that we should never find a
real body of citizen-officers to command our citizen-
1 It is hardly necessary to point out how completely this prophecy,
written a year before, is borne out by current events (June, 1917).
LAST OBJECTIONS 287
army. He proves clearly enough that those who
do not want to solve this problem cannot solve it ;
but there is not a word which would appeal to
that great majority of our fellow-countrymen
who are now sincerely anxious for a democratic
yet efficient system, and who know very well that
such systems work admirably in Switzerland and
Norway, from the private to the colonel.
But the Thin End of the Wedge is a specious
objection which is still urged, and will be urged
more strongly when the real discussion comes after
this War.
It is perhaps most clearly expressed on pp. 4
and 41 of the official handbook which has just been
quoted. We there read :
" Finally, there is the consideration that the step once
taken is irrevocable. A voluntary system can be adapted
to the changing circumstances. Once start on the road to
universal compulsion and there can be no return."
And again :
" There is reasonable ground for suspicion that if the
comparatively small army on lenient conditions of training
demanded by the National Service League were once
conceded for home defence, it would rapidly be extended
on the plea of military necessity, until it became an army
on the Continental scale, with the length of service and
rigorous training required by warfare as practised in
Europe to-day. The first step, once taken, would be
irretrievable, and would more and more entangle this
country in European militarism."
Mr. Trevelyan (pp. 16 if.), while following the
288 COMPULSORY MILITARY SERVICE
same line of argument, ventures to accuse Lord
Roberts of disingenuous diplomacy for having
frankly confessed that some supporters of the
National Service League were in favour of longer
periods, and for having added : " there would be no
difficulty in adjusting the details of the scheme "
later on (Fallacies and Facts, p. 14). The best
answer to this is the answer which Lord Roberts
gave in the Morning Post for February 6, 1914.
Mr. Philip Snowden, M.P., in a letter of February 3,
had in effect repeated this accusation, writing :
" There is no doubt whatever that the aim of the National
Service League, and the compulsory service agitation, is
the enforcement of compulsory military service for the
purpose of Continental wars. . . . Without Conscription
we could never raise a force which would be of any use to
' our friends/ and without years of continuous training
our soldiers would be of little use as allies of the conscript
armies of the Continent. "
To this Lord Roberts replied in words which I
need make no apology for quoting at some length,
since they constitute his fullest official pronounce-
ment on this subject in the days just before the war:
" The National Service League is fighting for three
main points ; for a home militia (1) training all the able-
bodied population with very few exceptions, (2) for home
defence only, and (3) under a system in which all recruits,
of whatever class, would start in the ranks. Moreover,
our draft proposals include a fourth point, that the term
of service should only be about one-fourth as long as in the
great Continental armies. It is perfectly true that I have
once admitted (with perhaps more frankness than political
LAST OBJECTIONS 289
finesse) that, if this period were found insufficient, it might be
extended. But by whom would it be extended ? ' By Lord
Roberts and his friends, if once they could get their main
principles established,' says Mr. Snowden. But no man
has a right to forget least of all has a Labour Leader any
right to forget that not I but the votes of the people
must decide this question. As he himself has said most
emphatically only twenty lines higher up, in an argument
where this common-sense reminder was necessary to his
purpose, c Lord Roberts is not going to work the system if it is
established. 1 I gladly underline these words to emphasize
my hearty agreement with them, and with the other
passage in which Mr. Snowden points out that * in a demo-
cratic country like this the system could not work per-
manently unless it secured the considered approval of the
working classes.' This is why we of the National Service
League are doing all we can to secure, at least, free and
open discussion of this question before working-class
audiences. The fact that the Swiss and Norwegian com-
pulsory militias are frankly accepted by all political parties
does not depend merely, or, even mainly, as Mr. Snowden
argues, upon different geographical conditions. It is
because the working men of these countries have thought
on these questions and have had the truth put before them.
Mr. Snowden and his friends (as I have already shown)
put before our working-classes assertions on matters of
the greatest importance, matters easily verified, which are
flatly opposed to the truth. 1 That these falsehoods are
disseminated through mere carelessness and prejudice
does not make much practical difference. The British
working-classes will never have a real chance of facing the
1 Lord Roberts, just above, had quoted from Jaures to show how
grossly Mr. Snowden misrepresented the real views of Continental
Socialists. To this letter of Lord Roberts Mr. Snowden never ventured
to make any reply.
T
290 COMPULSOKY MILITAEY SERVICE
question of National Defence until their leaders give them
a chance of hearing the truth. We of the National Service
League advocate above all things I seize this opportunity
of officially repeating it a system which may be described
as Compulsory Territorialism minus that caste-system
among the officers which Mr. Snowden deplores, and plus
an efficiency in training and organization which is quite
impossible so long as that admirably devoted force remains
on-national. Home defence is our first motive. If, beyond
this, we point out that war is a possible, though a lamentable
contingency, and that our expeditionary force might con-
ceivably have to be sent abroad, we are true here again to
our motto of Compulsory Territorialism. Lord Haldane,
in creating the Territorials, explained officially that ' the
Territorial Force is thus designed to enable both the Army
and Navy to operate with greater freedom at a distance
from these shores, where defence of British interests may
require their presence,' and later on he repeats this in other
words : ' to free the Eegular Army from the necessity of
remaining in these Islands to fulfil the functions of Home
Defence ' " (Memo, on Army Estimates for 1908-9).
It is scarcely necessary to point out how strikingly
experience has confirmed these words since they
were written. It was the lising feeling in the
country which forced compulsion upon the Govern-
ment ; it will be the real feeling of the country
which, when our immediate military necessities
are over, will determine whether to continue
compulsion, and, if so, for how long a period of
training. And, if every man in the country had
received a previous training for home defence
more thorough than that of our 260,000 Territorials,
this would have left no possibility for the epigram
LAST OBJECTIONS 291
attributed to Lord Kitchener in the Westminster
Gazette of January 11, 1915 : " 1 don't know when
this war will end : but I know when it will begin,
and that is in the month of May."
The " thin end " objection ignores the striking fact ,
that, with comparatively insignificant exceptions,
the tendency of all compulsionist countries has been
to shorten the service as time goes on. During the
First Revolution, the French conscript served five
years with the colours. In Prussia, at the introduc-
tion of the full compulsory system in 1807, the period
was three years with the colours. Both countries
gradually cut this down to two years ; and nothing
but the growing menace of German armaments
and diplomacy induced France to accept, by no
very large majority, a reversion to the Three Years.
In Switzerland the service was lengthened by about
three weeks, by a considerable majority of the
whole people, at a Referendum in 1907. But, even
thus lengthened, the Swiss period of service is far
shorter than it was in previous centuries. If, as is
very possible, France goes back to the Two Years
again, and Switzerland decides to add a few weeks
more to the training, the decision in each case
will be the deliberate decision of a national majority,
anxious to adjust military and civil considerations
as accurately as possible. In either case it will be
a truly democratic act, liable to reconsideration
after further experience by the same democracy
which has now adopted it.
