TOPICS - OF THE DAY.
COMPULSION, THE CABINET, AND THE PRESS.
" There can be no army without men. Men can be had only voluntarily or involuntarily. We have ceased to obtain them voluntarily, and to obtain them involuntarily is the draft—the conscription. If you dispute the fact, and declare that men can still be had voluntarily in sufficient numbers, prove the assertion by yourselves volunteering in such numbers, and I shall gladly give up the draft. Or if not a sufficient number, but any one of you will volunteer, he for his single self will escape all the horrors of the draft, and will thereby do only what each one of at least a million of his manly brethren have already done. Their toil and blood have been given as much for you as for themselves. Shall it all be lost rather than that you, too, will bear your part ? "—Lincoln's Message in Defence of the Draft.
THE nation is to be congratulated upon the way in which the so-called Cabinet crisis has ended, foil crisis " is much too sensational a word to describe Mr. Asquith's difficulties with his colleagues. For ourselves, we. never entertained much doubt as to how those diffi- culties would be surmounted. To any one who took the trouble to think the matter out it was clear that the force of -circumstances would render resort to compulsion for the' young unmarried men necessary—it being admitted, as it now is, that the Derby scheme failed to bring in all but-." a negligible quantity ." of such persons. The Prime Minister's pledge necessarily committed the Cabinet. Whether any members of the Cabinet will resign remains to be seen. We should not be at all surprised if in the end there were no resignations at all. We greatly distrust newspaper reports of what goes on in Cabinets, such as those we have had of late in the Daily Mail and the Times. Even when Cabinet Ministers in the heat of controversy so far forget the obligations of secrecy as to let their newspaper supporters know what is going on, they seldom give ,more than hints, or, if they do give more, such information as they supply is apt to be greatly over-coloured by the stress of controversy. A man much in earnest, made fretful by impatience and anxiety, excited by opposition, or rendered unreasonable by what he thinks and calls " mulishness " will come out of a Committee declaring that such-and-such people are abso- lutely against him and determined to wreck the scheme for which he cares. Accordingly he paints the situation in the colours of earthquake and eclipse to his favourite editor or editors. Yet it may well be that all the time the members of the Committee who are described as hopelessly irre- concilable, and out to ruin things generally, and so on and so on, are only grumbling loudly, and mean in the end to give in,' though not without a protest. It is a peculiarity of human nature, and especially of Committee human nature, that men hate to look forward. They seldom sit down calmly and estimate whether in the end they will have to yield, and if they find that they will, look pleasant and swallow their medicine. On the contrary, strange as it may _seem, when they are made to give in by force of cir- cumstances they go on until the very last moment grumbling, growling, and protesting that they will never beld, It is not very dignified and not very businesslike, ut presumably they regard such action as a way of getting even with those who are forcing them, as they would say, to do something which they consider wrong. Again, there are always in Committees men who, though they may feel that a thing is necessary, if disagreeable, are anxious to let it be known that they are not yielding to a colleague who they think has not behaved well in the matter, but bowing to the will of the majority or the persuasions of the Chairman.—" If the Committee decide by a clear majority, I shall not break up our solidarity " ; or again : " I think it is a case where in the ultimate resort we ought to trust the Chairman, but till the will of the Chairman has been made- .quite clear, I refuse to be bullied by —." No doubt when tempers are hot Mr. — will describe the man who takes this view as a deadly, if not poisonous, opponent of the scheme he champions, and as a man who must resign if the scheme is carried. Yet as a matter of fact Mr. was only engaged in showing that he did not mean to be hustled by a firebrand like X.Y.Z."
Another element which induces newspapers to manu- facture, or at any rate to magnify, crises is the journalist's natural love of an exciting atmosphere. We journalists always tend to believe public affairs to be much more picturesque and much more clearly defined than they really are. Let us hasten to say that journalists do this, not out of. any ignoble desire, as the public sometimes imagines, to sell their papers, but because things naturally appeal to them in a picturesque and sensational form. They would not be journalists if this were not so. The journalist is almost inevitably a person " awed by rumour." The more picturesque and sensational the rumour, the more he is fascinated by it. What the journalist will call " a struggle to the death in the Cabinet " between the forces of Mr. and Lord — may often represent a very commonplace situation. In reality what has happened is that Lord -- has expressed the opinion that for his part he " sees no reason why things should be rushed through at such a terrific pace, and Mn — has answered that " if we potter about much longer we shall become the laughing-stock of the nation." Therefore, though we should not have been sorry if one or two resignations had been the result of the decision upon the Derby scheme, and the Cabinet had thereby become more homogeneous, more determined to dare all things in the prosecution of the war, and more willing to let their one touchstone of action be : " Will this help us to beat the Germans ? " we shall be greatly surprised to hear of any sensational resignations.
The nation will know by Wednesday what the actual decision of the Cabinet is. Meanwhile we can only guess, but we will indulge ourselves with taking a hand in the guessing competition, prefacing our effort by saying that we have made no attempt whatever to obtain private information, but shape our forecast solely upon abstract considerations as to what is the logical outcome of the situation. We expect, then, that Mr. Asquith will begin by congratulating the country and Lord Derby upon the fine response made by the men of military age. The Prime Minister will go on to point out that, though the men of military age have done their duty as a whole so magnificently, an analysis of the figures shows that the young unmarried men have not done as well as they ought to have done, that those who stand out cannot be described as a negligible quantity, and that therefore the pledge given to the married men must be carried out. Accordingly a Bill is to be prepared, and will at once be introduced, for compelling such persons to offer themselves for attestation. Whether the Bill will attempt to simplify the process of compulsory attestation by scheduling all individuals engaged in certain forms of work, such as railway work, as indispensable, we shall not attempt to say, but it is clear that from many points of view advantages would flow from certain occupations being thus dealt with, provided, of course, the list were not too long. We may presume, further, that not all the men compulsorily attested will necessarily be called up at once. Some will be considered semi-indis- pensable and will be put back into the more distant groups, while others, again, will be sent at once to join the colours. In addition to these arrangements, we should not be at all surprised if Mr. Asquith took up the attitude which Lincoln took up, and stated his determination not only to use the Draft, but to defend it as a just and necessary war measure. In the passage from Lincoln's Message which we have used as the text to this article, the President, while enacting compulsion, left the voluntary system standing in order that those who objected to com- pulsion might still, if they liked, do their duty as volunteers. If it is urged that this is a mere dialectical subterfuge, all we can say is that what was good enough for Lincoln is good enough for us. We frankly confess that we would rather be thought sophists with Lincoln than patriots with Mr. Ramsay MacDonald. To leave the " Voluntary " gate open, while at the same time sternly insisting that every young unmarried man not indispensable or unfit must do his duty by entering either that gate or the gate headed " Compulsory," is, in our opinion, both just and practical.
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