PREPARATION FOR PEACE.
IN the year 1909, writing on the new way of life which we must adopt and the instant need of preparation for war, we declared that just as Denton, copying Bacon, made" Boldness, Boldness, and again Boldness" the motto of the Republic, so " Prepare, Prepare, and again Prepare" must be our motto. "Preparation is the need of the moment, and want of preparation has always been, though we trust it may not be in future, the chief of our national weaknesses. Our new way of life must be a way of preparing ourselves, morally, intellectually, and materially, for the coming struggle —a struggle which, by the paradox of life, may be avoided by the perfection of such preparation, but in no other con- ceivable way." The words we then wrote of war are just as applicable to the period of peace that is ahead of us. Unless we prepare for peace and the new way of life which it will bring, we shall find ourselves in a similar predicament to that in which we found ourselves in 1914. Though it may seem to some a t-trange use of language, peace may come upon us very sud- denly. We do not mean by this to suggest that it is coming soon, but merely that when it does come it will be without any great warning, and may thus take us at a disadvan- tage, and plunge us into a hugger-mugger of futile and painful experiments which might have been largely, if not entirely, avoided by looking ahead. If peace has its victories as well as war, it has also, like war, its defeats ; and we may make these defeats perilous to the social fabric, perilous to our economic situation, and fraught with evil untold unless we apply ourselves to the task of preparatory organization. We must know what to do when peace comes, and lay our plans accordingly. Very likely a good many of those plans will be upset when the moment arrives, or will have to be changed for other plans. But that does not matter. The essential thing is to have a course of action, or, rather, definite principles of action, laid down. We dare not trust to the improvisation of the moment, which is almost certain to land us in confusion, if not in some act of pure folly.
One of the peace problems which we have got to face— though it is only a comparatively small one—is set forth in a letter entitled "The Case of the Disabled" which we publish in our issue of to-day. We shall soon have a hundred thousand disabled soldiers to deal with, and the writer points out how hopelessly supine we have been in failing to set up any machinery for grappling adequately with the difficulties inherent in the situation. Yet here is a matter which we can tackle in war quite as well as in peace. Further, it is one which, if we do not tackle it while the war is going on, we shall practically be unable to tackle when peace comes, because the rush of other and far greater problems will deprive us of the time and energy to do so. To speak generally, the problem of the disabled soldier is the problem of carefully sifting and analysing cases, and of allocating to each man the kind of work which is appropriate to him as an individual. Next, he must in many cases be trained for the work which his circumstances demand. There are things which the man crippled by the loss of a foot or a leg, or some injury to the hip or the knee, can do as well, or nearly as well, as the man with two sound legs. There are other jobs which should be reserved for the man whose legs are sound, but who is suffering in the arms. But it often happens that these jobs, though they can be undertaken by injured men, require a good deal of training, mental and physical. Clearly it is advisable to begin this training at once, even if it is said that there is no difficulty just now in finding odd jobs for such men—in giving them fragments of the work which used to be done by men now at the front. But these fragments will not exist when the war is over. Therefore, even if the need is not now apparent, it behoves us to think out the machinery for training and get it in readiness. If this is done, and done, not by men hiding their light under a bushel, but visibly and before the country, public opinion will begin to help the helpers by impress- ing upon the individual disabled soldier that it is his duty to look forward to the work which he is to do when peace comes. After all, do what we may for the disabled man, his ..alvation is really in his own hands. If he can only be induced not to drift along and trust that somebody will find him a job, but to plan out his own new way of life, the task of those who wish to give him a helping hand will be made very much easier and he will get far better results from that help. Some men have naturally the gift of looking ahead, but all men may have it stimulated in them if we do not foolishly assume 1 hat they cannot be expected to look after themselves. The present writer recalls a case which he saw in hospital some few months ago. It was that of a National Reservist who had had both feet cut off by an engine on the piece of railway line which he was engaged in guarding. That man, only three nights after a most painful and dangerous operation, was discussing with his night nurse what particular breed of chickens—White Leghorn.s or Buff Orpingtons—he should keep on the chicken farm which he had determined to start as soon as he was " cured." He had roughly calculated what his pension would be, and how he could get "a little place" and start a small poultry farm. That is unfortunately a somewhat uncommon attitude, but it could be made much more common if we did not assume that the disabled man would be indifferent to his future. The effort to make the men face their peace careers should be begun in hospital, and kept up by a special machinery designed for that object. We must not, however, dwell too long upon this aspect of the question. We merely use it by way of example. What is a far more important, or at any rate far larger, problem is that which has been named" The Problem of Demobilization." When peace comes, the Government on one side and the soldiers on the other will be determined to carry out demobi- lization with the utmost rapidity. The Government will naturally want to free the country from the financial burden of keeping some four or five million men with the colours, and the soldiers will be equally anxious to regain their free- dom and return to civil life. But unless a solution of this problem of the return of the soldier to his place in the civil polity is carefully thought out, there will be not only enormous confusion, but very great suffering for all concerned. The best way to realize what the situation will be is to think of a concrete example. Take some factory which has been converted from its old uses into a munition factory, and has for the last year or year and a half been