WHAT NATIONAL SERVICE INVOLVES
By GEOFFREY VICKERS•
THE salutary shock of last September brought home to many people for the first time that the crisis in which we had lived so long might be partly at least domestic. It had been easy to think of it wholly in terms of international relations; as the clash of " haves " and " have-nots "; as the struggle of Good and Evil; as an example of mass neu- rosis in defeated peoples; as the price of ignoring the principles of Adam Smith. Munich sent cracks running all over the surface of our smugness. More and more people asked themselves, " What is wrong with us ? "
Briefly, the answer appeared to be—impotence in certain well-defined fields. There had been impotence in defence; necessary work had not been done. There was a sense of moral impotence, a lack of coherent and satisfying prin- ciple. In the fields of material and moral rearmament alike there was a distressing gulf between effort and achievement. There resulted a wave of indignation. Some called for more guns, others for more faith. With surprising swift- ness there was generated a great volume of moral energy, seeking an outlet. The most pressing question of the day is whether this energy is to be used, misused or merely wasted.
Hitherto its results have been meagre. The sense of impotence has not been swept away; it has grown stronger. The reason is surely that our present way of life does not permit this force to be used for the ends which are desired. Defence involves military engineering schemes, not in Aden or Singapore, but in Westminster and Hackney Wick. It involves plans for the diversion of shipping and transport, for the organisation and redirection of industrial effort, and consequent interference with business and private life on a scale and of a kind which in " peace time " is altogether new. Our community has no administrative machinery and no financial policy for such a task. Its economic life is organised on the basis that the pursuit of private gain is the best way to ensure the production and distribution of what is wanted. The State intervenes increasingly to deter- mine the conditions of the economic struggle, but does not itself take part. The idea that anything should be pro- duced and distributed simply because it is wanted has no place in our economy.
Whether this is a defect in our system or not is for present purposes irrelevant. The fact determines the point
• Mr. Vickers is a member of a leading firm of solicitors in the City, and one of the initiators of a movement advocating "National Service for National Reconstruction." He won the V.C. in the War.
at which our collective efforts become impotent. It ex- plains, for instance, why we can maintain hospitals and battleships, but cannot set the unemployed to work. It is evidence that the challenge of defence, if it were fairly presented to us, would require from all of us service—not service in such time as we can spare from earning a living, but the service of our whole working day; service in the sense of work co-ordinated to the end of usefulness to the community. We have no machinery for co-ordinating effort in this way. In war we should, presumably create such machinery; and today, if we are not at war, we are surely at least as far from anything which could be called peace. Are we prepared to pay the price not merely in money but in adjustment—mental, social and economic?
What is this price ? Clearly, it would mean in the first place a change of outlook in the individual; a greater sense of responsibility, both towards the State and towards his fellows; greater resolution, in face alike of war and of the needs of peace; a clearer realisation that the field in which his co-operation is needed is the whole field of his business and private life. For it is in this field that the fundamental condition for successful democracy is given—the condition that the ordinary citizen shall be continually ready to con- cur with others in getting things done. And even in this field the opportunities for co-operation might be multiplied. A deep defect of modern adminis- tration is the imaginative gulf which so often separates the administrator from his human material. In several spheres—perhaps not least in A.R.P.—consultative com- mitteeN could be used to bridge the gap and at the same time to extend to a wider class the educative responsibility of participation in government.
Changes would be involved in industrial and commercial organisation. Today the great industries are organised in varying degree's for the protection of their interests or of classes of their employees. Can these organisations so widen their scope and their vision as to undertake responsibilities for rendering public service as well as for protecting private rights? In so far as they cannot, the State will ultimately be forced to intervene. In so far as they can, they will justly claim rights commensurate with their responsibilities.
The limitation of private profit in public service is admitted as a principle; but is far from a reality. Both a new outlook and a new teChnique are needed to make it real. It is in fact only one aspect of the cardinal problem —how to couple the resources of a private-capitalistic world to the service of the State's purposes. If this problem is soluble at all, it has to be solved now. Yet today, although the Government's preoccupations are largely economic, no organic connexion exists between it and industry.
Industrial reorganisation even for defence affects labour, no less than the employer. Industry is a social as well as an industrial function. It conditions men's lives as well as supplying their needs. Any attempt at national organisa- tion for defence leads straight to the heart of social problems—unemployment, the dilution, migration and transference of labour, wages and conditions of work, in- surance, industrial training, rural and urban planning. These questions lead far beyond the immediate crisis.
The demand for effort and sacrifice leads to another fundamental question—what exactly is to be defended? The British Empire? The political status quo? The ex- isting economic and social system? The principles of democracy? The principles of Christianity? Service must have an object. An important section of the nation will require assurance that a community which learns to produce and distribute guns will not fail afterwards to produce and distribute butter. Many in all classes will require assur- ance that their effort and sacrifice will be used to support a policy which offers at least a hope of creating a nobler and more significant world for the generations to come.
It is useless to seek to postpone these questions in the name of national unity. On the contrary, national unity can only be achieved by some adequate approach to these questions. A change of outlook demands a change of organisation and both demand a change of policy before effort can find its expression in significant and effective action. Thus the problem of making an air-raid shelter, if adequately tackled, is found to be inextricably tangled with problems of social justice on the one hand and inter- national justice on the other.
The price of national security is a high price. It is payable not only in money but in responsibility, in public spirit, in readiness to accept change—in the practice of democracy as it has never been practised here, or perhaps elsewhere. Yet because of its nature the paying of it may not leave us the poorer. If defence means no more than rearmament within the limits which our present way of life imposes, it will merely mean a debasement of our stand- ard of living. If it brings with it such a change of habit as to let the spirit of public service find greater expression, it may add more to our strength than to our burden.
Previous page
