England and Germany

by Emile Joseph Dillon

Respect for individual liberty was carried to such a point in Great Britain that organizations against recruiting were tolerated in England and Ireland, and strikes, which not only inflicted heavy pecuniary losses on the nation but actually stopped its supplies of munitions and brought it within sight of discomfiture, were treated with soft words and immediate concessions. One cannot read even Mr. Lloyd George’s summary narrative of the preposterous doings of British slackers without wondering whether salvation is still possible. These men not only refused to work their best for the community, but forbade their comrades to work well. At Enfield, we are told, a man was obliged by trade union regulations so to regulate his work that he did not earn more than 1s. an hour, though he could easily have earned 2s. 6d.[118] Another man was doing two and a half days’ work in two days, and when he refused to carry out the behest of the Ironfounders’ Board to waste the other half day he was fined £1.[119] A consequence of this anti-national attitude was that “we had to wait for weeks in Birmingham with machinery lying idle, with our men without rifles, with our men with a most inadequate supply of machine guns to attack the enemy and defend themselves.”[120] Every one will re-echo the Minister’s comment on the outlook, if this attitude is persisted in—“we are making straight for disaster.”

Compare this state of things with that which rules in Germany. It is a British Minister who describes it: “If you want to realize what organized labour in this war means, read the story of the last twelve months. By the end of September the German armies were checked. They sustained an overwhelming defeat in France, Russia was advancing against them towards the Carpathians, and I believe in East Prussia. That is not the case to-day. Why? The German workmen came in; organized labour in Germany prepared to take the field. They worked and worked quietly, persistently, continuously, without stint or strife, without restriction for months and months, through the autumn, through the winter, through the spring. Then came that avalanche of shot and shell which broke the great Russian armies and drove them back. That was the victory of the German workmen.”[121]

Great Britain is the classic land of strikes. Strikers are sacred among us. Industrial compulsion is rank heresy.

That is one of our difficulties, and by no means the least formidable. The nation, despite the superb example of patriotic heroism given by all classes, parties, provinces and colonies of the Empire, is still deficient in cohesiveness. No fire of enthusiasm has yet burned fiercely enough among all sections of the Empire and all members of the race to fuse them in such a compact unified organism as we behold in the Teuton’s Fatherland. Read the characteristic given of us by the ex-German Minister Dernburg, and say whether it is over-coloured. Discoursing on the difficulties which Britain has to cope with in carrying on the war, he says: “They are intensified ... by the narrow-minded customs of the English trade unions, which contrast with the patriotic behaviour of the German associations of the like nature as night contrasts with day.”[122] This is melancholy reading for those whose hopes are fervent for a bright future of the British race, and it prepares them to listen in anxious silence to the general conclusion at which the Prussian ex-Minister arrives: “It is in the highest degree improbable,” he says, “that after the winding up of this contest England will be able to keep or wield any form of economic superiority whatever over Germany.”

In our Allies we find a strong touch of resemblance to ourselves. Their state of unpreparedness is amazing, if less desperate than ours. Russia, it is true, did much better at the outset than friend or foe anticipated, and she might have done quite well if only she had been supplied with munitions. But she had not nearly enough, and her armies were slaughtered like sheep in consequence. Then there were no boots for the soldiers, who were forced to wear thin canvas leggings with leather soles. And scores of waggon-loads of incapacitated men were taken to Petrograd and other cities whose feet had been frozen for lack of shoe-leather. One of the urgent wants of the Tsardom are railways, which the late Count Witte was so eager to construct. When hostilities opened, the insufficiency of communications became one of the decisive factors in Russia’s disasters. And it was heightened by the conduct of, shall we say, the prussianized officials,[123] who are reported to have disposed of waggons for large sums to greedy merchants, who used to raise the prices of the merchandise and batten on the misery of their fellows.

Trains, needed to supply the fighting men at the front with food and the wounded at the rear with medicaments, were kept back to suit the schemes of these greedy cormorants. Gratuities, it is openly affirmed, had to be paid by Red Cross and other officers to those subordinate railway servants who had it in their power to send on a train or shunt it off for days on a side-track. Bribery is working havoc in the Tsardom. In January 1916 the Moscow municipality discussed the advisability of voting a certain sum of money and putting it at the disposal of the chief officer of the city, to be discreetly employed in transactions with complacent railway officials, in order to further the work of reducing prices on necessaries of life. The motive adduced for this homœopathic way of treating a social distemper were the conditions of life in Russia and the necessity of complying with them. But as the Statute Book does not recognize these conditions and condemns bribery absolutely, a vote on the subject was not taken.[124]

