TOPICS OF THE DAY.
THE MAN-POWER PROPOSALS.
WE have to congratulate Sir Auckland Geddes on much the best and most scientific review of the Man-Power question which has yet been placed before Parliament. He had evidently thought deeply and carefully on his subject, and we have good hopes that the needs both of the Army and of the essential industries will be satisfied within a reason- able time. This is not of course to say that the record of the Government in connexion with Man-Power has been at all creditable. It is impossible to read Sir- Auckland Geddes's speech without asking oneself at every turn why all this was not done a year ago. At the end of 1916 the nation was encouraged to believe that every man and woman would be told immediately what his or her allotted task towards winning the war was to be, and that every one would be set to work forthwith. A year late we jump off from the same mark, and although we have high hopes of Sir Auckland Geddes's scheme, we are certain that it will require all the industry and application of the Government, and all the support the nation can give the Government, to bring it to a successful conclusion. Even now, although a large number of men of fighting age who have been unnecessarily exempted are to be called to the colours, the scheme does not provide for that arraying of the nation for which we have so often pleaded since the early days of the war. To consider only the past year, the National Register could at any moment have been brought up to date, and a plan of National Service could have been based upon it by which every man and woman would have performed the service most useful to the State. Let us deprecate in advance the probable criticism that this would have been industrial conscription. It would have been nothing of the sort. Every man and woman under such a plan would have been employed at full war-time wages, and the automatic result would have been that the luxury trades would have disappeared beneath the waves of the nation's energy.. News- papers would have been saved the conflict of emotions which are exacted by the necessity of deciding whether it is or is not unpatriotic to advertise totally unnecessary articles. Again, the mutterings of discontent against every scheme for increasing Man-Power—they are being heard now against Sir Auckland Geddes's proposals—would have been long since stifled.
But it is useless to go back upon the past. All men of patriotism and goodwill can combine now to help the plan as it is, and to make it a victory-winning success. It has the advantage of coming at an opportune moment, for the recent statements of War Aims by Mr. Lloyd George and President Wilson have united the peoples of the Allied nations as they have never been united since the first days of the war.- In a masterly manner the Prime Minister and President Wilson have shown what the current phrases of democratic language, such as are being used by Socialists and revolutionaries all over the world, mean when they are brought to the test of practical politics. There is nothing, for instance, in the phrases the Bolsheviks use so freely about "No forcible annexations," "No indemnities," and the "self-determina- tion of nations" which is not agreeable to us when those terms are not merely allowed to float in raid-air but are applied practically to the problems before us. The result, in fine, of the recent statements of War Aims is that we now all recog- nize the minimum for which we are fighting. Labour accepts the statements as whole-heartedly as the highest Tory. If Germany does not accept our demands, nothing remains, then, but to compel her to do so in the field. For the time being the less unreasonable sort of Pacificist has been driven out of business. He has had to put up his shutters. To the scientific value of his scheme, which we have already traced, Sir Auckland Geddes added the merit of courage. What he said about the workers in the munition factories and shipyards who threaten to hold up supplies if the Man- Power scheme is put into force could not have been better worded. It is true that the Amalgamated Society of Engineers, for example, has a very important place in the country, but it is preposterous for any -section of its members to pretend that they enjoy some kind of inherent or prescriptive privilege of standing outside schemes imposed upon the nation by the Government. If young men of military age refuse to fight, their fathers will have to take their place ; the spectacle, already harrowing enough, of men being patched up from their wounds over and over again to be sea to the trenches, Will be aggravated into one of .the most tragic scandals of which a country could be guilty. Even the short remission from great physical suffering which the men at the front get. ia their few days of leave will have to be stopped. It is impossible to argue with those who take the view that, in spite of these things, privileges must remain untouched. It is the virtue of Sir Auckland Geddes's speech that he recognized that fact, and told the insurgent workers plainly that their threats would not be listened to, and that if they attempted to carry them out they would be exposed to the hatred and contempt of all their countrymen. We should like to say here that, though Sir Auckland Geddes did not mention the fact, the hatred and contempt of which he spoke will be directed against them in an exceptional degree by their womenfolk. It is certain now that the enfranchisement of millions of women will go through, and from the point of view of raising Man- Power, the decision comes opportunely. For the result is sure to be that the women who have already played so nobly encouraging and so tenacious a part in the war will even increase their efforts to secure that there shall be no obvious and shameful dereliction of duty. The contempt of a woman is in the whole world the thing least easily defied. And if we were asked whether any considerable number of young men will have the peculiar form of courage necessary to defy it—particularly when this contempt is supported by the women's strong consciousness of their new place in the affairs of the country—we should say without hesitation that they will not. In any case, the spirit of working men throughout the war has been so sincere and plucky that we cannot take very seriously the threats uttered by a few. The attitude of the women will place the matter beyond doubt. The " sufferings " of those at home are not indeed worthy of the name. There has never been more than serious inconveni- ence through any one of the various shortages. Those young men who say that they will stop working at munitions or aeroplanes or ships must remember that they have already had the tremendous privilege of remaining at home in security and comfort for over three years, during which time they have i earned wages that have been the envy of every soldier n the trenches.
