III—THE NATION AND TRAINING

We have adopted Compulsion, become a militarist Power! Melancholy consummation; but for the period of the war it was always, I think, a foregone conclusion. What is to happen after? How is national security to be guaranteed without permanent surrender to militarism?

Assuming that attention will be paid to retaining due command at sea and in the air, what further will be necessary to fit us for our part in a League for Peace if it comes, or, if it does not come, to make us safe?

There will here be put forward in roughest outline a notion—long in the writer’s mind, but for which there has seemed hitherto little chance of serious consideration—with the plea that there is really no alternative solution commensurate with the need for being thoroughly prepared, no other adequate way, in fact, out of a dilemma, short of retaining a measure of Continental militarism, repugnant to our traditions, and ruinously costly to a people in our position.

Put with the utmost brevity it is this: That all boys between the ages of fourteen and eighteen, not then at school, shall pass four months yearly in camps, which shall give them continuation schooling so far as practicable, technical education in the craft, trade, or occupation for which the boy is most suited or intends to adopt, together with training in all the essentials of a soldier’s life. At the close of their fourth training the boys should be affiliated to Territorial regiments, and pass at once to one definite period of military service, from three to six months, as may be necessary to convert them into potential soldiers; and that, from that point on, we should rely, as hitherto, on purely voluntary service. From such a nucleus a really efficient Territorial force of at least a million could probably be enrolled, and the skeleton of a much larger force kept in being.

The scheme is admittedly heroic, but it could be as gingerly introduced as seemed good to more practical men than is this writer.

There are in England, Scotland, and Wales some 1,500,000 boys between the ages of fourteen and eighteen; there are eight months in the year when such education and training could be carried on. There will be an infinity of camps in being before the war is over. And however unsuited these camps may be at the moment for combining technical instruction with military training, many of them could undoubtedly be adapted. The chance of so much suitable material at hand, so much organizing capacity, and so much sense of awakened public spirit and necessity, will never come again. Some plan more or less heroic has got to be adopted, and it is submitted that no other could possibly kill so many birds with one stone. For, to the writer this proposal is even more important in relation to the menace from within than in relation to the menace from without.

The worst feature of our social scheme at present—the most dangerous flaw in the machine—is the waste, the absolute throwing away of the years between fourteen and eighteen, the most important period of the male life (and, for that matter, of the female life), the years when physique and character are forming when the instrument is malleable; years for the most part now left to chance and to blind-alley occupations. If we want to be a strong and healthy nation, this is the weakness of all others to overcome. The following is taken from the introduction to Mr. Arnold Freeman’s intimate and careful book: “Boy Life and Labour”: —

“What we need to consider is not the sacrifice of a certain number of youths through faulty industrial arrangements, but the lack of training and the manufacture of inefficiency in the majority of boys between school and manhood.

“At the present time it would seem to be the consensus of opinion of school teachers, employers, and all those who are intimate with the problem that great masses of boys are growing up to manhood inefficient for adult work, and incapable of performing the elementary duties of home life and citizenship. The truer mode of regarding the problem may be illustrated by the following quotation:

“ ‘According to the main statistical sources of information the very serious fact emerges that between 70 and 80 per cent. of the boys leaving elementary schools enter unskilled occupations. Thus, even when the boy ultimately becomes apprenticed or enters a skilled trade, those intervening years from the national point of view are entirely wasted. Indeed the boy, naturally reacting from the discipline to which school accustomed him, usually with abundance of spare time not sufficiently utilized, and without educative work, is shaped during these years directly towards evil.’ (Majority Report of the Poor Law Commission, Part VI., Chap. VII.)”

