The Political Results

When we turn to the political questions which the war has solved we have obtained immediate results of the very highest interest and importance, particularly to England.

In the first place, we have found that while the conscript system of war worked and mobilized with astonishing success, our own much more doubtful dependence upon a voluntary system for prolonged warfare has not betrayed this country. Everyone is agreed that the response to the call for volunteers, upon which there was at first great and legitimate anxiety, has been quite out of proportion to our expectations, and particularly to those of our enemies.

I think it true to say that there is nothing in which the German estimate of British psychology has been more hopelessly at sea than in this; and that the effects of this exceedingly rapid and large voluntary enlistment, principally drawn from the best material in the country, is the chief uncalculated factor in the scheme of what Germany expected to face. It is a factor that matures more slowly than many of the others, more slowly, perhaps, even than the effect of the blockade (which is also due to British effort), but it will mature with sufficient rapidity to affect all the later, and what may easily be the decisive, phases of the great war.

We have an equally direct answer to that hitherto quite uncertain question, whether in a modern state the secrecy which is essential to the success of a military plan could be maintained or no. Here again there has been a complete surprise. No one could have suggested six months ago that so news-tight a system could possibly have been worked with populations living in the modern great towns. And here it must be admitted that our opponents have done even better than ourselves. There is almost a comic element in the complete security with which the German and Austrian Governments can give those whom they govern exactly what news they choose and forbid the least scrap correcting or amplifying these meagre official statements, to pass the frontiers.

In connexion with this we should note that there is at the time of writing no definite answer to that very important question of how a complex modern town population will stand a heavy moral strain. But in so far as the indirect strain already caused by the war is any gauge, the answer seems to be favourable to the modern town liver.

Perhaps the most important point of all among the political questions which the war has propounded is that connected with class as against national feeling.

In plain fact, the idea that class feeling would anywhere in Europe be stronger than national feeling has proved utterly wanting.

In the industrial parts of Germany where the distinction of capitalist and proletariat was so clearly marked, that distinction had no effect whatsoever, not only upon mobilization, but upon the spirit of the troops; a fortiori it had none in that French society which is leavened by its peasantry, or in Russia which is almost wholly a peasant state.

There is nothing on which the judgment of an educated man would have proved more at sea had it been taken before the war broke out, and nothing in which the war has more poignantly revealed the ancient foundations upon which Europe reposes.

BALLANTYNE PRESS: LONDON AND EDINBURGH

Transcriber’s note