CHAPTER XX
CONCLUSION
IN the foregoing chapters the author has attempted
to prove that history shows ijs the principle of
compulsory service for home defence as an integral
factor in democratic freedom. For freedom can
be founded only upon sane discipline ; to obtain
the greatest liberty of action for the community at
large, we must necessarily impose certain restric-
tions upon the individualism of the minority ; and
the whole history of civilization is a history of
principles, first accepted as beneficial, then en-
forced by law, and at last so completely accepted
by the vast majority as to lose all the galling
nature of compulsion, while they retain its full
collective force. The effect of the law compelling
all husbands to support their wives and families
may be called wholly beneficial. We can conceive
of a society so advanced as to drop that law, finding [;
it useless, a mere survival of the distant past.i
But, in practice, we recognize the vast distance
which separates us still from that Utopia. Thosej
of us who are completely frank with ourselves 1
CONCLUSION 293
echo readily the memorable words of George
Washington : we are " actual men, possessing all
the turbulent passions belonging to that animal."
We cherish the law which protects wives and
children ; and we have reason to admire the Swiss
for cherishing a similar law which protects their
country at a similar cost theoretical rather than
practical to individual freedom of action. Com-
pulsion freely accepted is no longer compulsion.
TEis^onsideration removes all suspicion of paradox
from the historical generalization which connects
compulsory national defence with democratic
governments, aiid which shows enlistment by " free
contract " as characteristic rather of the despot.
So long as armies are needed at all, the people can
control the National Army only by entering into
it. It is mere self-deception to say " we will stand
outside the Army, and we will control it by law."
Under such a system the time would surely
come when the Army would make its own law.
When our Regulars, rightly or wrongly, showed
themselves disinclined to march against Ulster,
it was perfectly logical that democratic papers
like the Westminster Gazette should threaten to
revolutionize our military system and create a
People's Army.
I have tried to show, again, that military pre-
paredness and militarism are two very definite
things. To return to the case just cited. The
attempt to force a new system of government upon
294 COMPULSORY MILITARY SERVICE
Ulster, by the bayonets of hired troops, might,
with some show of reason, be stigmatized as
militarism. But, if every able-bodied man within
the four seas had been drilled and armed as in
Switzerland, and if the Government had been able
to reduce resistance to absurdity by pointing out
that the Home Rule Bill was supported by the same
proportion of rifles as of votes this would have been
less a military than a civic victory. Incidentally,
most reasonable people would admit that a system of
this kind would even reduce the chances of armed
conflict. Our real danger is not from the arming
of the average responsible citizen, but from the
vapouring of irresponsible hot-heads and secret
societies, who can calculate (not altogether un-
reasonably) upon taking society by surprise. Swit-
zerland, with far greater diversity of races and
languages than ours, and with the same religious
divisions, has nothing like an Irish question. It
was Jean Jaures who insisted that the leal danger
of wHir^EooSrng and thoughtless violence comes
nob from the soldier (who has learned to see human
T society in something like its true proportion), but
. from the irresponsible individualist, who has
1 scarcely even begun to recognize the value of co-
1 operation on a great scale, and who mistakes the
l eccentricities of his own mind or his own clique
\for eternal principles of justice.
It was Jaures also who emphasized the value
of a rational military education : this is, as he
CONCLUSION 295
insisted, " an integral part of human knowledge." l
It is idle here to turn our eyes away from all the
uses of military training, and to dwell only on its
abuses. The race of controversialists who lived
upon the defects of the Board School system is
now almost defunct ; there is no room in the modern
world but for those who are willing to accept com-
pulsory education, and to make the best of it.
Civil education is a power lending itself to great
abuses witness the indoctrination of the German
people with a State-made system of political theories.
Military education lends itself, as most people
would admit, to still greater abuses. But its;
general effect, as in the case of civil education, is)
to raise the individual and the society, giving a(
wider outlook, and teaching -the paramount social >
value of united effort under intelligent leadership. ^
To fix our attention solely on its abuses is to go
wilfully astray. If we look steadily at history as
a whole, we shall see that the abuse of general
military training for anti-social or anti-democratic
purposes is exceptional. And it "is precisely the
business of civilization to distinguish between the
normal and the exceptional working of any general
principle ; to seize all its potentialities for good,
and to eliminate its potentialities for evil. The
ignorant savage fears further complexity of organ-
ization as a force which will transform him against
his will. The civilized man passes boldly to higher
1 UArmie Nouvelle, 1915, p. 308 ; Democracy and Military Service, p. 69.
296 COMPULSOKY MILITARY SERVICE
social complexities, confident of bending them to
t the general purposes of human progress.
Y Moreover, it is beside the present point to object
that there is no lesson of co-operation, or duty,
or self-sacrifice in military life which cannot also
be learned and practised in civil life. Undeniable
as this is in theory, no society has yet come near
to realizing it in practice. It remains almost as
true now as when John Stuart Mill wrote it in
1864, that "until labourers and employees perform
the work of industry in the spirit in which soldiers
perform that of an army, industry will never be
moralized, military life will remain what, in spite
of the anti-social character of its direct object, it
has hitherto been, the chief school of moral co-
operation." l When this other ideal has come into
practical politics when it becomes possible to
bargain with trade-union leaders as one military
commander bargains with another, knowing that
the rank and file will obey when mutinies and
breaches of faith have become as rare in trade
organizations as in military life when the woikmen
are as ready to lay down their lives for a common
cause as the soldier has always shown himself
then, at last, there will be little excuse for the
soldier's survival, and we shall beat our swords into
ploughshares. Until then, let us not reject "the chief
school of moral co-operation " on the vague plea
some better school is theoretically possible.
1 Essay on Comte, 1863, p. 149 ; cf. 146.
CONCLUSION 297
The present war has cleared our ideas. Few
men believe now in Imperial Separatism ; and
few would venture to propound . a thoroughly
co-ordinated scheme of general Imperial Defence
except on a basis of such uniformity of effort as
practically postulates legal and general compulsion.
Again, the clear separation between the conscien-
tious objector and the ordinary citizen is welcomed
by many thinking people as a gain. The worst
hardships of which conscientious objectors com-
plain are due to the haste and disorganization of our
present emergency measures ; temperate disputants
on both sides are already so near each other as
to foreshadow a fairly easy settlement in this
field when peace gives us leisure to look around.
We shall then be able to distinguish clearly
between two ideals which lived confusedly together
in our days of ease, when so few theories of this
kind could be brought to any practical test. On
the one hand there is John Stuart Mill's ideal of
liberty, which permits the community to demand
of each individual a proportionate share in the
burden of common defence. On the other hand,
there is the Friends' or Tolstoyan ideal of escaping
war by ignoring war, and of claiming complete
liberty of action and expression for each individual,
even during the most perilous national crises. When
once, in time of peace, practical . statesmanship
has clearly delimited these conflicting ideals, the
two parties will be able to propagate their views
298 COMPULSORY MILITARY SERVICE
as definitely as two rival religious denominations ;
and the world will judge them not only by their
arguments, but by their fruits. If the non-resis-
tant party, now clearly marked out from the rest
by law and by legal registration, differentiates itself
with anything like the same clearness in moral
and intellectual qualities, we shall have gained
one of the greatest steps forward towards world-
peace. If their business-capacity, their probity,
their self-sacrifice, their breadth of view and in-
telligent sympathy with adverse opinions, if their
fortitude in face of the ordinary hardships and
burdens of life makes it probable that conscientious
objectors could preserve through adversity, by sheer
moral force, something of that unity and determina-
tion which the soldier shows in the face of the enemy,
then the world will begin to believe in the possibility
of a non-resistant State. If their indifference to
worldly goods proves equal to their dislike of the
forcible methods by which alone the possession
of worldly goods has ever been defended, here
again their good example will effect what no mere
words can ever do. They will show us how essen-
.tially false is the conception of the strong man
armed, keeping his goods in peace.
