The counterpart of leadership is following. A Government that shows the line of Britain's duty must be able to utilise the whole energies of her people for its performance. A duty laid upon the nation implies a duty laid upon every man to do his share of the nation's work, to assist the Government by obedient service, the best of which he is capable. It means a people trained every man to his task.
A nation should be like a team in which every man has his place, his work to do, his mission or duty. There is no room in it either for the idler who consumes but renders no service, or for the unskilled man who bungles a task to which he has not been trained. A nation may be compared to a living creature. Consider the way in which nature organises all things that live and grow. In the structure of a living thing every part has its function, its work to do. There are no superfluous organs, and if any fails to do its work the creature sickens and perhaps dies.
Take the idea of the nation as I have tried to convey it and apply it as a measure or test to our customary way of thinking both of public affairs and of our own lives. Does it not reveal that we attach too much importance to having and to possessions—our own and other people's—and too little importance to doing, to service? When we ask what a man is worth, we think of what he owns. But the words ought to make us think of what he is fit for and of what service he renders to the nation. The only value of what a man has springs from what he does with it.
The idea of the nation leads to the right way of looking at these matters, because it constrains every man to put himself and all that he has at the service of the community. Thus it is the opposite of socialism, which merely turns upside down the current worship of ownership, and which thinks "having" so supremely important that it would put "not having" in its place. The only cry I will adopt is "England for ever," which means that we are here, every one of us, with all that we have and all that we can do, as members of a nation that must either serve the world or perish.
But the idea of the nation carries us a long way further than I have yet shown. It bids us all try at the peril of England's fall to get the best Government we can to lead us. We need a man to preside over the nation's counsels, to settle the line of Britain's duty in Europe and in her own Empire, and of her duty to her own people, to the millions who are growing up ill fed, ill housed and ill trained, and yet who are part of the sovereign people. We need to give him as councillors men that are masters of the tasks in which for the nation to fail means its ruin, the tasks of which I have enumerated those that are vital. Do we give him a master of the history of the other nations to guide the nation's dealings with them? Do we give him a master of war to educate admirals and generals? Do we give him a master of the sciences to direct the pursuit of knowledge, and a master of character-building to supervise the bringing up of boys and girls to be types of a noble life? It would serve the nation's turn to have such men. They are among us, and to find them we should only have to look for them. It would be no harder than to pick apples off a tree. But we never dream of looking for them. We have a wonderful plan of choosing our leaders, the plan which we call an election. Five hundred men assemble in a hall and listen to a speech from a partisan, while five hundred others in a hall in the next street are cheering a second partisan who declaims against the first. There is no test of either speaker, except that he must be rich enough to pay the expenses of an "election." The voters do not even listen to both partisans in order to judge between them. Thus we choose our members of Parliament. Our Government is a committee of some twenty of them. Its first business is to keep its authority against the other party, of which in turn the chief function is to make out that everything the Government does is wrong. This is the only recognised plan for leading the nation.
You may be shocked as you read this by the plainness of my words, but you know them to be true, though you suppose that to insist on the facts is "impracticable" because you fancy that there is no way out of the marvellously absurd arrangements that exist. But there is a way out, though it is no royal road. It is this. Get the meaning of the nation into your own head and then make a present to England of your party creed. Ask yourself what is the one thing most needed now, and the one thing most needed for the future. You will answer, because you know it to be true, that the one thing most needed now is to get the navy right.
The one thing most needed for the future is to put the idea of the nation and the will to help England into every man's soul. That cannot be done by writing or by talking, but only by setting every man while he is young to do something for his country. There is one way of bringing that about. It is by making every citizen a soldier in a national army. The man who has learned to serve his country has learned to love it. He is the true citizen, and of such a nation is composed. Great Britain needs a statesman to lead her and a policy at home and abroad. But such a policy must not be sought and cannot be found upon party lines. The statesman who is to expound it to his countrymen and represent it to the world must be the leader not of one party but of both. In short, a statesman must be a nation leader, and the first condition of his existence is that there should be a nation for him to lead.
XIII
THE EFFECT OF THE NATIONALISATION OF WAR UPON LEADERSHIP