The Assault: Germany Before the Outbreak and England in War-Time

by Frederic William Wile

As a matter of fact, "everything" was about as all wrong as it could be. Beneath the surface of national life a volcano was boiling and sputtering, and though it gave early and unmistakable evidence of its presence, British calm with invincible indifference tossed it off as a sporadic manifestation unworthy of serious consideration. I refer to the Labor question--to trade-unionism's revolt against reorganization of industry for the purposes of war, and to its stubborn opposition to the introduction of compulsory military service. As long ago as January, the Labor controversy raised its hydra-head, and yet, in October, despite nine months of subsequent turmoil, it only began to be recognized for what it is--the peril which threatens these isles with danger hardly less gigantic than invasion itself. It is the decade-old British story of temporizing with impending menace, oblivious of its portent, serenely conscious only that it, too, can be "muddled through," like everything else in Britain's glorious past. It is the spirit in which Britain almost invited war with Germany, the flaming warnings of which the islands had for years.

The workmen on the Clyde, the engineers, mechanics and artisans responsible for the maintenance of British life itself--for in their hands rests the creation of the ironclads to preserve England from invasion and the merchantmen to bring food to her shores--were the first to cause the volcano to rumble. They objected to "overtime." The process of "speeding up" in every department, due to the iron necessities of war, was violating the most sacred traditions of trade-unionism. If not forcibly checked, practises tolerated in the name of emergency were in imminent peril of becoming fixed rules. The Clyde workmen struck. They paid no heed to Sir George Askwith, the Chief Industrial Commissioner, when he declared that "the requirements of the nation were being seriously endangered." Jellicoe urgently needed those six new destroyers waiting to be riveted. But the Clyde engineers wanted the overtime question settled, and settled in their way; and until it was, the navy could go hang. Englishmen were disappointed when they read the news from Glasgow and Greenock, but they were not upset. Matters would "right themselves." Trade-unionists were an "unreasonable lot." But they always "came around." At any rate, there was no cause to "worry."

One man, a big man, was "worrying." He was Lloyd-George, whose specialty is taking bulls by their horns. Being Welsh, it was not "un-English" for him to dignify an emergency with its intrinsic importance and act accordingly. He grasped instantly the menace which the situation on the Clyde conjured up. With decision of Napoleonic boldness in a politician to whom report ascribed the ambition to hoist himself into a dictatorship on the shoulders of the "masses," Lloyd-George determined to "speed up" industrial England for war by Act of Parliament. If labor would not voluntarily throw trade-union dogma to the wind when national existence was at stake, the possibility of imperiling it should simply be taken from them. Thereupon he introduced in the House of Commons an amendment to the "Defense of the Realm Act," which provided for nothing short of Industrial Conscription. Emerged later as the Munitions Act, it conferred enormous powers upon the Government. Reduced to essentials, it robbed Labor of the right to strike. It forbade lockouts, as well. It provided for compulsory arbitration of all disputes. It withheld from a workman the right to leave one employment and take another. It obliterated primarily and absolutely that holiest of holy trade-union regulations, by which output is restricted. On the other hand, it provided for the limitation of employers' profit by establishing a system of "controlled establishments," i.e., works engaged exclusively in the production of munitions for the Government and whose financial operations could, therefore, be exactly checked.

The Munitions of War Act was Great Britain's longest step in the direction of Industrial Socialism. It emanated with singular appropriateness from Lloyd-George, the father of the German-imported system of old age pensions and workmen's insurance introduced six years previous. Trade-unionism was aghast at the radicalism of the new proposals, which Mr. Balfour rightly described as the "most drastic" for which British Parliamentary sanction had ever been sought. Lloyd-George only partially subdued Labor's misgivings by pledging the Government's word that the scheme applied for the duration of the war only, and that with peace the old order of things would be automatically reestablished.

