Here I join issue with them. The world is for all practical purposes ruled by mankind. Nothing but the catastrophes like the tidal wave and the earthquake escape man's control. Famine, disease, and mortality he can arrest; he can increase his stature morally, mentally, physically. If he elect to play the prodigal he does so at his own risk, but he has no right to tamper with the vital resources of the generations that must follow. War is delirium, or he would bear this fundamental truth in mind. I think it has escaped him. He is immersed in the pursuit of the end, and no means are spared. Thus we hear the outcries because the fat money bags are growing thin, but nothing is said of the great asset that no trading, however successful, can restore.
We can find in some barbarous land wealth only comparable to that which Sindbad discovered in the Valley of Diamonds, but what will that profit a race that must depend upon old and exhausted stock to renew its vitality? The desire for wealth is at least one of the contributory causes of war, the thought of wealth wasted makes men forget they are wasting what no wealth can replace.
I am sure that women feel this eternal truth in their hearts, but all too many fear to be thought afraid. They fear their own mankind, those for whom they would gladly sacrifice all that life holds for them of good. They fear to be thought jealous for their own boys, while if the truth be told their fear is all for the young sons of all women quite irrespective of nationality. At least this is how the situation appeals to me, and I dare not keep silent if there be any medium of appeal to those who think with me that will set my thoughts down. There is a slumbering conscience of humanity only waiting the call that will break through its dreams. I am not so bold as to believe that I can utter it, but I may perchance stimulate some more gifted pen.
In any case, I cannot hide my thoughts merely because they may meet no response, for after all there is not in all the world a single great belief that was not once the unregarded possession of a single mind.
XIII THOUGHTS ON COMPULSION
While I am firmly opposed to conscription in any form that does not embrace national wealth and resources as well as men, or that singles out one class of men to the exclusion of others, while I believe that, even subject to this view of national obligation, conscription should be treated as a war measure and blotted out of the statute book in the month that sees the restoration of peace, I am not writing to protest or to complain. We are told that every cloud has its silver lining, and when the Government decided to demand the services of those unmarried men who, far more by reason of apathy than cowardice, had remained to be taken, I could not help thinking that much good might come of it. Against the hideous doctrine that the end justifies the means we may set the equally old saying that necessity knows no law, and against the compulsory making of soldiers which is an evil, I set the waking of the national consciousness, and that is a gain.
For centuries England led the vanguard of the workers for freedom. Against the will of the people the power of the great barons and of their Kings bent and broke. There were generations in which the people as a people were articulate, they stood up for their rights and privileges and were a force that few dared defy. The discovery of steam, the growth of factories, the increase of population and the struggle for life combined to make a large section of the working classes helpless. The hideous poverty and ugliness of life in the great centres of wealth drove men, and women too, to shut out the ugliness of their lives with the aid of brief spells of dissipation. Strong drink became alike a source of revenue to the country, a source of "honours"—generally paid for in hard cash—to the prosperous brewer and distiller, and the source of brief forgetfulness, misery, disease, crime and savage punishment to those who sought its dangerous solace. National expenditure and party funds alike clamoured for the maintenance of the evil, and those who are most concerned with what is euphemistically called "keeping the working classes in their places" turned a deaf ear to schemes that sought to make the places of leisure for the worker more attractive and less dangerous. Pure Beer Bills and legislation to restrict the sale of spirits to such spirit as is matured, met with no effective support. Give the worker the nineteenth and twentieth century substitutes for his old time panem et circenses and he would continue until strength failed him to sow that others might reap and to earn the opprobrium and contempt of those he enriched.
Parliament, immersed in politics to the exclusion of government, cared little for the real welfare of the people. It contrived by skilful electioneering to stimulate their interests in things that do not matter, and when they were not wanted at the polls their representatives—save the mark—left them severely alone. So it happened, as time passed, that the old interest in vital questions was passing from a large section of the proletariat. Powerful through the medium of their Unions they supported these great organisations for little better than the right to live. It was so hard to improve the conditions of a trade or a group of allied industries that the effort to this end left them with no energies to enter into larger fields. Those leaders of the people who have the gift of clear vision could meet with no adequate response, they alone could see the wood, their followers had their gaze riveted on one particular tree. England tended more and more to become the paradise of the capitalist and the purgatory of the working man, and because he was always protesting against conditions that will fill future generations with wonder and shame, conditions improved beyond recognition by the country with which we are now engaged in a life-and-death struggle, it became the practice of the comfortable classes to denounce the workman and all his ambitions. He was, in their view, sent into this world to create wealth, not to enjoy what it creates; that was the privilege of his betters. The Englishman's natural sense of fair play has been obscured by the newspapers that pander to him and give him all his thoughts ready made; if anybody thinks this is an extreme statement, let him turn to the files of the reactionary press from the time when John Burns led the Dockers' Strike down to the outbreak of war (and since) and see whether he can find anywhere a solitary favourable verdict for the worker as against the employer. He will search in vain.