THE CONSCIENTIOUS OBJECTOR.

ALITTLE book entitled I Appeal onto Caesar (Allen and Unwin, Is. net), written by a lady (Mrs. Henry Hob, house) whose eldest son is a Quaker and a conscientious objector and is now in prison, deserves the attention of the Government and of the public generally. It is supplemented by an Introduction by Professor Gilbert Murray and by letters from Lord Selborne, Lord Parmoor, Lord Hugh Cecil, and Lord Henry Bontinck. Though by no means satisfied by, and indeed in strong disagreement with, many of the argu- ments used by the writer and her supporters in setting forth " the case of the conscientious objector," we will say at once that we are in practical agreement with a great deal of Mrs. Hobhouse's plea.

We hold that Parliament was right in principle in declaring that the true conscientious objector, i.e., the man who honestly believes, and always has believed, that the shedding of human blood, no matter how good the motive, is a crime, and that armed resistance even to great wrongs is a greater wrong, ought not to be compelled to defend his native land, even at the moment of its dead- liest peril. Again, we agree that Parliament, having chosen a sound principle, provided very clumsy and in- efficient machinery for putting it into pract iee. We further agree that an immediate remedy is required for the unfortanate situation in which the nation is placed in respect of a certain number of the imprisoned conscientious objectors. There are Men now in gaol who ought not to be in gaol. That they are counterbalanced by a larger number of men who ought not to have been exempted does not, of course, afford any palliation or excuse. To these points of agreement we may add a practical suggestion. We think the Govern- ment should at once appoint a small Commission of Gaol Delivery, who should consider individually all the cases of conscientious objectors now in prison. Whenever satisfied that justice is not being done—i.e., that an individual has been unfairly deprived of the right to exemption on grounds of conscience—they should recommend that such individual should at once receive the King's pardon. The case of Mrs. Hobliouse's son is one of the strongest. He became a Quaker some time before the war, and proved the conscientious nature of his adhesion to the Society of Friends, not only by his change of religious denomination, but by abandoning at the same time his position as the eldest son of a landowner. Further, he was in all but name a minister of religion. It was to protect people like him that the Conscience Clause was inserted in the Act, and it was only owing to a series of blunders, to which no doubt he unconsciously contributed, that he is now serving a term of imprisonment.

So much for our practical agreement with " the case of the conscientious objector." We trust, however, that none of our readers will suppose that we think that the application of the exemption clause was an easy matter, or that see are lightly condemning the Tribunals to which was entrusted the task of carrying out a loosely worded Act of Parliament. If we are to judge by the little book before us and the opinions of even such just and patriotic men as Professor Murray, Lord Selborne, Lord Hugh Cecil, and their colleagues in this act of protest, the advocates of the conscientious objector do not realize the full difficulties of the case.

It was all very well for the House of Commons to adopt the principle decided upon, but unfortunately the moment the Act was passed the problem was, as it were, turned upside down, or at any rate came to bear a completely new face. Parliament thought only of how to protect the men who in good faith would rather suffer anything than shed human blood or use force even to destroy evil. What the Tribunals had to consider directly the Conscience Clause became law was a much harder matter. " How are we to prevent cowardly, lazy, hypocritical, lying men from taking advantage of the machinery set up by Government to protect the bond-fide

tender conscience, and using it to save their own unhallowel skins and to place upon the shoulders of brave and true men a double burden ? How are we to root out the vilest kind of moral malingering ? How are we to stop men from making false statements and false declarations to the effect that they have a conscientious objection to doing their duty, when as a matter of fact they may never before have ruled any part of their lives by the dictates of censcience ? " These were the problems the Tribunals had to solve. We, at

any rate, shall never forget that the Tribunals had a duty to

perform towards the State and towards the best and bravest in the land as well as towards the conscientious objector. If occasionally they blundered, and through their blunder, inflicted injury on individuals, it is a monstrous wrong to treat them as if they were cruel and unjust judges. lusters!.

of such treatment, the Tribunals deserve our strongest sym- pathy for the struggle they made to prevent the Conscience Clause in the Compulsory Service Act being used as a shelter for the coward and the skulker.