The men on the Clyde had no sooner gone back to work, reluctantly and sullen after a "compromise" settlement, when the dockers of Manchester, Birkenhead and Liverpool struck on the overtime issue. Lord Kitchener, while reviewing troops in the district, formally notified the Dock Laborers' Union that if they "did not do all in their power to help carry the war to a successful conclusion," he would have to "consider what steps would be necessary" to hammer patriotism into their souls. "K.'s" unambiguous language signally failed to impress the dockers. They remained on strike. A deputation of shipbuilding and shipowning firms now waited on Lloyd-George. They told him that drink, more truly the curse of the British working classes than of any other in the world, was at the bottom of the rebellious, lazy spirit of the men. They urged prohibition for the period of the war. The deputation declared that eighty per cent. of avoidable loss of time could be ascribed to drink. Lloyd-George sympathized with that view. "We are, plainly," he said, "fighting Germany, Austria and drink, and as far as I can see, the greatest of these three deadly foes is drink."

Now the miners became restless. They demanded a revision of the wage scale in accordance with the mine-owners' notoriously swollen war profits. Their Federation decided that notice should be given on April 1st to terminate all existing agreements at the end of June. There were hints that the miners intended pressing not only for a "war bonus," but for an advance of twenty per cent. on current wages. From the pits of South Wales comes the coal which is the navy's black breath of life. A week's idleness meant one million tons unproduced. The Government summoned the Miners' Federation for conference. Coal prices were already soaring. Here and there there was a shortage of supply. Germany was jubilant. Labor's temper in the Clyde country, the docker districts and in the colliery regions was far from improved by Lloyd-George's support of the suggestion that drink was the root of the industrial evil. The Chancellor of the Exchequer essayed to play a trump card. He announced that King George, "deeply concerned over a state of affairs which must inevitably result in the prolongation of the horrors and burdens of this terrible war," was himself prepared to set an august example to Labor by giving up all alcoholic liquor, "so that no difference should be made as far as His Majesty is concerned between the treatment of rich and poor in this question." Working-class Britain committed wholesale lèse-majesté by paying no attention to the King's decree of self-denial.

The sequel, though not, of course, the immediate result of King George's total abstinence proclamation, was the outbreak of the South Wales miners' dispute in full fury a few weeks later. Joint conference between the Federation, the owners and the Government ended in hopeless deadlock. The miners stubbornly refused to accept the principle of compulsory arbitration provided by Lloyd-George's now enacted Munitions Law. Two hundred thousand men stopped work. Threats to enforce the punitive provisions of the law did not terrify them. The establishment in Wales and Monmouthshire of a "Munitions Tribunal," before which they could be haled, only made them more defiant. In London one heard irresponsible mutterings that "a few leaders of the Federation" might usefully be shot, and it was suggested that if England were Germany, they would be. More than one voice advocated lynching "a few owners," too. The country waited dutifully for the Government to employ the "drastic powers" it had arrogated to itself only a few short weeks before. Instead of anything so heroic, it flung Lloyd-George into the breach. It sent him to South Wales, and in his entourage went Arthur Henderson, the new Labor member of the Cabinet, and Mr. Runciman, the President of the Board of Trade (the government department which deals with industry). The little Welshman drew forth from his inexhaustible arsenal the weapon he seldom unsheathes in vain--his persuasively silver tongue. New terms were drawn up between the miners and the colliery owners. The men got about everything they wanted. "Fill the bunkers," Lloyd-George cried to them amid their cheers in a farewell speech at Cardiff. "It means defense. It means protection. It means an inviolate Britain." The miners went back to work. But peace had been dearly bought by the Government. It had not dared to enforce the coercive paragraphs of the vaunted Munitions Law. The Act, it was now painfully evident, might do very well to discipline a handful of "shirking-men" at some shell works or shipyard, but to invoke its machinery to browbeat two hundred thousand organized miners was manifestly a horse of a different color. And one which the British Government was not prepared to back. Industrial Conscription was magnificent in theory. In its first great test in practise it had proved to be fire with which the authorities preferred not to play. Some one (I think it was Price Collier) called England the Land of Compromise. The Welsh miners seem to have shown that he was right.