Few, however, really believe in the possibility
of civilized existence without self-defence. Nearly
always, in the last resort, the antimilitarist falls
back upon the fear lest efficient defensive forces
should be used for offence. He looks upon every
CONCLUSION 299
drilled man as a potential murderer. He has never
realized, probably, that the proportion of murders
in the United States is enormously in excess of
those committed in any " militarist state." l Worst
of all, he does not realize the degradingly low
estimate of human nature which his own argument
postulates.
The present book, then, appeals to all who
believe in human nature, and who love their own
country without hating other countries. It appeals
to those who are ready to admit, with Jean Jaures,
that the world would be brought one great step
forward if all nations were piepared for war on the
maximum of defensive organization, with the
minimum of offensive and that the great Anglo-
Saxon Empire, with its small temptations to
aggression in these days, with its fixed determina-
tion in self-defence, and with its age-long traditions
of political liberty, is destined to inaugurate a
new era in world -politics by providing a concrete
example of a community coveting nothing further,
yet organized down to the last man and the last
penny in defence of what it now possesses.
1 Mulhall, Dictionary of Statistics, 4th ed. (1899), pp. 168, 172.
APPENDIX I
COMPULSORY EDUATION AND " PRUSSIANISM "
IT is curious to go back only two generations, and read
what was written by Sir Edward Baines, the parliamentary
leader of the Liberal Nonconformists, against Lord Lans-
downe's very mild project for a system of State Education
which would at last bring England nearly into line with
the civilized world. Baines writes : " At a time when educa-
tion is far more extensive than in any former period of our
history, when it is every day advancing with giant strides
. . . there are, it now appears, many Members of Parlia-
ment, and many writers who love Government surveillance
for its own sake ; or, at least, who have got so much of
the police spirit that characterizes the statesmen of Germany
as not to be satisfied without something like a universal
espionage a system of inspection, dictation and control
by public functionaries, of regimental uniformity, and of
dependence on public funds, characteristic of the conti-
nental despotisms. These persons, many of them able and
distinguished men, but forgetting, in their zeal for mechani-
cal completeness, the much higher value of a living spirit,
demand that we should imitate the Prussian or some
similar system, and place the education of the whole people
under the care and control of the Government. It is true
there are not many writers who as yet go avowedly this
length ; but there are many who manifestly admire com-
pulsory and State education, and who only shrink from
APPENDIX I 301
recommending its immediate adoption, because they believe
the nation is not prepared for and would not endure it."
Baines protested against ruining the good work which was
already being done by Voluntarism : "it would be as
reasonable to plough up the wheat in spring because it did
not yet bear full corn in the ear/' yet, at this very time,
great progressive towns like Manchester, as well as Baines's
own Leeds, were not providing more than 75 per cent, of
the children with even the pretence of school education !
But he was hypnotized by the conviction that " Prussian "
education would " Prussianize " our political and social
life. He wrote : " The destruction of our liberties will
be complete if we are to imitate Prussia and France in
their degrading and enslaving system of function alism.
It is obvious that the schoolmasters and pupil-teachers
will become nearly as dependent on the Inspectors as a
slave in the United States is on his master. . . . What must
be its effect upon the character of their teaching, and the
principles and spirit of the rising generation of England ? "
This, and much more to the same effect, may be found in
Sir Edward Baines's two pamphlets : An Alarm to the
Nation on the Unjust, Unconstitutional, and Dangerous
Measure of State Education, and A Letter to the Marquis of
Lansdowne on the Government Plan of Education. I have
given further quotations on this subject in the Nineteenth
Century and After for January, 1915. Macaulay dealt
with these old wives' alarms in one of the most pungent
of his speeches (April 18, 1847). Exceptionally wide-
minded Nonconformists like R. W. Dale of Birmingham
supported compulsion, and " complained that many people
interpreted voluntaryism as ' freedom to give nothing ' " ;
but for a long while Dale and his friends " were in a small
minority " (Life, by his son, A. W. W. Dale, 1898, pp. 162-3,
266-274). Nor was this hypnotism confined to one party.
A Conservative published, anonymously, a pamphlet
302 COMPULSORY MILITARY SERVICE
entitled Compulsory Education Opposed to the Liberty of
the Citizen (Ridgeway, 169, Piccadilly). This author, like
Baines, harped on the evil example of " the bureaucracy
of Prussia " and on "the highly-coloured statements of
some enthusiasts who attributed the great material pros-
perity of [Prussia and North America] to the more advanced
state of national education therein established." More-
over (by way of ' dishing the Whigs '), he sought to rouse
the working-man against his middle-class oppressor (pp. 3,
5). " Both Liberals and Conservatives alike stand forth
before the public eye as supporters of the Doctrinaire
Government and as oppressors of the poor. For it must
be conceded that this legislation is calculated to limit the
liberties of the working classes especially. The more
wealthy could find no excuse for entirely neglecting the
education of their families ; to them it costs comparatively
little to provide for their instruction superior to any that
could be forced upon the poorer classes. ... At a time
when power has been put into the hands of the lo\ver
orders, the opportunity is taken of inflicting oppression
and insult upon vast numbers of them ; they are wounded
in the most sensitive points, they are punished for the
shortcomings of their children ; the fathers, more especially,
are arbitrarily and capriciously punished for the errors of
their wives and children which they themselves are quite
powerless to correct or to prevent. All this is done to
gratify the craving for power of a comparatively few
enthusiasts, who press forward the realization of their
theories without regard to the rights or liberties of those
who fall victims to their doctrinaire zeal, in the pro-
motion of what they affect to consider the improvement
of the rising generation. This system of vicarious punish-
ment of parents seems to have originated with the despotic
government of Prussia, and it is, to a certain extent,
carried out by the despotic democracy of America ; but
APPENDIX I 303
it is a system wholly opposed to the spirit of British con-
stitutional government. In former times, the greatest
jealousy existed in England with respect to the liberty
and rights of the person; but of late years the ever-increasing
power of the Liberal party has emboldened them to treat
with contempt their opponents who have Conservative
tendencies, and, in spite of them, to coerce the great mass
of the people. ... In former times the Englishman's proud
boast was that his house was his castle. This can no longer
be said, for the poor man, at any rate. His home is ruth-
lessly invaded by officials of various kinds, and now recently
by the school board visitors, a body of men, from position
and training, totally unfit for carrying out inquisitorial
and restrictive measures among the humbler classes. . . .
The poorer classes are daily taught to feel that they must
be ,on the defensive in the war thus waged against them
by the higher classes ; by the working man it is, in fact,
regarded as a war constantly carried on between the rich
and the poor, for the still further aggrandisement of the
rich."
This was the cry, then, between 1847 and 1871. In the
autumn of 1915 Mr. H. G. Wells writes to the Times against
Compulsory Military Service, and bases himself expressly
upon the exactly opposite experience of two generations.