More than this, the Tribunals had to deal with what we may call " the middling cases," the cases of those who Wel'O not exactly fraudulent men—i.e., men who were pretending to be conscientious objectors when they were nothing of the kind—but men who had no heart for self-sacrifice an-1 who caught at any plea for exemption. Quito rightly, the Tribunals wanted to avoid suggesting to them an easy metho.I of evading an essential duty. They did not want to put up a sign inscribed : " Why worry ? If you are troubled

about Compulsory Service, all you have to do is to say you have a tender conscience. No one can prove that you

have not. Parliament has allowed you to be judge in your own cause. Nobody can compel you to commit suicide." Such hints must prove a dreadful temptation to weak men. Unless, then, the Tribunals were going to let their decisions act as a positive incitement to cowardice and want of patriotism, they seem obliged to give their judgments a stern character.

They dared not let the benefit of the doubt always tell against a man's duty to his country and in favour of his selfish interests.

And here we may note how utterly false is the analogy which is so often invoked—it appears in the hook before us ---- in regard to the early Christian martyrs. They could make their peace with the State by performing an act which exposed them to no trouble or inconvenience. A pinch of incense throws on the altar dedicated to the Genius of the Roman Emperor was enough. They had every fleshly inducement to make a compromise with the State. Can we fail to honour them when they preferred a dreadful death to the violation of their conscience ? Very different is the present situation. The dread of death and suffering, the instinctive terrors an 1

agonies, are apparently in league with the conscience. If a

man can only pretend to himself that he feels a conscientious objection, he may escape from the very jaws of death. lie may himself put the awful cup away from his lips. The path to safety for him is to drug his conscience. The tempter comes to him in the guise of conscience and says : " Only offer this small pinch of incense to me, and I will not only save your life, but also clothe you in the noble robes of spiritual pride. You will be a glorious martyr without any physics!

inconvenience whatever, or at the worst with physical suffer- ings which cannot for a moment be compared with those of the unhappy wretches who are defending their country in the trenches."

These considerations must never be forgotten when we are examining the ease of the conscientious objector. We pity

the man who is imprisoned, or forced to do work of a non- military character, and forget the honest, simple-hearted soldier who is dying in the trenches in the cause of civilization and humanity ; who is fighting the battle of the consaientiou objector quite as much as that of the keenest of Anti-Germans. The soldier at the front is the good citizen. He is the true exemplar. To him, indeed, we may apply without irreverence the most deeply moving words ever written :-

" Surely ho bath borne our griefs. an i carried our se ,rows. . He was wounded for our tremgrossioni, he was bruised far our iniquities the chastisement of our peace was upon him, all with his stripes we are honied."

To speak quite frankly, though we want to free the true conscientious objector, we are not going to make an idol of him. A good many of the conscientious objectors who have been imprisoned have far too much of the sophist in their composition to fill us with the sympathy of enthusiasm. The true Quaker .visionary, the man who obeys the inward light, may command our respect. The rationalistic, logical, argu- mentative conscientious objector does not appeal very strongly either to the heart or to the brain. He had his answer long ago from Socrates. We have already quoted more than once the beautiful passage in the " Laws ' in which Socrates dealt with him. We may quote it again. Socrates imagines the " Laws " incarnate, thus addressing the youth who insists that he is under no obligation to defend his native land or to serve the State in arms :— " ' Tell us.---What complaint have you to make against us which