Events were not long in forthcoming to demonstrate that neither forceful persuasion by a popular Cabinet Minister nor "drastic" Acts of Parliament were in themselves capable of regenerating the British working man or inspiring him with full and patriotic realization of the national emergency. Shortly after becoming Minister of Munitions in May, Lloyd-George began a speech-making tour of the industrial districts. He pleaded eloquently to Labor to forget its "isms" and its "rules" and throw the full weight of its Titan strength into the balance for the winning of the war. He addressed his appeal alike to masters and men. Passionately he begged both to relegate traditions, suspicions and prejudices and join hands for the common cause. He did not mince words as to the national consequences if either of them permitted ancient antagonisms to restrict their producing power at a moment when nothing short of the Empire's existence was trembling in the balance. "Pile up the shells!" was the burden of his plea. Bristol, Birmingham, Sheffield, Coventry, Leeds, Nottingham, Manchester, all the great industrial centers of the Kingdom, listened, and promised. By the beginning of autumn Lloyd-George had pledged nearly one thousand establishments, hitherto engaged in the peaceful arts, to devote their plants exclusively to the manufacture of sinews of war, and employers and workmen passed automatically under the "control" of the Ministry of Munitions. The country seemed to be yielding effectively to Lloyd-George's project for "speeding up" war industry.

Yet, as sporadic announcements in the newspapers presently indicated, the system was by no means producing desired results. Dogmatic trade-unionism was dying hard. The Government's call to men and women to do their "bit" for the war, either by enlisting in the fighting forces or engaging in munitions work, naturally sent tens of thousands of people to the factories who never possessed a "union card" in their lives. Organized Labor was horrified by the deluge of "scabs" thus created. It saw the results of decades of crusade for "union shops" and for privilege for skilled hands swept away like chaff in the wind. Another phenomenon of no less disagreeable omen was making its appearance. Marvelous American automatic lathes for shell-making were being installed on a prodigious scale--machinery so simple in construction that one man, or even a woman or girl, might learn to keep five lathes running at one time. This conjured up disquieting visions for the devotees of a system which looks upon arbitrary limitation of output and minimum employment of maximum numbers of skilled men as an inalienable heritage of Organized Labor. War might be war, national existence might be at stake, nothing else might count except victory, to say nothing of a dozen other shibboleths dinned incessantly into their ears, but trade-unionists had "rights" and "necessities," too. It had cost them years of blood and tears, and strikes and lockouts galore, to enforce them. Was Labor supinely to permit them to be snatched away bodily under cover of war, which Labor had always opposed? Were sainted rules about Sunday work and other "overtime," about apprentices, about female labor, and a dozen other trophies of triumphant trade-unionism to be renounced? Could Governments, from which hard-won prerogatives had had to be extorted almost by violence, be trusted voluntarily to restore them, once Labor had been cowed into surrendering them, and comfortable precedents established? Was the British proletariat, now only on the threshold of its liberties, to be hurled back at one fell swoop into the abyss of inglorious mid-Victorian "slavery"? Let the nation rant itself blue in the face over Labor's "disgraceful lack of patriotism." Let Germany find comfort, if it could, in the spectacle of British working men refusing to relinquish their holiest privileges on the blood-smeared altar of Militarism. "Patriotism begins at home," said the trade-unionist. "The Government is looking after its own interests. I am looking after mine," he explained.

With such recalcitrant and explosive conditions prevailing, the public was not surprised, though profoundly chagrined, to learn at the end of September--I choose the case as typical, and by no means because it was an isolated instance--that the Liverpool Munitions Tribunal had fined hundreds of workmen employed by Messrs. Cammell, Laird & Company, one of the most important firms of armament manufacturers in the country. It was testified that owing to shirking during the period of the preceding twenty weeks, there had been a loss of 1,500,000 hours' time. The evidence is so characteristic that I reproduce it textually: