TOPICS OF THE DAY.
-COMPULSION.
COMPULSION has come at last, yet not clad in terrors or bringing in its train fierce controversy and passion, but accepted almost universally as an act of necessity and of justice. There will, of course, be a protest by Sir John Simon and his group of thirty or forty Members, but unless some great change takes place in the attitude of the House of Commons between the initial and the final stages, the Bill will go through without any difficulty. Since the Spectator has advocated universal, and therefore compulsory, training and service for many years past, and urged it when it was by no means a popular cry, and when the newspapers which are now claiming it as their victory had little or nothing to say in its favour, we cannot but be greatly moved by the satisfac- tion of our hopes and aspirations. What moves and satisfies us most in the adoption of compulsion is the fact that com- pulsion by law is infinitely fairer and more democratic than compulsion by the heavy and often clumsy pressure of public opinion. ' Public opinion can among a patriotic people and during a great crisis effect wonderful things, but when reliance is placed upon its action there are -always loopholes left by which the well-to-do man and the man with private influence can escape their obligations. The well-to-do man and his sons, provided they are not rendered conspicuous by riches or by position, can make themselves invisible in a way which is not open to the poor man, unless, indeed, he is the very poorest of the poor—a gipsy and a vagabond. In that case no doubt extremes meet. The well-to-do man in a great many instances is not tied to his work, and while a hurricane recruiting campaign is going forward he can contrive to be away on businessor pleasure, at a rest-cure or on a " confi- dential business mission " in some remote part of the United Kingdom, and so escape disagreeable questions about his still being out of khaki. The working man who is held by his daily toil has no such opportunities. He is visible to all men and at all hours, and he cannot escape the pressure which his friends, his employers, and his neighbours put upon him. We of course do not complain of that pressure. In a sense it is wholesome and genuine, and if compulsion by law does not exist it is absolutely necessary ; but it does act unevenly, and therefore unjustly and in an undemocratic way. Compulsion by law, on the other hand, is fair, for it operates exactly in the same way upon the well-to-do as upon the working man. There Lino favouritism, and those who attempt to evade their duty, or being outside military age assist others to evade it, can be properly punished. But here let us say that when we talk of the well-to-do being able to evade the pressure of public opinion we must not be held to suggest for a moment that the rich have not done their fair share. On the contrary, as a class they have done more than their share. Nothing has been more striking in the present war than the fact that the rich, the professional classes, and the men of light and leading and education generally have led the way, and given a greater proportion of their young men than any other section of the nation. But in every class there are selfish people. What we contend is that under the voluntary system such persons within the well-to-do class can evade' their duty in a way which is not open to the wage-earners.
Compulsory service of the kind which is secured under the Government's Bill is not the equivalent of the scheme of compulsory National Service which we have consistently advocated. The difference resides in the fact that if you apply compulsion in peace time, and not as an emergency measure, you have the enormous additional advantage of a trained nation. We have never doubted the good heart of the British people, or their willingness to make great sacrifices for a great cause.- We had no fears on that score. But by putting off compulsion till war time and the very last moment it has given us an untrained and not a trained Army. If some ten or twelve years ago National Service had been adopted, we should have been in an infinitely better position than we are at present. Every youth not a cripple or an invalid when he had reached the age of eighteen would have undergone his four months' recruit training, would then have passed into the Territorial Force, would have remained there for four years and then entered the National Reserve. He would not, of course, have been a trained soldier of the kind that we obtain in the professional, long-service Regular Army, but he would have learned the grammar of his work, and, as the Territorials who were with the colours or came back to the colours in 1914 showed, we should have had a body of men who could have been knocked into shape within six weeks of their embodiment. Next, we should have had a far larger number of trained officers. Finally, and perhaps the most important advantage of all,we should have had no excuse for not providing that reserve of rifles and other 'equipment for which the Spectator called, but, alas ! in vain.- If there had been a Territorial Reserve .of a million men, -it ,would have been impossible for the Government Department to refuse to keep _a million rifles in store, or to make the answer which was made by the War Office to the Spectator in 1909—i.e., that it was a useless extravagance to keep a reserve of a million rifles always ready against a sudden improvisation of troops, because such an improvisation would not and could not possibly occur.
When at a discussion meeting of the National -Defence Associa- tion in 1909 the editor of the Spectator urged -his plea, he was in effect told by a member of the Army Council that his proposal was absurd, impracticable, and unnecessary—the blitherings of an idiot who did not understand even the -rudiments of military science.
Mr. Asquith has done well in making his Compulsion Bill thorough and whole-hearted within the limits in which it operates. But while the Government are about it, would it not be as well to enlarge the scope of the measure and make compulsion, though on a different scale and for different purposes, apply to the whole of the male population up to the age of sixty-one ? We do not, of course, suggest that the men between forty-one and sixty-one should be con- scripted for trench warfare in Flanders. We should, however, like to see the whole man-power of the nation put at the disposal of the Government without further legislation. We would give the Government the right by Order in Council to assign war duties to men over forty-one years of age. To begin with, the Government should, in our opinion, call upon all men between forty-one and fifty-one to join a Volun- teer Training Corps, and, under penalty of a fairly heavy fine, make themselves efficient within the next six months. As, however, the question of physical disability is naturally much more acute with the middle-aged man, we would not, to begin with, burden the Government and the medical authorities with heavy compulsory machinery. We would allow any man called upon by Proclamation to join a Volunteer Training Corps to exempt himself, as it were, by making a written statement to the effect that in his opinion he is physically unfitted for military work, or, again, that the nature of his civil employment renders it impossible for him to train as a Volunteer. In order to ensure the bona, ficles of such a state- ment, the names and addresses of men thus claiming exemp- tion should be printed and posted upon the church-doors. Their neighbours would be pretty shrewd judges of whether they were taking an unfair advantage of the leniency of the law. We do not, however, believe that there would be any very great misuse of this power of self-exemption. It is more likely, indeed, that a good many middle-aged men really not fit for any military work would try to join the Volun- teer Training Corps, and would have to be told during the course of their training that they were not physically up to the work. By the means we have suggested we do not doubt that the numbers of the Volunteer Corps could easily be raised to a million, or even a million and a half.
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