The main obstacle to the introduction of compulsion at this
time (according to Mr. Wells) is that the people have now
been educated for more than a generation, and are too
" alert and suspicious to fall into a trap." Superficial as
this view is, it is less superficial than the ancient fear of
national education as a " Prussian " thing, alien to the
spirit of the free-born Briton.
304 COMPULSORY MILITARY SERVICE
APPENDIX II
From the Annual Register for 1793, p. 259.
" THE moderate party in the convention, who were greatly
influenced by Barrere, endeavoured to divert the attention
of the public from these disastrous contests to objects of
public utility ; and the following decrees were proposed
by that deputy in the name of the committee of public
safety, to improve the system of public instruction, and
to make some necessary change in the regulation of the
army.
1. There shall be a primary school in every place, which
contains from 400 to 1.500 inhabitants. This school may
serve for all less populous places within a specified distance.
2. In each of these schools there shall be an instructor,
charged with teaching the scholars that elementary know-
ledge which is necessary to enable citizens to exercise
their rights, and to manage their domestic concerns.
3. The committee of public instruction shall present a
proportionable mode for towns, and the more populous
communes.
4. The instructors shall be charged to give lectures and
instructions once every week to citizens of all ages, and
of both sexes.
5. The plan of a decree, presented by the committee of
public instruction, shall irrevocably be the order of the
day on every Thursday.
The requisition of the public force [for the army]
was ordered in the several following classes :
" The first requisition shall extend from the age of
16 to 25 ; second, that of 25 to 35 ; third, from the age
5
APPENDIX IT 305
of 35 to 45. The names of all citizens above that age
shall be inscribed, in three classes, in registers kept by
the municipalities. Every citizen burthened with three
children, and who can prove that he is unable to main-
tain them, except by his labour, shall be ranked in the
third class, whatever may be his age. All bachelors,
under the age of 45, shall be placed in the first class.
The municipalities shall inscribe in the same registers
the number of fire-arms which they have at their disposal,
and which shall be distributed among the citizens of the
first class. The municipal officers shall take care, under
pain of being dismissed by the directories of departments,
that all citizens of the first class be exercised every
Sunday."
Five years later, under this new school-system, France
was already putting Great Britain to shame in educational
progress, though the loss and suffering of war had fallen
far more heavily on the French than on ourselves during
all those years. We read in the Monthly Magazine for
January, 1798 (p. 26), " The establishment of national
schools in France may, at least, be considered as one
benefit arising out of the progress of the revolution, and
(in proportion as the design matures and becomes general),
must eminently promote the ends of a good government,
inasmuch as every citizen will be taught to feel his weight
and consequence in a State where talent and virtue form
the criteria of promotion. Such institutions, on a similar
plan, have long been the desideratum of this country. In
England the education of youth has been uniformly,
except in some few instances, entrusted to the most ignorant
and incapable, or to school-men who, heated with the
prejudices of a college, view the progress of the mind with
distrust, and treat its aptitude with neglect."
It is worthy of remark that Adam Smith treats of com-
pulsory military training under the heading of education ;
306 COMPULSORY MILITARY SERVICE
that he speaks in the same breath of our deficiency in mili-
tary discipline and in school-system ; and that he blames
the state-neglect which breeds cowards almost as severely
as the neglect which breeds dolts (Wealth of Nations, bk. v.
pt. iii. art. 2, " Of the Expense of the Institutions for the
Education of Youth "). Part of this section will be found
quoted on p. 162 of the present work.
APPENDIX III
MORRIS BIRKBECK ON FRENCH CONSCRIPTION
AFTER noting that the calling-up of males had made far
less difference to French industry and agriculture than
English people had imagined, Mr. Birkbeck proceeds :
" Much has been said of this horrible conscription by
which Buonaparte was enabled to repair his wasted
legions ; but it is rather the abuse of the practice than
the principle which is the proper ground of complaint.
When irresistible power became united in the same
individual with insatiable ambition, it is no wonder
that in order to promote his views the most righteous
institutions are perverted. Thus the conscription,
which under a free government would be the surest and
most equitable principle of defence, and at the same
time the best security against the adoption of mad
schemes of offensive warfare, became a dreadful engine
in the hands of a despotic ruler. I know nothing of
military affairs, but from what I have seen of French
officers and soldiers I am struck with the difference in
character from all ranks between an army, drawn from
all ranks by conscription, and whose officers rise by
merit, and one formed from the dregs of lowest orders, or
APPENDIX III 307
from the scum of the highest. And their demeanour
when disbanded differs as widely as their composition.
The former return to their homes, resuming their stations
among their peaceful fellow-citizens, whilst the latter
are too often wretched vagabonds, the terror and pests
of society, and the officers probably a burthen to them-
selves and a tax upon the community." l
APPENDIX IV
Extracts from " Military Reports ( 1866-1870)." By Colonel Baron
Stoffel. Translated for the War Office by Captain Home, R.E.
Printed by H.M. Stationery Office. 1872.
" BUT the most important lesson to be obtained by a
study of the Prussian army is that connected with its
moral. Two things are very striking :
1. The intellectual value of the army.
2. The principle of justice and morality which is the
basis of its organization.
I. The Intellectual Value of the Army.
This is due to the intellectual state of Prussia, which is
very high, and to the effects produced by the law of com-
pulsory service, which causes all the talent of the country
without exception to serve in the army.
Prussians are not remarkable for either the elevation
or nobleness of their ideas. Greatness of soul, generosity,
and the attractive gifts of mind are not their inheritance.
But they possess, in a marked degree, sterling qualities :
industry, a strong sense of duty, a love of order, economy,
and obedience. Their Electors and their Kings have almost
1 Notes of a Journey through France in 1814, London, 1815, Appendix,
p. 12.
308 COMPULSORY MILITARY SERVICE
always been an incarnation of the national character.
Wanting nobleness and greatness of soul, this nation would
never have produced a Louis XIV. Bat it must be admitted
that neither would it have produced a Louis XV. The army
represents the nation much more than the French army
does the French nation, and it possesses all the sterling
qualities I have named.
Under the head of general education it is far superior
to the French army, and, as I have already pointed out in
my first report, this superiority is to be found in every
grade. The officers are better educated than ours, so are
the non-commissioned officers ; and finally, the soldiers
surpass the French not by their natural intelligence,
which is certainly as great amongst us, but because their
primary education is less superficial " (p. 11).
" II. Priivciple of Justice and Morality.
Prussia has given the brightest example of justice and
morality, by applying the principle of compulsory service
for all her citizens. On this basis her military institutions
rest.
How is it possible to compare an organization based on
a principle so just, so pregnant with valuable results, with
the French organization, bearing on its face the horrible
stain of substitution by means of money payments ? A
thing which demoralizes the army, nay the nation itself.
We do not reflect on the dangers of this fatal institution ;
men gifted with common-sense have long ago discerned,
and said all that can be said against a principle so unjust,
so immoral, and which, in the long run, saps the very
foundations of the nation.
Prussia has proclaimed loudly that military service is
APPENDIX IV 309
the first duty of the citizen ; that nothing is more demoral-
izing to a nation than allowing the rich, by reason of their
wealth, to free themselves from this duty. For, say they,
how can a nation but believe that all duty may be bought
and sold, if this the most sacred of all duties is so treated ?
