CONSCRIPTION
In a recent interview with Lord Wolseley, the visitor states that he obtained from that officer the following vehement declaration in favour of enforced and universal military service:—
‘You develop his physical power, you make a man of him in body and in strength, as the schools he had been at previously had made a man of him mentally. You teach him habits of cleanliness, tidiness, punctuality, reverence for superiors, and obedience to those above him, and you do this in a way that no species of machinery that I have ever been acquainted with could possibly fulfil. In fact, you give him all the qualities calculated to make him a thoroughly useful and loyal citizen when he leaves the colours and returns home to civil life. And of this I am quite certain, that the nation which has the courage and the patriotism to insist on all its sons undergoing this species of education and training for at least two or three generations, will consist of men and women far better calculated to be the fathers and mothers of healthy and vigorous children than the nation which allows its young people to grow up without any physical training although they may cram their heads with all sorts of scientific knowledge in their national schools. In other words, the race in two or three generations will be stronger, more vigorous, and therefore braver, and more calculated to make the nation to which they belong great and powerful.’
It is obvious that such a rhapsody could only be uttered by one who has never studied the actual effects of conscription on a population, but speaks merely of what he has been led to believe is its effect from what he has watched on the drill-grounds of countries little otherwise known to him. It is a sweeping assertion, still less grounded on fact than its corresponding declaration, that school makes a man of its pupil mentally, which is by no means always or inevitably the case. I could not, of course, propose to contravene any purely military statement of a military celebrity, but this composite and wholesale and most amazing declaration I do dispute, and I think that I know more of the effects of compulsory service than does its speaker. Lord Wolseley has never certainly dwelt, even for a short time, in those countries which are cursed by conscription. He sees that the battalions of conscripted armies seem to him to march well and manœuvre finely, and he concludes, with natural military prejudice, that the results, moral and mental, of conscription on a nation are admirable, and are unattainable in any other manner.
To begin with, he considers evidently as beyond all dispute that the soldier is the highest type of humanity, which may be doubted, and that obedience is the highest human virtue, which may be also doubted. All the finest freedoms of mankind have been obtained, not by obedient, but by utterly disobedient, persons; persons who, if they had failed, would have been thrown into prison or sent to scaffolds. Obedience in the child is the first and the highest virtue, because the whole well-being of the child, material and moral, depends on it. But the man, to be a man, must be courageous enough to disobey if disobedience be needed by honour, justice, or wisdom. There are moments, even in war and even in a soldier’s life, when the magnificent daring which disobeys is a more precious quality than the primmer and more decorous one of unquestioning deference to commands received. In older times the modes of warfare or the manner of civil life left much freer scope to idiosyncrasy and choice, much wider space for the play of spirit and originality. Modern warfare, like modern education, tends yearly to draw tighter the bonds with which it buckles down all natural growth of character and possibility of adventure. Mechanical reproduction is the chief note of military effort as of civil. The soldier, like the civilian, every year tends more and more to become only one infinitesimal atom of a rivet in the enormous and overwhelming engine of the State.
To a young man of genius, or even of merely great talent, it is certain that the enforced term of military service would be sorely and indelibly injurious. Genius does not easily obey, and all the harsh, unlovely, stupid routine of camp and barrack would be so odious to it that a youth of brilliant gifts and promise might easily be compromised and condemned, continually and fatally, in his passage through the ranks. Even were such a youth obedient to his duties, the sheer waste of time, the dispiriting influences of a long period of tedious, irksome, and detested occupations, would have the most depressing and dwarfing effect upon his talent. History teems with instances, which it would be tiresome to enumerate, in which revolt and refusal have produced for the world all that we most prize of liberty, of conscience, and of conduct. Revolt and refusal are disobedience, and they have frequently been quite as noble and fruitful as the more passive virtue of obedience, which not seldom has taken the form of timorous submission to, and execution of, conscious wrong. Would Lord Wolseley have admired or condemned a mousquetaire of the Louvre who should have refused to fire on the Huguenots from the windows?
