AGE AND THE WAR.
IT is said, with what amount of truth we do not know, that the percentage of deaths among older men has been larger than usual during the past year. In one way this was inevitable. Parents and grandparents cannot lose sons and grandsons in such numbers, and under such terrible conditions, without feeling the physical effects which commonly accompany mental trouble. To follow day by day the lengthening list of casualties in an over-present dread of what they will find there is an exercise that may well try the stoutest heart, and during the last thirteen months it has been the chief employment of thousands who are no longer young. It is not, however, the suffering caused by the deaths of kindred that we have in view. That is immeasurably the acutest cause of depression, but it is not the only one. There are forms of mental disturbance which affect a much larger class—a class, indeed, which embraces the whole body of educated men who have come to an age when they can no longer serve their country in any active capacity. Until sixty has been left some way behind there is consolation to be found in some of the minor forms of war work. They can serve as National Guards, or in Volunteer Reserves, or as special constables. But at one time or another their powers of helping the war in these ways grow feeble, until at last they feel that they are only burdens to others who would get on faster without them. Sooner or later, if they reach old age, they have to look for employment in their own thoughts, and the change is seldom an agreeable one. It is not, indeed, that they are at any loss what to think about. There is material enough at hand, but it is of a kind that only breeds discomfort. However far their recollections go back, or however well read they may be in history, they can find no parallel to the present conflict. Disturbing as former wars may have been while they were going on, they left the main conditions of the national life unchanged. After Waterloo, after Sebastopol, after the Indian Mutiny, after the war in South Africa, men turned. with relief to their old ways of living as soon as peace was restored. Some temporary increases of taxation, and an addition to the National Debt which did nothing to cripple industry, were then the chief results that war left behind it.
Things are very different now. No one who recalls the years that immediately preceded. the war can find. any pleasure in looking forward to a revival of the issues— Constitutional, industrial, or fiscal—which then filled his mind. They had their importance once ; but if they are destined to have it again, it can only be in the imagina- tions of some professional politicians. To any one who trios to gauge the nature and magnitude of the conflict in which we are now engaged there is something repellent in the very notion of their reappearance. They belong, we may hope, to a past which is dead and buried. So far as there was any reality in them they will survive, but it will be as mere fractions of a larger whole. In their former shapes they can have no interest beyond what is involved in the fear of their resurrection in all their old narrowness. Is it conceivable that a General Election should again turn upon such issues as the extent of the Lords' veto, the precise boundaries of the new Ulster, or the right of a Parlia- mentary elector to vote—on different qualifications—in more than one constituency, or that questions which havo disappeared from public notice in the nobler excitement of a fight for national existence should spring into a dis- honoured life " six months after the war " ? The subjects that will then come up will, we may hope, involve larger issues and demand larger treatment. But there may be some among the men of whom we are thinking who remember how little real change former wars have worked in the national temper, and so find. it hard to believe that the future which will follow upon the war will be anything more than a, reproduction of the past to which the war has for the time put an end. Is it strange that to old men who look to this aslthe sole result—for England—of all that the Allies have done and suffered their sun should seem to be going down in unrelieved gloom ?
There are others, no doubt, who will take a longer view of the future awaiting England, but it will not necessarily be a brighter one. They will realize clearly enough that no man now living, however few his years may be, can hope to see the vanished conditions of life return. Their descendants may live in a better or in a worse England ; they will not live in the England. that he has known. Old men live in a great measure in and for those who come after them, and they are not likely to welcome for them that which they would greatly dislike for themselves. The generation that will follow their own will have to face new problems or to provide old ones with new solutions. There is nothing in this prospect to disturb a healthy young man or woman. For them life will go on somehow, and the very uncertainty of the future has a charm of its own. But to the old man these changes all make for the worse. At the very least, they mean the closing of the ways by which fortunes have hitherto been built up, or, if they remain open, the pursuit of them in strange countries. A. future which can thus be described is not what he would welcome for himself ; will it be any satisfaction to him to know that it is reserved for those who will live after him ? They, indeed, will probably make light of these forebodings. They will tell him that they have no doubts of their ability to face whatever is iu store for them, that when difficulties are fairly faced they commonly disappear, and that in this respect, if in nothing else, the future will be like the past. They may even try to cheer him with glowing pictures of what England will be like when the victorious Allies have set up a new and better order of things. Unparalleled as the cost of the war May be, the lesson it will convey will be worth the money. In the new society there will be no luxury and no extrava- gance. Wo shall have seen what thrift and the simple life could do for us when we wore driven by necessity to practise them, and none of us will ever wish to return to the old and bad society from which the war has set us free. It is to be feared that these assurances will fall on unbelieving ears. The listener will recognize the too familiar language of Collectivist enthusiasm, and he will also remember that he has never come across a, single crank who has not been absolutely certain that the peace which is to follow after so wonderful a war will mean the triumph of his own favourite hobby.