What a gulf do not such principles open between the rich
and the poor ? How can it be hoped, if such principles
are allowed, that the army can enjoy that respect and that
consideration which is so essential to its very existence ?
It is impossible to describe how the consideration in which
Prussia holds her army strikes one ; it can only be ex-
plained by the application of universal military service,
which fuses, as it were, the nation and the army " (p. 12).
" I proceed to make observations on the Prussian Army.
Elements of Moral Superiority.
Under the head of moral superiority, two things have
given the Prussian Army an undeniable advantage over
all European Armies.
1st. The principle of compulsory military service.
2nd. The general instruction diffused through all
classes of society.
Compulsory Service.
It is needless to point out again (I have already done so
in my reports of 1866) the moral superiority which the
presence in the ranks of all classes of society, and the
i respect that the army and landwehr taken together
[represent the entire nation under arms, confer on the
(Prussian Army. Whatever faults may be found with
[Prussian military organization, it is impossible not to
310 COMPULSORY MILITARY SERVICE
admire a people, who, having recognized the truth, that for
nations, as for individuals, the first necessity is existence,
have determined that the army should be the chief, the
most honoured of all its institutions ; that all healthy
citizens should share the danger and the honour of defend-
ing the country, increasing its power, and that they should
be respected and esteemed before all others. 1 To speak
only of the officers, what an excellent example they give
to other classes. In Prussia, those privileged by birth or
fortune do not, as elsewhere, spend their lives in deplorable
idleness. Far from it, men of the richest families, the
most illustrious names, serve as officers, enduring the
labours and exigencies of military life, instructing by
example. When such a spectacle is seen, not only does one
feel respect for this rough but grave people, but dread
also, for the power such institutions give its army.
Compulsory Education.
The principle of compulsory education has been adopted
in Prussia for more than thirty years ; it may even be said
since the time of Frederick the Great ; consequently
the Prussian nation is the most enlightened in Europe, in
the sense that education is diffused among all classes of
society. . . .
Feeling of Duty.
I cannot omit to mention one quality which characterizes
the whole Prussian nation, and which helps to augment
the moral value of the army it is the feeling of duty. It
exists to such an extent amongst all classes in the country,
that the more the nation is studied the more one is
I 1 have already said that in Prussia all the honours, all the advantages,
all the favours, are for the army, or for those who have served in it.
He who for any cause has not been a soldier receives no employment.
Both at home and abroad he is an object of contempt to his fellow-
citizens.
APPENDIX IV 311
astonished at it. This not being the place to examine
into the causes of this trait of character, I limit myself to
referring to it " (pp. 43-45).
" The War Minister has asked me to inform him what
is thought in Prussia of our new law of military organization,
dated the 1st February, 1868, more especially of the
institution of the National Guard 'Mobile.' I replied in
my report of the 29th March, 1868 ; but my replies were
very brief, as I proposed to report in person on the subject
in Paris. I return now to this important question.
When the law was promulgated last year, it was at first
thought at Berlin that its application would augment the
military resources of France ; but, after a closer study,
the opinion at first conceived is now greatly modified. In
Prussia, where the application of the principle of compulsory
service has taken deep root in the country, and contributed
so materially to its greatness, they generally consider our
new law of military organization as a step in advance, so
far as it enunciates (although only for war) the principle,
so just, so moral, of compulsory military service for all
citizens. But they cannot understand the inconceivable
inconsistency by which a statesman having admitted the
principle can stop there. For the law does not allow the
National Guard ' Mobile ' to receive any military instruc-
tion. Looking at it in a broad point of view, it is thought
nonsense, or rather an abortive law, adding nothing to the
power of France, but rather, on the contrary, weakening
her resources. As will be seen, this view of our new military
organization, a view taken here by practical reflecting
people, is unfortunately too true.
This law having put at the disposal of the country, as
an auxiliary to the army, a force of 500,000 men, under thd
312 COMPULSORY MILITARY SERVICE
name of National Guard ' Mobile/ adds this indefensible
Article (Article 9) :
1 The young men of the Guard " Mobile " have (except
absent with leave) to attend
1. The drills which take place in the parishes where
they live or are domiciled.
2. The company or battalion meetings which take
place in the company or battalion districts.
3. Each drill or meeting must not cause the young men
who attend it a greater loss of time than one day.
These drills and meetings can be repeated only fifteen
times a year.'
One is perfectly confounded, when one thinks that a
proposal so absurd could have been brought forward and
seriously discussed by the Parliament of a great country,
and that a Government could be found willing to consent
to accept and introduce such a law.
How ! Was there not one man in the assembly who
could say to his fellows, ' This law that you are going to
enact is a deception. Be assured, you deceive your-
selves, you deceive France. How ! You wish to increase
the military force of the country by several hundreds of
thousands of young men, under the name of National
Guard " Mobile," and you, at the same time, take away
every means for instructing these young men ! For what
military instruction is it possible to give a man who, in the
greater number of the departments, must, in one single
day, go four or six miles in the morning from his home to
the place of assembly, and return the same distance at
night ; and who, in the same day, must be present at the
roll calls, parades of all kinds, issues of arms, clothing, and
equipment ? Do you not see that it is a physical im-
possibility to find in this same day a single quarter of an
hour for drill, properly so called ? . . .
APPENDIX IV 313
. . . Nothing more is requisite to show that, so long as
Article 9 is in force, the institution of the National Guard
" Mobile " is a deception.
But (say some) the National Guard Mobile may be
drilled during war itself ; to which it is only requisite fco
reply How, if the war be of short duration ; if France is
smitten with sudden disaster at the outset, and finds herself
suddenly invaded, how can you then give these young men,
assembled in haste, that cohesion, discipline, and instruction,
which is so requisite ?
Thus common-sense condemns at once our new law of
military reorganization, so far as the National Guard
Mobile ' is concerned ; yet this law has been enacted by
the Chambers !
Thus one has seen (an incredible thing) a great nation
give itself solemnly, by means of its representatives, an
increase of 500,000 men for the defence of the country,
and at the same moment, by a stroke of the same pen, so
to speak, deprive these men of all means of obtaining
military instruction.
I do not believe that any assembly in any country ever
gave such a flagrant proof of inconsistency and levity.
How can we be astonished after this if foreigners criticise
us severely ?
How can we be astonished that here, and in all Germany,
they tax the French nation with ignorance and vain
presumption, and that they proclaim, with ill-disguised
satisfaction, in books seriously written, the downfall of the
Latin races ? I declare that all intelligent and studious
officers (and the Prussian Army has a great number) with
whom I have spoken on our new military law, judge it
with great practical sense to be simply without results of
any kind.
But we, we do not limit ourselves to making a defective
law. From presumption, as much as from ignorance, we
314 COMPULSORY MILITARY SERVICE
deceive ourselves, and declare it to be perfect, and superior
to all others! It is sad to say it, but it is nevertheless true,
for any one who has lived amongst foreigners and followed
the development, both moral and intellectual, of other
nations for fifty years, that the French, notwithstanding
the eminent qualities for which they are remarkable, live
above all others in ignorance and presumption, each of
these faults tending to increase the other. These words
continually recur when one compares France with other
countries, especially Prussia, so well-taught, serious, and
keen for her interests " (pp. 129-132).
