THE MENTAL EFFECT OF DRILL.
PHILOSOPHERS tell us to know ourselves, and as individuals we all imagine that the advice is unnecessary. On the other hand, it is obvious very often that nations do not know themselves, and have at any rate periods in which they are to themselves, even more than to their neighbours, an enigma. In vain their would- be rulers study the public mind ; in vain the journalists fix their attention upon the public pulse. They cannot diagnose the public case. Look at England to-day. What is our world thinking about ? Who can penetrate the reserve of the mass ? It is more incalculable than their passion. A few years ago it would have seemed impossible that the present condition of Ireland should arouse so little emotion, and it cannot be explained by declaring that the whole mind and thought of the people is fixed elsewhere. The English face has become inscrutable. The crowd has become so silent. A little while ago at the opening of Parliament every one noticed the absence of enthusiasm, of cheers, of talk. Yet there was no appear- ance of grimness or of discontent. Again, the sad funeral processions held in connexion with Irish outrages have provoked almost no comment so far as a looker-on could hear and see from the mass of the spectators. Such hot conflict of opinion prevails among the few when Irish subjects are discussed, the whole business seems calcu- lated to arouse such intense emotion, that it would seem impossible for men to be brought face to face with the results of the situation and say nothing. No arguments, no contradictions, no threats or counter-threats. The lookers-on took their hats off, put them on again, and went about their business.
" The English crowd of to-day gives me somehow the impression of men on parade," said a soldier, and perhaps herein lies an explanation. Men are always discussing the moral effects of war, but they are apt to forget the side question of the effect upon behaviour of drill. A generation has lived for years under discipline, quite apart from the great experiences of the men at the front. The men never under fire, never face to face with any very definite hardship, at home perhaps in factories, shipyards, and labour battalions, have been brought under a discipline quite new to them. We are using the word in rather a mechanical sense ; we mean not what is called the discipline of life, but the discipline of mechanical obedience, which seems always to create a kind of reserve. A boy who goes to school for the first time, especially if he goes rather late when he is old enough to think for himself, comes back somewhat changed. Often one hears parents complain that when their children come home from school they find them " less easy to read " than before they went. They are less willing to express themselves. They wear their hearts no longer upon their sleeves, but buttoned up in their innermost pockets. Often they are more amenable ; often, too, they seem to have less initiative and to have developed a tendency to loaf. Most people consider that something is gained, or in process of being gained, which more than compensates for these passing peculiarities. All the same, they are disconcerting for the time being. The same psychic phenomena may, we believe, be traced in to-day's crowd. They did not make their loyalty so apparent when Parliament opened as they used to make it. On the other hand, it is certain that the feeling is still there. In many ways it is stronger; it is more widely based on reason; it no longer pays the revolutionary orator to attack the Royal Family. But the crowd have become a little shamefaced about expressing individual emotion, and corporate emotion can therefore only express itself in an attenuated form. Now and then, of course, the pent-up stream bursts forth just as it does with the schoolboy. They have learned to act together and under orders. Had they been ordered to cheer they would have expressed their hearts to their individual satisfaction, but discipline has impressed upon them only too strongly that too much individual expression savours of mutiny and weakens that wonderful concerted force which they have lately discovered and of which they conceive themselves as a part. The thought of this concerted force has obsessed them. It is set in motion by a word of command, and when no word is given they remain by habit quiescent. They have got what the schoolboy gets, a new arrogance and a new humility. As parts of a whole their pride may even be ridiculous, but as disintegrated individuals they have learned to distrust themselves. Is not this proved by the amazing zeal shown in the modern obedience to trade unions and even to far smaller nnits of authority ? The present serious difficulty of dismissal comes of the meekness with which individuals receive and accept the ruling of the body to which they belong. Bands of employees give up their work to protect the rights or fancied rights of one of their number. Such doings were unheard of till the war sent them to school, where they learned so much and forgot something. There is, there must be, a tendency for men who act together to think together. That means in practice that it takes each man a little longer than it used to do to know what he thinks. He wants to know what all the others have to say, which only means, after all, that he is weighing the evidence and suppressing his prejudice to the best of his power; but it must make him inscrutable and also sometimes make him seem stupid. There can be no doubt that people who have worked under command for the first time do take it very easy when once they are on their own. Natural reaction accounts for the loafing of the little schoolboy ; also he has been taught to play or even to " find occupation " in bands, and he cannot at once regain the habit of occupying himself. The nation just now is perhaps in this same puzzling and pu zzled state of mind. Drill may be the best preparation for a life of liberty, but it is not a quick preparation, and its first effects are rather disappointing and bewildering. " But," some one may say, Continentals have been accustomed to far more discipline than we, and are far less reserved. Does not that destroy your analogy between the Englishman of to-day and the new schoolboy ? " We think not, because the effect of custom is entirely outside our consideration.
Our criticisms of the new scholar do not apply to the fifth-form boy. It is the effect of the unaccustomed that we have been studying, and it is of necessity a transient effect.
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