There is still another form of anxiety which may beset the old at this time. It springs from the uncertainty that rests on the Constitutional future of England. In this country Constitutional change has hitherto moved very slowly. The Parliamentary franchise retained the singular anomalies which disfigured it down to 1832, the power of the Crown did not take its present shape till the reign of Victoria, and the alterations in the relations between the Lords and the Commons effected four years ago still await revision. But when the war is ended there are two questions of very great moment which may easily claim attention—Federalism and woman suffrage. This is not the time to speak of them on their merits. All that concerns us now is the fact that they may take on a wholly new importance with the return of peace. How they have hitherto been regarded by instructed Conservatives may be seen from what Mr. Dicey wrote about them in the eighth edition of his Introduction to the Study of the Law of the Constitution, published early in the present year. Of Federalism he says : " The attempt to form a Federal Constitution for the Empire is at this moment full of peril to England, to the Dominions, and, it may well be, to the maintenance of the British Empire." Of the claim of women to Parlia- mentary votes he says : "It treats as insignificant for most purposes that difference of sex which, after all, disguise the matter as you will, is one of the most fundamental and far-reaching differences which can distinguish one body of human beings from another." It is impossible to feel confident that either of these questions will be taken up in this cautious temper when they are next presented to the country. The question of Federalism will no longer be approached, as hitherto, from the standpoint of English politics. It will have to be considered in the light of the demandsput forward by the Commonwealth of Australia, the Dominions of Canada and New Zealand, and the Union of South Africa. The nature and extent of these demands may at present be unknown even to themselves. But this much may be said with some certainty : that whatever they do ask—if they all ask the same thing—will be granted them. It is . the chief gain of the present war up till now that it has made our fellow- subjects in other continents known to us as they have never been known yet. On every front Colonial troops— especially the Australians and New Zealanders in the Dardanelles and the Canadians in Flanders—have fought for the flag with an enthusiasm and tenacity that have never been surpassed. The patriotism they have shown has put to shame some English counties. That their claims, what- ever they may be, will deserve and receive full and generous recognition is beyond doubt. A. closer union with the Mother Country need not—and in the first instance probably will not—go the length of Federalism. But it will raise questions that will bring the theory of Federalism into full publicity, and it is impossible to forecast the form that it may ultimately take. Much the same may be said of woman suffrage. What has been the share of women in the present war ? In every depart- ment of civil life they have been as much in evidence as men. The Government have thought them important enough to include them, on equal terms with men, in the National Register. They serve as clerks in Government offices and as waitresses in clubs and restaurants. They have replaced men on railways and trains. They are helping to make munitions and to gather in the harvest; and by next spring many of them will have accustomed themselves to the harder forms of agricultural work. They are associated with men on numberless Committees. They are always ready to serve as nurses, as attendants un convalescent soldiers, as servants in hospitals, as waitresses in canteens. And, most wonderful of all, they have given up for the term of the war that militant agitation which they bad brought to such perfection. In not a single instance have they struck for shorter hours, or higher wages, or the maintenance of trade rules. In this way they have set an example to men which miners and artisans would have done well to imitate. It does not follow from this catalogue of women's achieve- ments that the old arguments against giving them votes have lost their force. But it does follow that, in view of the facts we have enumerated, they will be put forward with much greater assurance of success. To the old, who as yet have hardly trained themselves to bear the huge financial burdens which the war will impose on us, the possibility of a Constitutional revolution in addition will come as a last and worst terror. SENEX.
[We disagree altogether with the view of " Senex," but the points he raises are of great interest. Ho no doubt describes a frame of mind very common to mon and women who have passed sixty-five. Nevertheless wo venture to predict that the old who survive the war will find the post-bellum world not so very different from what it was before. " Ginger will [still] be hot i' the mouth," and we shall find neither the Federalists nor the Feminists so incapable of assimilation as he imagines.—En. Spectator.]
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