employed on Government work, turning out shells, or machine guns, or gun-carriages, or other munitions of war. When peace comes the work of such a factory will stop absolutely dead. No more of the things that it has been turning out in frantic haste will be needed, and every effort will be made to stop its work completely. Peace, as we have said, may not come gradually, but in an instant, and when it comes our arsenals will be full, and there will be no excuse for making more of the implements of war in our new factories. But the instant stopping of the manufacture of war material cannot be followed by an instant return to ordinary work. It is true that there will be a great general demand for all sorts of civil supplies, the production of which has been set aside for more urgent work. The publie will be crying out for more motor-cars, motor-vans, and motor-omnibuses, more ships, more machinery of all kinds, more cotton and woollen goods, more furniture and more hardware, and more of all the things that have been "done without" since the war began. But though these needs will exist, the ordinary factories will in most cases find themselves without a single order, and also without the capital required to start speculative work—to start creating things which in peace time owners calculate are certain to be asked for, and therefore can safely be manufactured for stock. Unless the whole matter has been thought out beforehand, their first impulse will be to wait a little and see how things are going. But that waiting may mean very great misery for those who during the war have been drawing enormous wages. Beyond this difficulty there is another perhaps more important, of a physical kind, which will prevent the rapid resumption of ordinary work in our factories. It took many weeks, and in some eases several months, to adapt ordinary industrial concerns to munition work. It will take, we fear, as many weeks or months to place them in a position to return to civil work. And during that time employment will have to cease, except for the comparatively small number of men engaged in the task of reconversion. This means that the first effect of peace will be to throw a very large number of men temporarily out of work. But this backwash will be met by a huge tide of workers returning from the front, clamorous for work of every sort and kind. Unless, then, there is a most careful preparation for tiding over the transition period, we shall be faced with a situation such as that which arises when a body of men are being turned out from a public hall while another body of men are seeking to gain admission and the two streams meet on the portico steps We are in no sense pessimists as to the industrial future, and are convinced that in the end we shall be perfectly well able to shoulder the burdens left by the war. Nay, more, we believe that our working population of all kinds—both the people who work with their hands and those who work with their brains—will have learnt great lessons from the war, and will be in a position to put these lessons into practice. All indus- trial development relies in the last resort upon human energy, and the amount of human energy existing in this country has been enormously stimulated by the war. The country is awake, and will remain awake. But this readiness of every man and every woman to " do their bit " in the battle of peace (if we may be allowed so mixed a metaphor) will not save us from great suffering in the first few months that will follow the cessation of hostilities and the return of the troops, if we have not tackled the problem beforehand, but have lulled our- selves with the belief that it will be all right "on the night." In spite of the fact that it is necessary to win the war before we talk about peace, and that there must be no deflection of the national energy from this prime object, we must allocate a certain amount of the best brain-power in the country to put us in a posture of economic defence and to make the process of demobilization as little painful as possible. We should like to see the whole problem dealt with by a very strong Royal Commission, presided over by a Cabinet Minister, and armed with a certain amount of executive power. The man to preside over that Commission need not necessarily be a business man, but he should be a man who understands Englishmen and the conditions of English life, who is sympathetic, who is receptive of ideas, who is not afraid of taking responsibility, and who is not likely to be awed by newspaper and Parliamentary criti- cism. It is not the function of a newspaper to make public appointments, but by way of illustration we might name the kind of man who ought to be employed upon such work. We believe that in Lord Derby is to be found exactly the type of man who could undertake and carry out the work. Lord Derby, as we have said again and again in these columns, understands Englishmen, and is not afraid of asking them to make sacrifices. Further, he is a man who has been a soldier and who understands soldiers. Yet in one sense he is a typical civilian, conversant with business affairs and local administration. He is just the man to bring together the soldiers, who must have the first say in the work of demobi- lization, and the employers of labour. Further, Lord Derby's experience of civil government both before and after the war will prevent him from falling into what we may call the conventional folly of treating the whole civil administration of the country (Imperial and local) as " red-tape " which must be hacked away regardless of consequences. In spite of the fact that it is fashionable just now to criticize what he accomplished, and to declare that the Derby scheme was a muddle, and so forth, the fact remains that Lord Derby and those who served under him performed work of the highest national importance last autumn. It is not too much to say that Lord Derby arrayed the nation for war. He laid the foundations for compulsion, for without his scheme compulsion could not have been carried out so easily as it was carried out. If the task were entrusted to him, he could, we are convinced, array the nation for peace. If it should happen, though we trust that may not be the case, that Lord Derby is wanted for other work, then all we can say is : Let us get a man as near to the Derby type as possible.
Though we are not among those who imagine that peace is coming in the course of the next few weeks or months, a beginning should be made without delay, for the necessary preparations are bound to take time. Foundations in all cases require solid work. If they are well and truly laid, the superstructure may be rapidly built up. But there can be no " hurricane " business in digging foundations.
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