Another merit of Sir Auckland Geddes's speech was that, while he fully recognized the imperative need of more men at the front, owing to the fact that 1,600,000 enemy troops will probably be transferred from the Russian front to the West, he balanced demands for soldiers nicely and properly with the need for more work in the shipyards and the aeroplane factories. We have dealt so often lately with the subject of ship- building that we shall say no more now. We think, however, that, in spite of the unceasing vigilance of the Navy, and the latest encouraging returns, we cannot hope for any absolute means of destroying the 'U '-boats. It is simply a question of plugging away on the old lines, and of course following up new and more hopeful lines of action as well, but in the main applying ourselves to producing as many ships as we possibly can to replace those which are sunk. Look at the matter in this way. If we succeed in staving off starvation in food or materials by building enough merchant ships, we shall be safe against defeat, for we can certainly hold the Western line till the enormous resources in man-power of the United States are brought to our assistance. But if we upset the true balance by sending too many men to the front, and fail to build enough ships, we may conceivably lose the war before the American host can arrive upon the scene. We therefore place ship- building at the very head of our needs. The production of more aeroplanes, tremendously important though it is, must be placed second. Of course Sir Auckland Geddes's figure of from 420,000 to 450,000 men whom he hopes to comb out, mainly from the war industries, does not represent the whole increment in view. There is the new "class "—to use the Continental term—of boys who are just coming of military age, and we think that more men could be obtained than some people suppose from the rearrangement of our Home Army. There is one other matter to which we wish to refer. An appreciable number of men are available who joined the Army voluntarily before, the Conscription Act came into force, who were wounded and discharged but who are now cured and quite capable of military service again. It is true that the nation is under a Parliamentary pledge to these men not to call them up again. They were expressly exempted from the operation of the Con- scription Act. We think it should be considered, however, whether the national needs are not now acute enough for a reconsideration of this pledge. It should be remembered that any pledge can be recalled by the same means by which it was originally bestowed ; the pledge of Parliament is not the act of a person, but the expression of the sum of the will of the nation itself. No one, we think, who has seen men going back to the front after being patched up by the doctors four or five times, and has then turned to the contrast afforded by a Man who was wounded once early hi the war, and is now as well as ever he was in his life, can doubt that there is some reason in what we say. We admit that this is a very difficult matter, and we dislike the idea of tampering with a pledge given compara- tively recently, particularly in the case of men who proved themselves the salt of the earth. We should like, therefore, to repeat the suggestion we made a short time ago, that if the idea of recalling the pledge be rejected, an attempt should" be made to bring back more of the fit discharged soldiers to the Army by offering a bonus. Bonus-raised troops were familiar enough in the Napoleonic Wars, and we see no reason why a plan which answered then should not answer now. As regards the decision of the Government to leave Ireland out of the question "for the present," we hope we may take the words of Sir Auckland Geddes to mean that the Govern- ment are waiting only to know the results of the Convention, and that they will thereafter reconsider the question. Possibly some pledge has been given to the Irish Nationalists. It would be a great help in the discussion of this question to know whether any such pledge has been given. If it was given, it ought obviously to have been safeguaidcd by reservations such as Mr. Henderson wisely introduced into his pledges to Labour.
We have only one serious reservation to make in our praise of Sir Auckland Geddes's statement. We assume, however, that a want of verbal dexterity rather than any want of right feeling led him to use the words of which we are going to complain, for we are sure that he cannot have meant his words to convey the very unfortunate meaning that they may only too easily convey. We refer to his remarks on casualties. He said that the Government were determined to secure proper consideration for the men in the ranks, and that they would not hesitate to deal with Generals who were guilty of sacrificing their men. Of course the sense of these words is unexceptionable in itself. No sane person, whether he regards the question only from a humane point of view or from the point of view of military success, can for a moment be in- different to an unnecessary sacrifice of men. But surely it may be assumed that our Generals are neither less humane nor more foolish than we are ourselves. If a General is convicted of throwing away his men, he is convicted of the greatest possible military futility, and he should not be allowed to remain in command for another moment. But when a Minister uses such language as Sir Auckland Geddes used in speaking of casualties, we cannot help saying that he is going much too near to the " Don't-nail-his-ear-to-the-pump ' kind of argu- ment. Sir Auckland Geddes added : "We are accusing no one of recklessness or disregard for human life. The Government is laying down a perfectly plain general principle." But nevertheless we must utter our protest. We cannot think that it makes for military efficiency either that Generals in the field should feel that they are being held up to a kind of public odium in advance and that they should conduct their terribly difficult work under a kind of threat of public disgrace, or that the men themselves should feel that insinuations are abroad about the ability of their Generals to handle troops with proper consideration. No General can do himself justice with a rope round his neck. We are sorry that Sir Auckland Geddes did not see that such words are indiscreet. The best comment on all talk about casualties is supplied by Sir Douglas Haig's recent despatch, in which he pointed out that it was not fair to the men themselves that new drafts should not have sufficient time for training. This is the only truly humane word on the subject. By far the greatest number of casualties occur through a want of cohesion in a hardly pressed line, and cohesion can be acquired in only one way—by training. It will be much better for the Govern- ment to apply themselves to sending out to Sir Douglas Haig as many men as possible as early as possible, than to talk in general terms about the horror of casualties.
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