COMPULSION AND RECRUITING.
THOUGH we are strongly convinced that compulsion, had we adopted it in peace, would have preserved the nation from its present peril, and might probably have prevented the war, we are bound to point out that, till the Government are obliged to resort to compulsion—which cannot be long delayed if things go on as they are now going —the less that is said about it the better. And for this reason. The country, though deaf to so many other things, has a curious instinct about compulsion, and listens to every whisper about it. Now we do not believe for a. moment that compulsion is unpopular. In many ways we agree thoroughly with Mr. Grant, whose letter we have quoted in the previous article, that it is popular, and that a great many men who now have a kind of surly suspicion that they are being forced into the ranks by unfair private pressure, while well-to-do shirkers escape, would welcome a compulsion which came down, as it would, with as much severity on the man with £600 or £700 a year as upon the man with £1 a week. We will go if everybody else has to go," is a feeling which strikes' very deep. But to talk about compulsion till its enforce- ment is decided on has a very bad indirect result. It is not too much to say that vast masses of men have come to believe that the Government intend to adopt compulsory service as soon as the need arises. Start- ing from this premiss, thousands, indeed hundreds of thousands, argue backwards that because the Government have not had recourse to compulsion the need for men cannot be great. " Wait till you are wanted," is a view which appeals very strongly to the phlegmatic and undemonstrative Englishman. He is watching the Govern- ment, and when the trumpet-blast of compulsion comes he will be ready enough to shoulder a rifle. In all probability he would have already done so if he had known that compul- sion would never come. Meanwhile he waits to see. He is not going to act prematurely, or to get into a state of alarm before the Government themselves are alarmed, and he feels that they cannot be alarmed or they would have already adopted compulsion.
We should like next to point out how extra- ordinarily muddled men's minds still are in regard to this problem. They seem to think that if the policy of Lord Roberts and the National Service League had been adopted, we should have had compulsion of the kind that is now talked of—compulsion for oversee service. As a matter of fact, we should have had nothing of the kind. What the National Service League has always advocated is the Swiss system—universal training to arms, but with compulsory service only in these islands. To make the matter more clear, we may describe what would have happened here during the present war if the scheme proposed by the National Service League had been at work. We should have had an active Territorial Army, filled by compulsion, of some five hundred to six hundred thousand men. We should have had next a First Reserve of about a million and a half, and a Second Reserve of another million and a half. In addition, of course, we should have had our regular professional Army, whom we may call the Imperial gendarmerie. The moment war was declared the Territorial Force would have been embodied, as it was embodied last August, and the Territorial Reserve called up, with the result that we should auto- matically have had some two million Territorials under arms. Behind them would have been another million and a half of older Territorial Reservists, who would, of course, have been warned for service. Then a process analogous to the raising of the new Army would have begun. We should have asked in the first place for volunteers from the Territorials for oversea service, and in all probability we should at once have got a million men—all, of course, having had previous training. A great many of the units would, no doubt, have volunteered wholesale, and new units would then have been raised out of the Second Reserve to take their place. Other regiments would have been raised ad hoc, just as they are being raised now. The only difference would have been that all the men flocking to the standard on patriotic grounds would have been trained, not untrained men. Not only would the material have been vastly better because it would have consisted of trained men, but these trained men, as we have seen in the case of the National Reserve, would have come in much more readily than the untrained men. They would have had the sense of military duty in them, and, further, they would not have suffered from that shyness which is characteristic of the untrained man. Many men do not enlist simply because they think that they would be no good in the field, and that they might make fools or worse of them- selves. Such men, like Mr. Fearing in The Pilgrim's Progress, as often as not turn out very good soldiers, but that is a fact hidden from them, and they fear to put it to the touch.
To sum up, volunteering would have been necessary just as it is necessary now, but it would have been the volun- teering of men already fit as against that of men who require several months' training to make them fit. We do not, of course, suggest that the " compulsory " Territorial who had only had his recruit training of four months, and his fortnight in camp four years in succession, would have been a perfect soldier after he had been out of the Army for seven or eight years. He would have required a good deal of freshening up, but nothing like the amount of training that is necessary for the utterly untrained man. For example, his musketry would still have been fairly good, for that is a thing men do not easily forget. After a day at the butts he would have been congratulating himself upon how little he had gone off his old form. This, however, is not the time for details : we wish merely to keep the public mind from confusion. Once more—for we cannot too often emphasize the point—if we had Universal Service we should still depend upon volunteering for foreign service : only it would be the volunteering of the trained, not the untrained man, and therefore some- thing far more valuable.
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