justifies you in attempting to destroy us and the state In the first place did we not bring you into existence 1 Your father married your mother by our aid and begat you. Say whether you have any objection to urge against those of us who regulate marriage?' None, I should reply. ' Or against those of us who after birth egnlate the nurture and education of children, in which you also were trained 7 Were not the laws, which have the charge of education, , ight in commanding your father to train you in music and gymnastic 7' Right, I should reply. Well then, since you were brought into the world and nurtured and educated by us, can you deny in the first place that you are our child and servant, as your fathers were before you 7 And if this is true you are not on equal terms with us ; nor can you think that you have a right to do to us what we are doing to you. Would you have any right to strike or revile or do any other evil to your father or your master, if you had one, because you have been struck or reviled by him, or received some other evil at 11113 hands ?—yon would not say this 7 And because we think right to destroy you, do you think that you have any right to destroy us in return, and your country as far as in you lies ? Will you, 0 professor of truettyktue, pretend that you are justified in this 7 Has a philosopiker like you failed to discover that our country is more to be valued-and higher and holier far than mother or father, or any ancestor, and more to be regarded in the eyes of the gods and of men of understanding 7 also to be soothed, and gently and reverently entreated when angry, even more than a father, and either to be persuaded, or if not persuaded, to be obeyed And when we are punished by her, whether with im- priamunent or stripes, the punishment is to be endured in silence ; and if she lead us to wounds or death in battle, thither we follow as is right ; neither may any one yield or retreur,pr leave his rank, but whether in bottle or in a court of law, or in any other place, he must do what his city and his country order him; or he must change their view of what is just ; and if he may do no violence to his father or mother, much lessmay he do violence to his country."

Few men who were not obeying a real religious impulse could, we imagine, read these words without a pang, without the thought : " Am I not playing an ignoble part ? Have I remembered how terrible is the responsibility of him -who acts as judge in his own cause ? Am I sure that what I labelled the path of conscience was not merely the path which would allow me to avoid a dangerous and unpleasant duty ? " Truly the joys of martyrdom with only ten per cent. of the risks is an enervating game But though we find it difficult not to be left cold by the ordinary conscientious objectors, and cannot help finding in many of them a certain moral obliquity, if not moral degeneracy, we must repeat our demand for immediate attention to the question. Whatever else is right, it is wrong that several, perhaps many, of the men who are now in prison should be there. To feel unsympathetic towards the conscien- tious objector gives us no right to be unjust to him—to torture him or to deprive him of his legal rights. Again, it is clearly wrong that any attempt should be made to break down the objector's conscience or pseudo-conscience by a system of bullying. We think it probable that the allegations of bullying of a brutal kind have been a good deal exaggerated, but bullying should never have been tolerated even in the slightest degree by the military authorities. No junior officer should ever have had any excuse given him for thinking that if he allowed a conscientious objector to be knocked about he was doing what his superiors would consider the right thing. As a conclusion to the whole matter, we ought, we feel, to deal (though it must be very shortly) with the question— But how are you going to punish the men who, though they :;re not Quakers or inspired by real religious feeling, declare that they are conscientious objectors ? How should Parlia- ment have dealt with those bad citizens, or at all events " self- ,lisratcd" citizens, who stubbornly refuse to shoulder the obligations which they ought to shoulder, who in fact are very much in the position of the smuggler or person who attempts to evade paying his just contributions tothe revenue of the State. The problem is a very difficult one, but it appears to us that there is a good deal to be said for the punishment of exile—a punishment which for some reason or other has been neglected by modern States. If a man deliberately refuses to pull his weight in the boat, and insists hat he owes it as a duty to himself not to help to maintain the social life of the community, the State has surely a right to deprive him of the privilege of citizenship, and to banish Lim, for a time or perpetually, from its confines.

No doubt an objection to exile is that in many cases the

conscientious objector would welcome the proposal. lie would snatch at the chance of compulsory emigration. On the other hand, there are a good many soon to whom exile would not only be a great inconvenience but a at disgrace, a real punishment. But to what place is the exile to be sent ? We can well imagine that most foreign countries would refuse him admittance. The places to which he could be sent would probably have a climate and physical conditions to which he would thoroughly object. The conscientious objector is not as a rule of the material out of which hardy adventurers are made. But perhaps this suggestion will be deemed fantastic, and internment till the end of the war will be preferred. In any case, Parliament must provide better machinery than it has yet provided for carrying out its intention to protect tender consciences.