Now, if the richer classes of this country could be brought face to face with a sight of their own boys from fourteen to eighteen planted in this morass that boys of the poorer classes have as a matter of course to struggle through, they would marvel that the poorer classes have not long ago demanded that it be drained. Working-class parents have not demanded this chiefly because the boy from fourteen to eighteen has meant so many scanty shillings in the family pocket. When shillings are scarce one more or less seems vital. But, economically as well as nationally speaking, such rotting-down of the boys is grievously short-sighted. By this scheme, I believe, the working classes would be the first to benefit, and, after a few years, the last to wish it given up. Their ultimate gain would be incalculable, and, collectively speaking, their immediate loss even would be small. One million five hundred thousand boys training four months in the year means a seeming withdrawal of one boy in three, or half a million boys annually, from labour. But the number of boys between fourteen and eighteen actually employed before the war was only 1,264,000, so that there would be available some unemployed towards filling the places of the half million withdrawn. In the withdrawal too, of so large a number of boys from the labour market lies some chance of solving a problem that will begin to loom as soon as Peace comes: How to find places for the women whom the war has accustomed to work and wages? By this withdrawal, also, old and unemployed men would benefit; we shall want all the help we can get to minimize the unemployment that will sooner or later follow the war. So far as the labour market is concerned, the problem, in fact, would be mainly one of adjustment, but boys could be paired for their four years of training, one taking the other’s job—boy A. working it eight months the first and third years and four months the second and fourth year; vice versâ with boy B. A nation which has achieved in these last few months such miracles of organization is surely equal to a task of adjustment no harder of accomplishment than that which has long confronted every militarist country in time of peace, and which may at any moment confront this country, if it neglects adequate preparation for home defence on some such lines.

Consider the life of the working man at present. The State provides him as a boy with education up to the age of fourteen; provides him as a man with labour exchanges, insurance, and old-age pensions. The one period, which in the more fortunate ranks of Society is regarded as above all preparatory for life, is the one period of which the State takes no account. It is a fatal hole in the ballot. Why should not the workers have the privilege for their sons that belongs by mere good fortune to the wealthier classes—the privilege of a training that will give them greater health, greater knowledge and technical skill, better habits, more self-respect, and the power as well as the inclination to defend their country if need be?

After this war the national readjustments that take place to meet the menace from without and the menace from within must surely have relation to fundamental necessities, and not merely be the top-dressing and timorous expedients that accompany the piping times of a long-unshaken peace.

In the expenditure of large sums to achieve its ends the State need not look for its money back this year or next, so long as there is a certainty of the money back manifold ten and twenty years hence.

The expense of a national scheme for the training and technical education of all boys from fourteen to eighteen would have been looked on before the war as an insuperable objection. But the truly wonderful example of faith shown by the Russian Government in cutting off their own colossal revenue from drink at the outbreak of the war, and the immediate incalculable advantage to the strength of the Russian nation that accrued thereby, has knocked penny-wisdom off its perch.

This is not the time or place, nor am I qualified to examine the cost in detail. But, whatever that cost, can there be any doubt that the increased physical and industrial efficiency, coupled with the national security guaranteed by such training, would bring the outlay back tenfold within a generation? And can there be any question that it would conserve wealth, which adult training would but dissipate? When the war is over there will be great numbers of men whose lives have been hopelessly jolted, who have to find new occupations—men qualified, and probably only too willing, to take positions of technical instruction and military training under such a scheme. And the boys of the nation, already infected with desire to stand for something in the national security, would fall in with good spirit.

Apart from the question of expense, opposition would come, no doubt, from the employers of boy labour, and from the working-class parents of boys who are contributing to the family purse.

Both these objections can surely be met in the main by careful organization and dovetailing of employment. Only half the boys would be training at once; and for the winter months, of greatest stress for the poorer classes, none would be training; boy-labour is not highly-skilled labour, it is rarely of a nature that cannot equally well be supplied by another boy, and, failing that, by women, or men past the prime of work. With good-will and co-operation it should not surpass the wit either of employers or of the officials of special Boy-Labour Exchanges to cope with the dislocation. A boy’s earnings are not vast; when his own keep has been paid there remain but few shillings for the family exchequer. The value of these few shillings is in many cases, however, enormous; the loss might be made good by some system of insurance. Nor is it inconceivable that camp work would produce a small wage that could go to the assistance of the boys’ families. Omelettes cannot be made without breaking eggs; and, even if distress were caused at the start, can it be seriously weighed against the great ultimate benefit to the working classes, and the overwhelming advantages of rejuvenation in the blood and brain of a whole nation? The war has shown what those who have had to do with camp life for boys knew well before—the vast change that can be made in the physique and bearing of young fellows by a few months of fresh air and training. If those months are repeated yearly for four years, the training combined with civil instruction, and followed by a short spell of full military service, the country will have not only potential soldiers, but real men and citizens, at the end.

