"Compulsion, especially with regard to personal service, to one's choice of occupation and way of life, is of the essence of slavery and oppression. Nothing but actual extremity of life and death ought to justify us in resorting to it even temporarily. No such extremity has arisen, or is, happily, likely to arise. The voluntary principle has not failed either in the Army or any other profession. What has failed, what does fail, is the political policy and administration of the Government.
"Since the days of Feudal slavery in Great Britain no man or woman, except he be a criminal, a lunatic, or a pauper, has been compelled personally to serve any master or Government, or engage in any occupation or task by legal compulsion.
"Shall we allow the old-world tyranny to return?"
Glasier, unwittingly, tapped the very root of the problem, as far as his own particular cohorts, "downtrodden labor," are concerned. The British masses, in their preponderant majority, have not been brought to comprehend what Germany's war is--that it involves for Britain "nothing but actual extremity of life and death." Although leaders of public opinion, from the highest to the lowest, never ceased to emphasize the true inwardness of the struggle, Organized Labor was not convinced that Voluntary Service was unequal to the emergency. At Bristol, in the first week of September, 610 delegates to the annual Trade Union Congress, representing nearly 3,000,000 workers, placed themselves on record flat-footedly against Conscription. With British military failure in the war crying to Heaven, the following "anti-Compulsion" resolutions were adopted:
"We, the delegates to this congress, representing nearly three millions organized workers, record our hearty appreciation of the magnificent response made to the call for volunteers to fight against the tyranny of militarism. We emphatically protest against the sinister efforts of a section of the reactionary press in formulating newspaper policies for party purposes and attempting to foist on this country Conscription, which always proves a burden to workers and will divide the nation at a time when absolute unanimity is essential.
"No reliable evidence has been produced to show that the voluntary system of enlistment is not adequate to meet all the empire's requirements. We believe that all the men necessary can and will be obtained through a voluntary system properly organized, and we heartily support and will give every aid to the Government in its present efforts to secure the men necessary to prosecute the war to a successful issue."
When the cheers following the unanimous adoption of these resolutions subsided, Robert Smillie, the miners' leader and one of the most respected Labor chieftains in Britain, received the heartiest applause of the whole debate when he rapped out: "Now that this congress has declared, on behalf of organized labor, that it is against Conscription, it will be the duty of organized labor to prevent Conscription taking place."
It was not long after the Bristol Trade Union Congress defied the Government to establish Conscription that Vernon Hartshorn, the Socialist miners' leader, declaimed in the Christian Commonwealth that "a golden opportunity for Labor" had arrived, asked "whether trade-unions shall now not be successfully recognized as the controlling authority in a new industrial democracy," and set up "the irresistible claim of Labor to control its own destinies and those of the country." The Bristol and Hartshorn manifestoes were followed by the most extraordinary outburst of all--the formal declaration on the official premises of the British House of Commons by J. H. Thomas, a Member of Parliament for Derby and Organizing Secretary of the Amalgamated Society of Railway Workmen, that if the Government attempted to enforce Conscription, 3,000,000 employees of the national transportation lines of the country would not shrink from precipitating "industrial revolution!"
Interesting to the foreign observer as are all these manifestations of the British masses' opposition to war-time "control" and universal military service, the pathological causes of it are no less absorbing. They are not, in my judgment, far to seek. I thought I gained a composite glimpse of them one day at Shepherd's Bush, by no means the most squalid section of London, for it lies in the west, far from the putrid east. I had gone to watch a great "recruiting-rally"--an attempt to inject some patriotism into regions where it was sadly lacking. I found myself in the midst of a huge typically lower-class and lower middle-class multitude. Scattered throughout it were countless hundreds of what should have been young men fit for military service. It was for the most part a motley throng of blear-eyed men and women of all sorts, sizes and conditions of mental and physical deterioration. Nearly everybody, particularly children, was unkempt and seemed underfed. In the wide-open doors of odoriferous saloons stood hatless, slovenly females, balancing with one hand a half-emptied mug of beer, while the other shepherded a cluster of wretched youngsters with dirty faces, tattered clothing and shredded shoes. Collarless men slouched along, filthy of attire and language alike. The remarks one overheard, as the troops trudged by and the bands blared Rule, Britannia, were usually purely ribald, and the cheering, when a taxi full of wounded Tommies, shoved into the procession to lend corroborative detail to what Sir W. S. Gilbert would have called an otherwise bald and unconvincing spectacle, was desultory and short-lived. The parade had been assigned a line of march through several miles of district precisely like Shepherd's Bush. I could hardly imagine that the scenes anywhere were considerably different from those of which I was an astonished and chagrined witness. There were very few recruits.
I could not resist a reminiscent soliloquy. I had stood in the midst of German crowds in Berlin and elsewhere times without number. But I was quite sure that nowhere in the Fatherland had I ever been in contact with such concentrated, omnipresent, apparently inconquerable squalor and proletarian apathy. It was manifestly not this stratum of English society which was to perpetuate Britannia's rule of the waves. Lamentably little of the "bulldog breed" was visible here. It was more like the starved cur type. Starved! That was the word. Starved for generations of the nourishment on which health, education, ideals and patriotism must be developed, if they are to stand the test in the hour of supreme trial! Why, I asked myself, was such a disheartening picture as good as physically impossible in Berlin or Hamburg or Düsseldorf or Breslau? I may be wrong, but the answer seemed to me to be that paternalistic Government in Germany had produced a race of men and women who, because better educated, better housed, better fed and generally better cared for--even under the relentless jackboot of Militarism--looked upon a war for national existence through entirely different-colored spectacles than this slipshod composite of British illiteracy and nonchalance. I seriously doubted if Shepherd's Bush understood the meaning of Patriotism as the Germans know it; understood that Service and Sacrifice are necessary in the hour of the nation's jeopardy, and, because necessary, must be lavishly, unquestioningly rendered. I found myself excusing the British proletariat. I felt that they were what they were, and acting as they were, or, rather, failing to act as they ought, because they knew no better. Patriotism is not altogether instinct. It is largely a cultivated virtue. That is why we teach immigrant children from Russia and Italy and Hungary to sing "My Country, 'Tis of Thee" as the rudiment of their American schooling. Education has been compulsory in Britain for many years, but drink has been traditionally universal, and housing of the poor and the working classes was only in comparatively recent years deemed a subject worthy of vast national effort. Public hygiene is no longer a neglected theme, and playgrounds and parks are numerous. But illiteracy, intemperance and disease can not be eradicated in a generation. Masses which have for decades been neglected and held in subjection and contempt by an unrelenting class-distinction system heavily charged with arrant snobbishness can not be churned, by the turning of a crank, into a community of enlightened, high-minded or able-bodied patriots and war-makers. Britain has sown the wind. She is reaping the whirlwind. That has been said before, but never has it applied with such grim significance as at this hour.