" How can I avoid being profoundly affected by these
comparisons, believing as I do that war is inevitable ?
But (it must never be forgotten) in this war, Prussia, or
rather the North German Confederation, will dispose of
1,000,000 trained disciplined and strongly organized
soldiers, while France has barely 300,000 to 400,000 men. 1
But the Federal [i.e. German] Army embraces all the manly
portion, all the intelligence, all the vis viva of a nation full
of faith, energy, and patriotism, while the French Army
is almost entirely composed of the poorest and most
ignorant portion of the nation.
The German Army, from the fact that it does embrace,
without any exception, all the manly portion of the nation,
feels itself strengthened and supported by the unequalled
esteem and consideration it enjoys in the country, while
the French Army, looked on by some as a useless institution,
attacked by others, \vho sow corruption and insubordination
1 It is said that the institution of the National Guard " Mobile " will
raise the military forces of France to more than 800,000 men ; but I
have already explained in the first part of this Report what may be
expected of that abortive institution.
APPENDIX IV 315
in its ranks, feels itself bowed down by a want of con-
sideration, and has no consciousness of the mission it has
to fulfil
Chief among these regenerative institutions there are two,
as the history of Prussia superabundantly proves com-
pulsory military service, compulsory universal education.
To speak only of compulsory service, we must first ask,
Has the French nation the requisite qualities to adopt and
apply it ? The reply, unfortunately, is not encouraging.
Infatuated with itself, and perverted by egotism, the
nation will with difficulty conform to an institution of which
it does not even suspect the strong and fruitful principle,
and the application of which requires virtue it does not
possess, self-denial, self-sacrifice, love of duty. Like
individuals who correct nothing in their lives, except
taught by the stern lessons of experience, nations never
improve the institutions which govern them until compelled
to do so by the rudest trials. Jena was requisite in order
that Prussia might probe herself, and feel the necessity
of invigorating, herself with healthy manly institutions.
She then adopted the principle of universal compulsory
service for all her citizens. And it must be allowed that if
this institution did not now exist, Prussia would find it
impossible to introduce it.
Only once in fifty years has France been in a position
favourable for the introduction of compulsory service.
In 1848, when, thanks to the rapid growth of ideas pro-
duced by the revolution of February, the National Assembly
found itself in an excellent position to show, by the adoption
of universal service, that it understood how to apply prac-
tically those principles of equality that it so loudly vaunted.
It did, indeed, attempt something in this sense by seeking
to abolish the hideous plague spot of military substitution,
and it named a Commission of which General Lamoriciere
was reporter. This law would have been adopted but for
316 COMPULSORY MILITARY SERVICE
the interference of M. Thiers, who made himself in the
Chamber the champion of the egotistical and paltry ideas
of the bourgeois. By thus preventing France from entering
in 1849 on the path which would have led her later on to
adopt compulsory service, so fruitful, so moralising, so
suited to regenerate her, this man, to whom nature has
denied feelings of true greatness, firm convictions, or the
power of serious thought ; this man, I repeat, has been
more fatal to his country than twenty disasters " (pp.
144-145).
APPENDIX V
Extracts from Sir J. R. Seeley's Life and Times of Stein. (Cam-
bridge, 1878, Vol. II.).
"NOTHING is more attractive than the thought of a
universal service of every youth, without exception,
paying his debt to the country. But suppose, as in the
United States, that the country does not need defence,
or, as in England, that the danger of invasion is speculative
and remote, so that though the country needs a protecting
force, it could make no use whatever of such a vast army
as universal service would call into existence. Suppose
again this also is the case of England that the country,
though it needs a large army, does not need it for defence
but for other purposes, such as maintaining possession of
distant dependencies. It cannot so easily be argued that
it is proper that every youth should give some years of his
life to tasks like these, as that every youth should take a
personal part in the work of national defence. And thus
countries which have few wars of self-defence and many
wars of empire cannot adopt this system, but are driven
APPENDIX V 317
to form one of those purely professional armies in which
war assumes a less interesting aspect.
These, then, are the two military systems which suit
nations, according as they are or are not in danger of
invasion " (pp. 97-98).
" We have spoken of the compulsory national system
as being nobler and more beneficial in its working, where
it is admissible, than the voluntary system. But it is to
be observed that there is a compulsory system very differ-
ent from that of modern Prussia and plainly less defensible
than the voluntary system. Compulsion works well in
modern Prussia because it strikes all alike and because the
object of imposing it is to preserve what all value inex-
pressibly. But where it does not strike all alike, where
exemptions are allowed, the system is not merely damaged
but converted at once into a bad system, chargeable with
an injustice from which the voluntary system is free.
That war should be a man's chosen profession and means
of livelihood, so as to give him a positive interest in war,
is perhaps not altogether satisfactory, but no one is injured
by such a system ; and so long as the soldier enters no
service but that of his own country, he devotes himself
to a noble object. Conscription with exemptions, on the
other hand, is glaringly unjust and oppressive ; not only
are the exemptions themselves unjust, but so long as they
exist it is impossible to put upon any high ground the
constraint laid upon the rest. It is a mockery to speak of
the duty of defending one's country where this duty is not
made universal, but those may pay in money who do not
care to pay in blood ; under such a system compulsion is
a shocking tyranny, similar to the levying of the taille
upon the common people in old France, and such as could
318 COMPULSORY MILITARY SERVICE
only be enforced in a population accustomed to despotism.
Moreover, if we suppose the exemptions to be very numerous
so as to comprehend the whole classes, and at the same time
the population of the country to be not large, and its
danger from foreign enemies very great, we shall have a
case in which it will be necessary to make up for the
exemptions by requiring those who serve to serve for a
very long time. By serving many years such soldiers will
acquire the character of a professional caste and become
distinguished from the rest of the community, even though
they did not originally enter the army by choice. The
army of old Prussia was of this kind. The greater part of
it was raised by conscription ; but from this conscription
large classes of persons, as well as whole towns and districts,
had exemption. In the main the citizen class were exempt,
while the peasantry were subject to compulsory service ;
and in order to maintain so large an army it was necessary
to make twenty years the term of service " (pp. 99-100).
[The Prussian minister, Hardenberg, is laying down
in 1807 the main principles upon which this new Universal
Service must be conducted.]
" All the exemptions hitherto allowed must be abolished
without exception. Everyone who does not serve the
State in some other appointment must be bound to
effective military service in the regular army and in the
reserve. But the military class must be made a true
order of honour. Foreigners are only to be admitted
when they are of good character and offer themselves
voluntarily, and they are then to be treated as if they
were natives. But as a rule we must not count upon
foreigners. Every degrading punishment must cease.
The private soldier must be treated with strictness, yet
APPENDIX V 319
with respect. The term of service must be made short,
in order that the pressure be not overwhelming ; it
must be six years."
Upon which Seeley remarks :
" We have here in one view the whole military reform.
