Army, because Parliament can only remedy grievances, and that not before years of delay and agitation elapse. Even then the grievances are not dealt with on their merits; for under our party system, which is the most abominable engine for the perversion and final destruction of all political conscience ever devized by man, the House of Commons never votes on any question but whether the Government shall remain in office or give the Opposition a turn, no matter what the pretext for the division may be. Only in such emergencies as the present, when the Government is forced to beg the Labour members to help them to recruit, is there a chance of making reasonable conditions for the soldier.
The Four Inoculations.
It is therefore necessary that the War Office should have working class representatives on all committees and councils which issue notices to the public. There is at present, it would seem, not a single person in authority there who has the faintest notion of what the immense majority of possible British recruits are thinking about. The results have been beyond description ludicrous and dangerous. Every proclamation is urgently worded so as to reassure recruits with £5,000 a year and repel recruits with a pound a week. On the very day when the popular Lord Kitchener, dropping even the et rex meus of Wolsey, frankly asked the nation for 100,000 men for his army, and when it was a matter of life and death that every encouragement should be held out to working men to enlist, the War Office decided that this was the psychological moment to remind everybody that soldiers on active service often die of typhoid fever, and to press inoculation on the recruits pending the officially longed-for hour when Sir Almroth Wright's demand for compulsion can be complied with. I say nothing here about the efficacy of inoculation. Efficacious or not, Sir Almroth Wright himself bases his demand for compulsion on the ground that it is hopeless to expect the whole army to submit to it voluntarily. That being so, it seems to me that when men are hesitating on the threshold of the recruiting station, only a German spy or our War Office (always worth ten thousand men to our enemies) would seize that moment to catch the nervous postulant by the sleeve and say, "Have you thought of the danger of dysentery?" The fact that the working class forced the Government, very much against its doctor-ridden will, to abolish compulsory vaccination, shews the extent to which its households loathe and dread these vaccines (so called, but totally unconnected with cows or Jenner) which, as they are continually reminded by energetic anti-inoculation propagandists in largely circulated journals and pamphlets, not to mention ghastly photographs of disfigured children, sometimes produce worse effects than the diseases they are supposed to prevent. Indifferent or careless recruits are easily induced to submit to inoculation by little privileges during the ensuing indisposition or by small money bribes; and careful ones are proselytized by Sir Almroth's statistics; but on the whole both inoculation and amateur medical statistics are regarded with suspicion by the poor; and the fact that revaccination is compulsory in the regular army, and that the moral pressure applied to secure both typhoid inoculation and vaccination both in the regular army and the Territorials is such as only a few stalwarts are able to resist, is deeply resented. At present the inoculation mania has reached the pitch of proposing no less than four separate inoculations: revaccination, typhoid, cholera, and—Sir Almroth's last staggerer—inoculation against wounds! When the War Office and its medical advisers have been successfully inoculated against political lunacy, it will be time enough to discuss such extravagances. Meanwhile, the sooner the War Office issues a proclamation that no recruit will be either compelled or importuned to submit to any sort of inoculation whatever against his will, the better for the recruiting, and the worse for the enemy.
The War Office Bait of Starvation.
But this blunder was a joke compared to the next exploit of the War Office. It suddenly began to placard the country with frantic assurances to its five-thousand-a-year friends that they would be "discharged with all possible speed THE MINUTE THE WAR IS OVER." Only considerations of space restrained them, I presume, from adding "LAWN TENNIS, SHOOTING, AND ALL THE DELIGHTS OF FASHIONABLE LIFE CAN BE RESUMED IMMEDIATELY ON THE FIRING OF THE LAST SHOT." Now what does this mean to the wage worker? Simply that the moment he is no longer wanted in the trenches he will be flung back into the labour market to sink or swim without an hour's respite. If we had had a Labour representative or two to help in drawing up these silly placards—I am almost tempted to say if we had had any human being of any class with half the brains of a rabbit there—the placards would have contained a solemn promise that no single man should be discharged at the conclusion of the war, save at his own request, until a job had been found for him in civil life. I ask the heavens, with a shudder, do these class-blinded people in authority really intend to take a million men out of their employment; turn them into soldiers; and then at one blow hurl them back, utterly unprovided for, into the streets?
But a War Office capable of placarding Lord Roberts's declaration that the men who are enlisting are doing "what all able-bodied men in the kingdom should do" is clearly ignorant enough for anything. I do not blame Lord Roberts for his oratorical flourish: we have all said things just as absurd on the platform in moments of enthusiasm. But the officials who reproduced it in cold blood would have us believe that soldiers live on air; that ammunition drops from heaven like manna; and that an army could hold the field for twenty-four hours without the support of a still more numerous body of civilians working hard to support it. Sane men gasp at such placards and ask angrily, "What sort of fools do you take us for?" I have in my hand a copy of The Torquay Times containing a hospitable invitation to soldiers' wives to call at the War Office, Whitehall, S.W., if they desire "assistance and explanation of their case." The return fare from Torquay to London is thirty shillings and sixpence third class; but the War Office no doubt assumes that all soldiers' wives keep motor cars. Still, let us be just even to the War Office. It did not ask the soldiers' wives for forms of authorization to pay the separation allowance to their bankers every six months. It actually offered the money monthly!
Delusive Promises.
The middle and upper classes are nearly as bad as the War Office. They talk of keeping every man's place open for him until the end of the war. Obviously this is flatly impossible. Some places can be kept, and no doubt are being kept. Some functions are suspended by the war and cannot be resumed until the troops return to civil life and resume them. Employers are so hardened to the daily commercial necessity for discharging men without a thought as to what is to become of them that they are quite ready to undertake to sack the replacers when the troops come back. Also the return of peace may be followed by a revival of trade in which employment may not be hard to find, even by discharged soldiers, who are always passed over in the labour market in favour of civilians, as those well know who have the task of trying to find places for them. But these considerations do not justify an attempt to persuade recruits that they can go off soldiering for months—they are told by Lord Kitchener that it will probably be for years—and then come back and walk to their benches or into their offices and pick up their work as if they had left only the night before. The very people who are promising this are raising the cry "business as usual" in the same breath. How can business be carried on as usual, or carried on at all, on unoccupied office stools and at counters with no men behind them? Such rubbish is an insult to the recruit's intelligence. These promises of keeping places open were made to the men who enlisted for South Africa, and were of course broken, as a promise to supply green cheese by quarrying the moon would have been broken. New employees must be found to do the work of the men who are in the field; and these new ones will not all be thrown into the street when the war is over to make room for discharged soldiers, even if a good many of these soldiers are not disqualified by their new training and habits for their old employment. I repeat, there is only one assurance that can be given to the recruits without grossly and transparently deluding them; and that is that they shall not be discharged, except at their own request, until civil employment is available for them.
Funking Controversy.
This is not the only instance of the way in which, under the first scare of the war, we shut our eyes and opened our mouths to every folly. For example, there was a cry for the suspension of all controversy in the face of the national danger. Now the only way to suspend controversial questions during a period of intense activity in the very departments in
