There is a certain psychological aspect of the labour question that has, I think, been overlooked. A generation or two of oppressive conditions tends to produce a race that loses national consciousness. The worker learns to take the view that he is no longer a part of Great Britain, that his interests are exclusively personal, like those of his employers, that he has no status in the country and that his business is to get the most tolerable conditions of life that he can secure by combination and agitation, and to ignore the trend of politics, religion, social progress, and the rest of the life forces of civilisation. He knows himself for one who hews wood and draws water, it suffices him to carry a minimum of logs to the pile and buckets from the spring. He knows that there is for him no glimpse of the larger life and that because he is collectively a multitude there will be keen competition to batten on his small savings or surpluses. He has the feeling that if he loses his job he will take his place in the ranks of a submerged tenth, ranks easy to slip into, almost impossible to rise from. My long intercourse with those who fast that others may feast has revealed this attitude to me in a hundred shapes, all tragic, some dangerous. It has been the despair of those who are working for the people and know that if they would but combine to grasp the sorry state of things environing them they could "shatter it to pieces and remould it nearer to the heart's desire." Unhappily it is impossible to fight what is called vis inertiæ, you cannot bruise a feather pillow or hurt a sack of sand by striking it, and while long hours, scanty holidays, mean pleasures and continual anxiety dogged the footsteps of the working classes, it seemed impossible to secure the unity of action, the collective wisdom that would not only enable labour to find its place in the sun, but would destroy the parasites that thrive upon it. I think that the careful observer who noted the social condition of England down to the late summer of 1914 will be disposed to agree that I have not overstated the case or put the ugly lighting unfairly on the foreground of the picture.
Then came war with its strange, unmistakable revelation to the working man and working woman. In the blinding light born of battle they saw their country assaulted by an enemy completely trained and organised. Women saw that their own rulers had been too immersed in the great games of party politics and business development to give proper thought for the safety of the country. They saw, too, that the limitations of capitalism and capitalist were visible in the eyes of the world. They could help, they could leaven the dough of profit-making with the yeast of personal sacrifice, some have done so, but for the salvation of the country they appealed to the working man. Government adopted some of his own panaceas, they accepted schemes of pure socialism as props for the pillars of the State, they taxed riches and laid sacrilegious hands upon the Dagon of wealth to the infinite rage of certain Philistines who are still grieving for the god's lost hands and feet, but it was to the working classes Government turned in the hour of their distress, and Labour responded nobly. Those into whose souls the iron of corruption, disappointment and indifference had not entered, set themselves to labour seven days a week for long hours in evil atmosphere, or left their sweethearts and wives to strike a blow for the country that had displayed to them more of the qualities of a step-mother than a mother. Many have laid down their lives, and in the hearts of those who survive national consciousness has been re-born.
The democratic comradeship of the battlefield, embracing all classes, has taught the working man that his foe in times of peace is not so much the class whose representatives are of his own blood brotherhood, but the system that dominates those who serve and those who accept service. This lesson learned exclusively on the fields of war will permeate the factories when war is over. One stumbling-block to progress remained. It was, I venture to say, the presence in our midst of hundreds of thousands of men who have been rendered listless and apathetic by life conditions too easy or too hard. Now compulsion has reached this class it will give them in return for unsought risks and labour a sense of their place in the body politic. It will teach them that whether they will or no they have a part to play in shaping the destinies of Great Britain and that the reward will be in proportion to the sacrifice. We must not forget that a new Britain, a new Empire, a new Imperial outlook is being shaped over the far-flung area of war. It will not be only to the British Empire that change will come, but to all belligerent nations. The upheaval, sure as the succession of day and night, is one we dare hardly contemplate, not by reason of fear, but by reason of hope. To take advantage of the change as it will affect our nation, all classes of the community must prepare, and nothing could have clogged the wheels of progress in the near future than the presence in our midst of so many thousands of men whose inactivity would have been bitterly resented by those who have borne the heat and burden of the day. Unity of action is a condition precedent to the close and merciless revision of existing conditions, the ending of privilege, the widening of the powers of democracy, the whole peaceful solution of a question that two years ago promised to develop into a war worse than this we are waging, a war of brother against brother.
I repeat that I am opposed to conscription, particularly to a conscription that picks and chooses, and does not demand capital as freely as it demands life; equally am I opposed to the action of the young and unattached men who shrink from assuming their proper responsibilities. That they would have held back if the conditions of their life, whether favourable or unfavourable, had been the true conditions of an enlightened citizenship, I sincerely doubt, that they should have been forced to undertake as a duty what they should have embraced as a privilege is matter for regret. Happily they will not go unrewarded, they will see their errors, and they will come back to a country they have helped to save with the keenest determination to make it worth living in as well as worth fighting for.
XIV WOMEN AND WAR
"Why is it," wrote an editor, criticising a view of women that I had put forward, "why is it that woman is actually a war lover at heart, an inciter to and encourager of war? Can you explain why, while some women condemn fighting, the great majority do not shrink from it, and even regard the fighting man as the proper object of their admiration?" It was a challenge, that I will answer to the best of my ability.
In the first place, I must admit that the statement is true about countless women. Only yesterday I had a letter from a friend to whom I had written my sympathy; her only son was killed in the British advance. "I need no more consolation," she wrote. "Harry's colonel has sent me a letter telling me of my poor boy's bravery. I am proud to think that he has lived up to our tradition—ours has always been a fighting family, you know."
I would not criticise a bereaved mother; I can never forget that my eldest son has been in the fighting line, that my other boy gave up Cambridge for the aviation school, and is now flying in France, that my son-in-law is a soldier, and that of many friends and a few relatives only the memory remains. But I feel, from the bottom of my heart, that the death and glory idea is wrong; that the attraction of medals, ribbons, stars, orders, titles and uniforms and brass buttons is false, and that an ever-increasing number of women are conscious of the truth, not only here but in France, Germany, Austria, Russia and Italy.