The impression it made, when it had been carried into
effect, upon a bystander, may be seen in the following
remarks of Henriette Herz :
The time was past when every simple peasant and
every honest citizen of the towns subject to the con-
scription might fear to have to receive into his house
after the expiration of the term of service, instead of
a well-conducted son, ai inmate corrupted in the
depths of his nature by the society of those foreigners,
for the most part mauvais sujets, from whom the
Prussian army was partly recruited, and completely
degraded by the lash ; the time was when I and many
ladies of my acquaintance would not walk the streets,
if we could help it, during certain hours at review
time, for fear of being sickened by the repulsive sight
of punishment, inflicted often on men of advanced
years, who, perhaps for some neglect of their pigtail
which only a professional eye could detect, would be
flogged at the order of a lieutenant of fifteen or six-
teen, when the least involuntary cry of pain was
counted for a new offence to be punished by flogging ;
, . . But now the nation began to regard the army as
a school, not only for the anticipated war, but also
for life " (pp. 114-116).
These words of Henriette Herz, a woman of advanced
opinions and remarkable culture, are strikingly corroborated
by Stoffel's reports from Berlin two generations later.
He drew the most unfavourable contrast between punish-
ments in the French professional army and in the German
320 COMPULSORY MILITARY SERVICE
army raised by Universal Service. He strikes this note
at once in his second report (October 4, 1866, p. 9) : " Is it
not advisable to alter our rules of discipline ? Do we not
punish the French soldier too much ? Can we find no
means of increasing amongst our non-commissioned officers
and soldiers that feeling of duty which so distinguishes
the Prussian army, and which causes punishment to be so
rare ? . . . The number of punishments inflicted in the
French army is prodigious when compared with those of
the Prussian army." This same point is emphasized by
Colonel Maude (a strong opponent of Compulsory Service
for Great Britain) on p. 11 of his War and the World's Life
(1907). He writes : " I do assert from personal knowledge,
that, relatively to their respective stages of civilization,
the treatment of the Prussian soldier since 1815 has been
fairer and more humane than in any other army."
Finally, much the same effect was observed in Belgium
in 1913, when military service was made practically uni-
versal, and all classes began to drill together. M. Albert
Mechelynck, the Deputy who represented the Radical
party on the Parliamentary Committee for settling disputed
points in this new Army Bill, assured me in the spring of
1914 that the new law had at once made an immense
difference in barrack life and in the status of the soldier.
APPENDIX VI
THE HESSIAN PRESSGANG IN 1780 OR 1781
From J. G. Seume's Autobiography (Leipzig, 1813, pp. 108 if.).
SEUME, a small farmer's son of promising parts, had been
sent to the University of Leipzig. Here he lived somewhat
as Dr. Johnson lived at Oxford ; and finally he made up
APPENDIX VI 321
his mind to run away. When he reached Hessian territory,
he was snapped up by the pressgang. " They brought me,
half under arrest, to the fortress of Ziegenhain, where lay
already many other poor devils from all four corners of
Germany, to be sent to America next spring under Fawcet's
escort. I resigned myself to my fate and tried to make
the best of a very bad job. We lay long at Ziegenhain,
until the necessary number of recruits was raked together
from plough and highroad and town. The story and the
time are notorious enough ; no man in those days was
safe from the clutches of these soul-mongers ; all methods
were employed persuasion, cunning, trickery or force.
Nobody asked by what means the damnable job was done.
Strangers of every kind were arrested, locked up, and
packed off. They tore my university matriculation certifi-
cate from me ; and I had no further proof of identity.
At last I resolved to quarrel no longer with my fate. . . .
We were a strange olla podrida of human beings, good,
bad, and indifferent. There was another runaway student
from Jena, a bankrupt shopkeeper from Vienna, a haber-
dasher from Hanover, a post-office clerk dismissed from
Gotha, a monk from Wiirzburg, a bailiff from Meiningen,
a Prussian sergeant of hussars, a cashiered Hessian major
released from prison, and others of similar stamp. It may
be imagined that there was plenty of entertainment here ;
the slightest biographical sketch of these gentry would
make an interesting and instructive book. As most of them
had had the same experience as mine, or perhaps worse,
we soon hatched a great plot to escape." A hundred and
fifty were concerned in this plot, which was, naturally,
betrayed. More than thirty were condemned as ringleaders ;
these were adjudged to run the gauntlet of the regiment
from twelve to thirty-six times, and then to lie in irons
" during the Elector's good pleasure." Their final release
was due to the practical consideration that a soldier lying
322 COMPULSOEY MILITARY SERVICE
in irons at Ziegenhain would not be paid for by the Eng-
lish government. They were presently shipped down the
Weser, and embarked upon the English transports at
Bremen.
" On board these English transports we were pressed in
layers like pickled herring. To save room, there were no
hammocks, but shelves in the low under-deck, one above
another. A grown man could not stand upright in any
part of the under-deck ; in these bunks we could not even
sit upright. We lay six in a bunk ; you may fancy what
that was like ! The bunks were really full with four men
apiece ; the two last had to be wedged in as best they
could. Under these circumstances, and in warm weather,
we did not exactly freeze. No single individual could turn
round lying on one's back was, of course, out of the
question. When we had sufficiently stewed and sweated
on one side, then the right flank man would cry 'right
about turn ! ' and we changed our layers. When we fcould
stand it no more on this other side, then the left flank man
gave the word of command, and we squeezed again into the
same mess as at first. . . .
The fare was none of the daintiest, nor even of the most
plentiful. Pork and peas to-day, peas and pork to-morrow.
Sometimes oatmeal porridge, with pudding for a treat,
made of musty meal ; and water half from our casks, half
from the sea ; and ancient, ancient suet ! The pork may
have been four or five years old ; all round the edge it was
streaked with black ; further in it was yellow ; just in
the middle there was an actual strip of white. The same
description will apply to the corned beef, which we often
ate raw, without further ceremony, like ham. The biscuit
was often full of maggots, which we had to eat as a relish,
since there was little else left to eat. It was so hard that
we often used round-shot to crush it ; yeb we were too
hungry to wait and soak it even if we had had water
APPENDIX VI 323
enough. We were told, credibly enough, that this was
French biscuit ; that the English had captured it in the
Seven Years' War, had kept it meanwhile in stock at Ports-
mouth, and were now feeding us Germans with it, that
we might go and shoot the French under Rochambeau
and Lafayette, with God's blessing. But God didn't bless
it!
The water, though it had been strongly disinfected
with sulphur, lay in the deepest stagnation. When a cask
was hauled up and knocked open, the under-deck stank
like Styx, Phlegethon and Cocytus together. It was
almost solid with fungoid growth, thick, silky tassels as
long as a man's finger. We couldn't drink it without
filtering it through a cloth, and even so we had to hold
our noses ; yet we positively fought for our ration of this
stuff ! "
They took a circuitous route to avoid French cruisers ;
bad weather came on, and the month's passage to Halifax
took, in Seume's case, twenty-two weeks ! We may con-
clude with a sketch of one of his fellow-sufferers : " We
sickened a good deal ; but, so far as I remember, only
seven-and-twenty men died out of nearly five hundred.