Acting on instructions issued by the Finance Minister, a Member of the Council of the Finance Ministry, D. I. Zassiadko, visited the Kharkoff circuit for the purpose of studying the bribery problem on the spot. M. Zassiadko acquired the conviction “on the spot” that the railway officials do really take bribes, “and even of considerable amounts.” But, that ascertained, the representative of the Ministry decided to delve deeper to the root of the matter. And he reached the conclusion that railway servants belong to the class of the tempted. The evil, he reported, resides not in the circumstance that they take bribes, but that bribes are offered whereby these weak little souls are seduced. The representative of the Ministry discovered an entire category of bribes which do not bear the signs of extortion, but only of “gratitude.” To us this conclusion sounds somewhat naïve. The most widely circulated journal of Petrograd prefaces an article on the subject as follows.[125]

“The misdeeds of the officials and bribery on the railway system cry out to heaven,” writes the organ of the Constitutional Democrats. “Compared with the reverses on the Carpathians and in Poland, the defeats we are sustaining in our own house and behind the enemy’s back are much greater....” On the important line Petrograd-Moscow-Perm scandalous cases of corruption took place in which, according to Russian journals, officials of a class who might reasonably be regarded as unbribable were implicated. They are alleged to have let out to firms of speculators for large sums of money, goods waggons which were already destined to carry consignments to the front.[126] Russia’s purchases abroad have made a profound impression on the peoples in whose midst they were effected. The principles on which these transactions were carried on provoked lively comments. It is not that they revealed a superlative degree of disorganization. That touch would have merely marked the kinship of the men concerned with their allies. By the discovery that the Russian Government’s purchasing Commissioners, the representatives of one of its embassies, the agents of the British Government and the equally zealous agents of the French Government were all secretly bidding against each other for the same rifles to be delivered to the Tsar’s Ministers, only a smile of recognition was elicited. It may have seemed at once amusing and consolatory to find that all were tarred with the same brush. But when it was discovered that the offer of certain army necessaries was put off for weeks and weeks, although they were to be had under cost price, and was then accepted at a much higher price, profound sympathy was felt for the Tsar’s armies.

Chaos, waste and a variety of abuses that pressed heavily on the poorer classes marked the efforts made by the Russian Government to cope with the scarcity of fuel, corn and other necessaries which began to be felt soon after the war. The rolling stock, it was complained, was utterly insufficient, yet it was found possible to transport 1,000,000 poods[127] weight of mineral water of doubtful quality. When trains arrived bringing supplies to the suffering population, it turned out that there were no hands to unload the waggons. And when labour was requisitioned, vehicles were not to be had. In October 1915 on the rails of Moscow station five thousand waggons, laden with life’s necessaries, stood waiting and waiting in vain for the unskilled labour which ought to have been abundant, considering the number of the population and of the refugees. At the same time 2000 waggons were on the rails of the Petrograd station, their contents lying unutilized.[128] It is only by the lack of order and organization that one can explain the facts that in Petrograd the inhabitants have no butter, while in the places where butter is made it is being sold cheaper than before, at 12 in lieu of 16 to 18 roubles a pood. In the province of Ekaterinograd, mines which own 800,000 poods of coal cannot get more than a few waggon loads of it every month.

Russia has incomparably more than enough fuel, without importing any, to satisfy all the needs of her 180,000,000 inhabitants. But owing to the insufficiency of communications, and still more to the lack of forethought and enterprise, the population of many cities and towns underwent serious hardships in consequence of the impossibility of acquiring coal or wood. In September 1915 the Petrograd region could obtain no more than 65 per cent. of the necessary quantity, and a month later only 49 per cent. In Moscow the plight of the inhabitants was worse. In September they could get but 26 per cent. of their needs and in October 40 per cent. According to the Minister of Commerce, who volunteered these data, the condition of the towns of Rostoff, Novotcherkassk, Nakhitchevan, Taganrog, Ekaterinodar and others was not a whit better. The city of Vyatka was, according to the Novoye Vremya,[129] in January 1916 without fuel, while the mercury registered 30 degrees Reaumur below freezing-point. The unfortunate citizens heated their homes with fragments of hoardings, tables, desks and stools. And yet there is abundant fuel in the superb forests with which Vyatka is surrounded, and, what is more to the point, the city authorities had received during the preceding spring 60,000 roubles for the purpose of purchasing a supply of wood for the winter. But they did nothing, organization not being one of their strong points.