“I see your point,” I said; “all’s fair and so forth?”
“Also, we shall have trouble, up there, I have no doubt. Probably there will be a ca’ canny party among our recruits. They will have every chance at first. I won’t interfere with them. But once the situation clears up a little, I shall deal with them—and I shall do it by the hand of their own fellows. They won’t last long. Now get along and promise these officials exactly what I have told you.”
I offered no criticisms of his methods. His brain was far better than mine. When I remember that he must have drafted the outlines of his scheme and arranged most of the preliminaries of its execution in less time than it would have taken me to decide upon a new factory-site, I am still lost in amazement at the combination of wide outlook and tremendous concentration of thought which the task involved.
Despite the carefully-planned deterrents which appeared in the proclamations, the recruiting was enormous from the first. “Nordenholt’s Million”—as the popular phrase ran—was not really a million at all; but Nordenholt knew the influence of a round figure upon the public imagination and it was near enough for all practical purposes. He had looked on the thing in the broadest possible lines at the start, and had drawn up a rough classification for the use of the recruiting stations. To begin with, he limited the enlistment to men between the ages of twenty-five and thirty-five; though exceptional cases received special consideration. On this basis, he expected to get all the men he required. Three-quarters of a million of these were to be married men with an upper limit of four children, preferably between the ages of six and twelve. In addition to this, he was prepared to accept half a million young unmarried men. Half a million unmarried girls were also selected. The net result of this was that in the end he obtained in round numbers the following classes:
| Husbands | 750,000 |
| Wives | 750,000 |
| Children | 2,250,000 |
| Bachelors | 500,000 |
| Girls | 500,000 |
| ———— | |
| Total | 4,750,000 |
That left a margin of a quarter of a million below his original estimate of five millions; and this he kept free for the time being, partly because some of the number would be made up by specialists who did not come under the general recruitment organisation and partly, possibly, for taking in at the last moment any cases which might be specially desirable.
At a later date I had an opportunity of questioning him as to his reasons in laying down this classification: and they struck me as sound.
“In the first place, I want a solid backbone to this enterprise. I get that by selecting the married men. They have got a stake in the thing already in their wives, and especially in their children. I know that the children mean the consumption of a vast quantity of food for which we shall get no direct return in the form of labour; but I believe that the steadying effect introduced by them will be worth the loss. We are going to put this colony under a strain which is about as great as human nature can bear; and I want everything on our side that can be brought there.
“Then again, they will help to form a sort of public opinion. Don’t forget that the ultimate aim of this affair is to carry on the race. I could have done that by selecting bachelors and girls in equal numbers and simply going ahead on that basis. But we must have discipline; and unless you have some established order we should simply have ended by a Saturnalia. You couldn’t have prevented it, considering the nervous strain we are going to put on these people. I have no use for that sort of thing; so I chose a majority of men with families, whose natural instincts are to keep down the bacchanalian element among the unmarried.
“But in addition to these married men, I needed others who had a free hand and who had only their own lives to risk. In certain lines, the unmarried man can be relied upon where the married man shivers in his shoes to some extent. That accounts for the bachelor element.