Among these were some of my nearest acquaintances,
including the ex- monk from Wiirzburg. ... The cloister
is a poor school for the camp. All he lacked was energy ;
but idleness and indolence (which he of course called
resignation and indifference) had taken such hold of him
that nothing would move him. A sloth would have been
a nimble beast compared with him. ' If I get over the
ocean,' he would say, 'the worst is yet to come. Hard-
ship and want and weariness is all our prospect, until a
rifleman shoots us through the lungs or a Mohawk scalps
us.' The good cloisterer was not absolutely mistaken
there ; but a man of any pluck will hold out to the last,
and certainly no end can be so shameful as to die of pure,
324 COMPULSOKY MILITARY SERVICE
unmitigated sloth. Nobody but a monk could have dreamed
of it. He was resolved not to live until the bad time came ;
and it was a new phenomenon to me, quite unprecedented
in my experience, that a man could die of mere indolence
without any other sickness or cause whatsoever. The
doctor found absolutely nothing wrong with him ; indeed,
he complained of nothing but his present misery and his
misery in prospect. They flogged him to take exercise,
to go out and breathe upon deck, to wash, and even to eat ;
the one exception was rum ; he would take a little rum
without flogging. At last they grew tired of flogging and
just left him where he lay. . . . When he died, the two
dirtiest among the crew were bribed with rum to throw
the body overboard."
How Seume, after his return from America, was picked
up by the Prussian pressgang, and with what difficulty he
finally fought his way to freedom, is too long a story here.
The little book has been often reprinted ; it forms one
volume of Reclam's Universal-Bibliothek at 20 Pf. ; but
this is almost impossible to procure in war-time, and I
have been compelled to quote from the old edition. The
episode begins about the middle of the book.
APPENDIX VII
From the Annual Register for the year 1794.
" THE military list exhibited by France to the eyes of
Europe for the year 1794, was such as to occasion the most
serious alarm to the coalition. The whole strength they
had been able to collect for a contest in which they were
so deeply concerned, and the decision of which was so
quickly approaching, did not exceed 360,000 men ; while
APPENDIX VII 325
the troops sent into the field by France alone more than
doubled that number. But France relied as much, if not
more, on the temper of the men that composed its armies.
Tutored by those who raised them, and no less by those
who were employed to teach them military discipline in
the maxims of republicanism, so violently predominant in
France, they took up arms with far other views and ideas
than those that actuated the soldiers of the combined
powers. Obedience to the will and orders of their rulers
was the sole motive that actuated these ; whereas the
French soldiers went to battle, some of them, animated
with the deadliest sentiments of revenge against men
whom they looked upon as the base instruments of tyranny
and oppression ; others, by the hope of rising in the army,
and acquiring both fame and fortune, and all of them by
a desire of maintaining the military reputation of French-
men " (p. 4).
" Declaration of the king of Prussia against a general
armament of the inhabitants of the empire, made in
February, 1794.
I. WHEN the proposition for a general armament of
the subjects of the empire was made, at the assembly of
the diet, the king of Prussia represented such essential
difficulties against this measure, that he could not have
expected that the proposition would have been carried to
a conclusum.
II. For this reason, his majesty finds himself under
the necessity of laying them again once more before the
six nearest circles, 1 with this observation, viz. : c That
if the said circles cannot determine with themselves to
1 The states composing the Holy Roman Empire were grouped, for
purposes of government, into ten " circles.'* G.G.C.
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withdraw the said conclusum, and render it of none effect,
he will be forced, however contrary to his inclination, to
withdraw his troops, as he cannot expose them to the
danger which must necessarily result from this measure.
III. The reasons that his Prussian majesty opposes to
a general armament of the inhabitants of the empire, are
the following, viz. :
1. By employing the peasants against the enemy, agri-
culture will want hands.
2. That there are not arms sufficient to give to such a
mass of people.
3. That it is impossible, in so short a time, to teach the
manual exercise to the inhabitants.
4. It has been found, by the experience of the two last
campaigns, that the soldiers opposed to the French must
be perfectly exercised to make head against them.
5. Lastly, independent of the above reasons, it is in-
finitely dangerous, at a time like the present, when the
French are watching every advantage to insinuate their
principles, to assemble such a mass of men, whose ideas
upon forms of government must be various, and among
whom consequently dissensions might arise, disastrous in
their consequences both to the armies, and to the consti-
tution of the empire " (p. 204).
APPENDIX VIII
THE contention in my text, that we must carefully separate
the normal from the occasional and accidental working of a
system like this, is strongly borne out by Seeley's argument
on p. 102. He points out that the moral and social founda-
tion of Frederick the Great's army was rotten ; that there
is much to be said for a Voluntary army on the one hand,
APPENDIX VIII 327
and much for Universal Compulsion on the other, but
nothing for a system of partial and unjust compulsion ;
that Jena, therefore, was only the final realization of the
long-inevitable disaster. He proceeds :
" It may be said that these considerations prove too
much, for if they explain how the army dissolved after
Jena they make it at the same time impossible to under-
stand how it can have fought so well under Frederick.
But discipline, backed by wonderful diligence and self-
devotion on the part of the king, and also by much
chivalrous loyalty on the part of the aristocracy of officers,
may, for a time, particularly while the army is victorious,
. lay the minds of the soldiers under a spell. It is when
an ordinary king leads them and is surrounded by old
and feeble officers, and when ill-fortune arrives, that
the moral hollo wness of the system shows itself. Even
then they do not fight ill, only defeat operates like the
snapping of a spell ; once driven apart, they are not
urged together again by any cohesive force." 1
This wonderful " diligence and self-devotion " of the
sovereign, and this "spell of victory" have also been
characteristic of the German Empire. Dr. Holland Rose
says truly of the present Kaiser : " He is one of the hardest
workers in that nation of hard workers. . . . The Kaiser's
career has been a constant appeal for national efficiency,
and hence the prodigious strength which Germany is now
putting forth." 2 Under these circumstances, we need not
wonder if the German Government can, for a generation
or two, counteract the essentially defensive character of
Universal Service. For there is no possible doubt as to
the predominantly defensive character of the Compulsory
system. It has been emphasized by writers who look at it
1 J. R. Seeley, Life and Times of Stein, vol. ii. pp. 102-103.
2 The Origins of the War, 1914, pp. 28-9.
328 COMPULSORY MILITARY SERVICE
from very different points of view : Seeley 1 ; Lord
Haldane and Sir Ian Hamilton 2 ; Jean Jaures. 3
APPENDIX IX
THE AMERICAN DRAFT LAW
ONE or two publicists have lately argued, with an ingenuity
worthy of a better cause, that this law had little real
influence upon the course of the war. By far the most
distinguished of these advocates is Sir R. K. Wilson ; and,
as his arguments are practically identical with such others
as I have read, it will be enough here fco summarize his
contributions to the Nation and the Daily Chronicle. I will
state his arguments in his own order, answering each as it
comes :
1. The Draft Act was not passed by Congress until
March 3rd, 1863.
But, long before this, its eventual operation was
practically certain. Lincoln had slowly brought him-
self to face the necessity of compulsion, and nobody
doubted Lincoln's tenacity when his mind was once
made up. Already, in December, 1862, the rush of
professional men and others, anxious to obtain legal
exemption from the coming draft, had begun ; a typical
scene of this kind is portrayed in the Illustrated London
News for January 3, 1863. It is equally notorious that
a large proportion of enlistments under the " Derby
Scheme " in Great Britain were due to the compulsion
already looming 