But were obedience the first of virtues, conscription does not teach it: it enforces it, which is a very different thing. You do not put a quality into a man because you taught him and forced from him by fear the simulacrum of it. Because the conscript has for a term of years, to his bitter hatred and despite, been compelled to obey at the point of the bayonet, he does not thereby become a more willingly obedient man; he will, on the contrary, as soon as he is set free, revenge himself by insubordination to his parents, his employers, his superiors, in all the ways which may be open to him. The obedience exacted from the soldier is taken by force: he obeys because he knows that those stronger than himself will punish him badly if he do not. This is not an ennobling sentiment, nor is it one which can lend any beauty or nobility to a character. You are not a better or a kinder master because you have been a slave, nilly-willy, for three of the best years of your life. Obedience which is rendered out of true veneration may be a tonic to the nature which is bent by it; but the obedience which is merely rendered, as all conscripts’ obedience is, because if it be not given the irons and the cell will follow, does no one any moral good, teaches no virtue which can be productive hereafter. There is no servant, groom, artisan, farm-labourer, or hireling of any kind so lazy, so impudent, so insubordinate, and so useless as the young man who has recently come out from his term of compulsory service. It is natural that it should be so. As we cannot create morality by Act of Parliament, so we cannot create character by the knapsack and the cross-belts. Family education, even school education, can in a measure mould character, because it is the long, free, malleable, tender years of childhood and boyhood upon which it works; but after twenty-one, the character does not vitally alter much, though it will assimilate vice and vanity with fatal quickness. When Lord Wolseley utters the preposterous declaration that the education given by conscription teaches a lad ‘all the qualities calculated to make him a thoroughly useful and loyal citizen,’ has he the least idea of what is the actual moral state of the barrack-yards and barrack-rooms of the armies of the continent? Has he ever reflected on the inevitable results of the pell-mell confusion with which the clean-living young sons of gentle-people and commercial people are flung together with the lowest ruffians from the cellars of the cities and the caves of the mountains? Will he even credit how constantly the healthy, hard-working, obedient lad from the farmside or the counting-house, who left his people, happy in his duties and clean in body and mind, comes back to them, when his time is over, cankered body and soul, eaten up by disease, scornful of simple ways, too useless to work, too depraved to wed, too puffed up with foul desires and braggart conceits to earn the bread which he considers his father and brothers bound to labour to provide for him?
When the youth has had purity and strength of character and of mind enough to resist the contagion in which he has been steeped, he will in nine instances out of ten be a spoilt agriculturist, artisan, student, labourer. He has been torn from his chosen pursuit at the moment when he had begun to fairly master it, and he is spoilt for it, he is out of joint with it, he forgets its cunning. If he were engaged in any of those arts which require the utmost delicacy of touch, the ends of his fingers have become coarse, rough, blunted, and have lost all their sensitiveness; the porcelain-painters, the jewellers’ artificers, the makers of the inimitable articles de Paris, suffer immeasurably from the injury done to their finger-tips by barrack work; whilst on the other hand the horny palms of the lads who push the plough and use the spade have grown so softened by what is to them the lighter work of the barracks, that they writhe with pain when they go out on their farms and the skin soon is stripped off the raw flesh.
To a military commander it is natural that the diffusion of the military temper should appear the beau ideal of improvement. Every class has its own intrinsic vanity, and sees in itself the salt and savour of society. But in truth there is a distinct menace to the world, in the present generalisation of the military temper, which is and must always be accompanied by narrowness and domination. What the young man acquires from his years of enforced service is much more often the hectoring and bullying temper characteristic of the soldier to the civilian, than it is the obedience, humility and loyalty which Lord Wolseley believes that he brings away with him. It is certainly most unjust that the soldier should be regarded, as in England, inferior to the civilian, and hustled out of theatres and concert-rooms; but it is still worse for the community when the soldier can fire on citizens, slash at greybeards, and run through children with impunity, as he can do in Germany, at his will and pleasure.
The very rules and qualities which are inevitable for the well-being of the soldier are injurious to the character of the civilian: mill-like routine, and unquestioning acceptance of orders, are not the makers of virile or high-minded men in civil life, however necessary they may be in battalions. Linesmen and gunners are admirable and useful persons, but they are not the supreme salt of the earth that we should endeavour to make all humanity in their likeness. The military education creates a certain sort of man, an excellent sort of man in his way, and for his purpose; but not the man who is the best product of the human race.