This is interference with the liberty of the subject. Yes; but a boy is only a boy. In the richer classes he is sent to school till he is eighteen without any say whatever in his fate. And as to interference with the liberty of the parents: Are they not now completely interfered with, in reference to their children up to the age of fourteen; and is there any sane reason why that interference should not be continued partially, for the good of the boys, and of us all, up to the age of eighteen?

The scheme is nothing but a form of militarism! Yes, but facts must be faced. After the lesson of this war, its appalling suddenness, its complete disregard of the law of nations, after the hatred it has evoked and the burning for revenge it will leave, are we prepared to trust our country and all that it stands for, to old-time methods and—luck? If not what form of training can we have that will be less militarist than this? To relapse into our unpreparedness is but to court the chances of an attack, to shirk our share perhaps of duty under a League for Peace; and to risk being forced into rank militarism, in one of those panics certain to come freely after such a war.

If I thought such a scheme of boy-training would bolster up privilege, foster a dangerous docility, put power into the hands of our Junkers, and generally convert our country into a kind of Germany, I would shun it like the devil. To keep boys of that age at it all the time would be dangerous; to train them for civil and military life four months in the year, with one short final period of military service—harmless. After the war—perhaps not at once, but within a few years—there will almost certainly be serious civil troubles, and any such scheme of boy training would need to be inaugurated under the most solemn engagements not to employ the youth of the nation in the quelling of strikes, civil riot, or what-not. It would be for Labour to fix those guarantees before they gave adherence to the plan. Having secured themselves, I believe they might look forward to nothing but benefit, after the first rubs and jolts.

Consider, too, that except under some such scheme there is practically no chance of putting into practice another national dream—the resettlement of the land. By attaching farm lands to those camps, town boys could be instructed in the difficult work of modern agriculture. Farm workers do not grow on thorn-trees, or even spring full-fledged from the brains of ardent reformers. They are made, not born, and made in youth. It is time to begin making them, if indeed it is not already too late. No adequate land scheme will flourish without machinery on a large scale for educating boys in modern farm work.

But there is another aspect of this matter worth more than passing attention. If the war ends victoriously, Great Britain will bulk very large, dangerously large, in the eyes of the world. The German cry is: “Great Britain is the tyrant; the Fleet of England is the menace, threatening every country!” No effort will be left untried to din that whisper into every ear, to implant that suspicion in every mind. To escape the world’s jealousy will not be possible. And, if in addition to a dominant Fleet, and possibly a dominant air service, we preserve militarism on the present Continental lines, we shall excite—whatever the peaceful nature of our conduct and intentions—the most profound uneasiness and envy in quarters where we most wish to be regarded with perfect equanimity. On the one hand, then, we have the danger of relapsing into a state of unpreparedness that may provoke another war; on the other, the danger of rousing too great fear and envy by an ostentatious strength, and of increasing a burden of armament already too heavy on our shoulders. Between these dangers lies a path of safety in the training of our boys. But there lies much more than that. There lies the grander social future of our country—an incalculable physical, moral and economic uplifting, a nation more self-reliant and more eager, purged of that don’t-care look, of the town blight which was settling on it fast—there is no nation suffering from town life to anything like the extent to which we suffer from it. Just now the war has lifted that blight; but with peace it will come down again, unless we fight it.

Is this lamely outlined plan a mere dream, or is it a possible, nay, a probable, measure, in times big with chances—in times such as we may never have again, for tuning up our life, for equalizing fortune, removing foul places, and essential weakness?

With the suggestion that it is worth thinking over, at any rate, the writer leaves the answer to those less fatuous than himself.