Part 11

It is only necessary to concede in the first instance that a sane Government recognises the paramount claims of the children, the terrible loss of much of the country's best blood, and the consequent need of bringing what is left to us to the highest pitch of public utility. These premises should surely stand beyond controversy. Why should not every slum child have its share of public-school life free of all charge? If we have come to the conclusion that this is the best thing for the future of the country, why should the majority of the little ones be left out? Does anybody hold that we do not require the best that all the children can do for England? To those who suggest that such a simple matter is revolutionary, or that it will cost too much, one reply is that our children are our greatest national asset. Upon our capacity to rear them well and wisely and to educate them to the needs of the time, the whole future of the British Empire depends. There is really nothing revolutionary about the proposal, for, if you come to think of it, we give free education and even free meals, and the most hardened Conservative will acknowledge freely enough that the slum is not a good training ground for the rising generation. You cannot clear slums away in a hurry. The owners of such places are regarded if not with affection, at least with respect by the law and the law makers, but you can run up boarding establishments that will be infinitely superior to slums, and you can gather within them the outcasts of the capitalistic system for proper feeding, clothing, education, and training. If children go wrong they are sent to special schools. All that is necessary is that instead of the children going wrong, the grown-ups shall go right, that they shall recognise how little their politics, prejudices and preconceptions matter by the side of one child's welfare. I go as far as to declare that it is the bounden duty of the State to make its gift of education effective, that in making education compulsory it recognised certain paramount duties that remain fulfilled only in the letter, and not in the spirit. One does not advocate change, however beneficial, for the mere sake of a nobler and wider life, such pleas do not gain prompt acceptance. Rather let it be stated quite frankly that, unless we turn the best aptitudes and capacities of the rising generation to the fullest account, we cannot hope to maintain our position in the face of competition. As a nation we handicap ourselves lamentably when we endeavour to hold our own in the world with no more than a small part of our national assets realised or realisable. Children are our assets, and between the infant mortality on the one hand, blind product of ignorance, poverty, and apathy, and indifferent education on the other hand, we stand a very bad chance in the battle for supremacy. If we would increase, preserve, and train child life we could look to the future without misgiving.

Edmund Burke, who will not be found to have given many hostages to socialism, declared that the citizens of a State are a partnership, that every member of such partnership has a right to a fair portion of all that society with all its combinations of skill and force can do in his favour, and that he has a right to the fruits of his own industry and the improvement of his own offspring. Let us be content to leave the case as Burke stated it in the time of George III., it will be seen that we have not yet gained for the average man the minima that the most eloquent statesman of his time prescribed. It is also clear that this claim for a full and free education is not the claim for charity, but the claim for a right that should be deemed inalienable. The grant of this right enriches while appearing to impoverish the State, and a step that some will deem socialistic and others revolutionary is fairly defined as common-sense procedure. We have at last reached the stage of agreeing that child life must be increased, preserved, and cultivated to the best ends, but there is a fatal inclination in this country to regard the theoretical acceptance of a principle as the equivalent of its complete practical development. When you discuss the whole vital question with sensible people they prove, almost without exception, in accord, but as soon as you say, "_therefore let us endow maternity, pass Pure Milk Bills, protect the mother from wrongful labour before and after confinement, and the child from mal-nutrition, educate the child when it is old enough to be educated, submit it to reasonable discipline and prepare it physically, morally, and mentally to fill the place for which it is best fitted in the workshop of the world_," the theorists are unable to follow. Some constitutional timidity holds them. They will not gallop across country to reach their goal, fences and ditches frighten them, and all gates must be unfastened. It is well for those of us whose ambitions for England are inexhaustible, and who watch the shadow on Life's Dial moving inexorably towards the sunset that we dare not despair of humanity. The pen, however ill we may wield it, gives us courage. We know that when our views are issued broadcast they resemble the seed in the Parable of the Sower, and that some worker who in days yet unborn will lead the children of the poor to their safe harbour out of the troubled waters on which their helpless lives are tossed, will have gathered a part of his inspiration and force from the thoughts of those who have gone before.

What is it that taints our physical bravery as a nation with so much moral cowardice? Why is it that countless thousands will face shot and shell and wounds horrible beyond imagining with quiet heroism, and will yet shrink from the display of moral courage required to tell their rulers that, until the poorest child of England has its rights and its chance, they have failed in their duty, and that they must put the national house in order? I would wager that a majority, a large majority of both Houses of Parliament would be prepared to admit in private conversation all the claims I have put forward on behalf of the little ones, and that they would in public find a score of excuses for not pressing them. The most frequent excuse will of course be that after this war we shall lack the means. But I protest that whatever the date of peace, if it be a peace that meets our hopes, we shall be in a state in which we could find the means for at least another year of war if need be. Who will deny that it is better to create, cherish, and equip life than to devote our vast resources to its destruction? Equality, liberty, and fraternity are the first-fruits of liberal education, the fine flower of progress. The war found our wealth accumulating and our people deteriorating, so slowly to be sure that they were able to pull themselves together and appeal with certainty to the favourable verdict of world history, but yet deteriorating. Slums, prostitution, crime, insanity, drink, irresponsible wealth, all these evils were beginning to fester in the body politic, and war has applied the surgeon's knife to the open sore. Is peace to see it extirpated or allowed to grow again? I think in all honesty and sincerity that our treatment of the children will decide. If we will learn from our neighbours on the continent and our kinsmen across the Atlantic we may renew our strength. We may even justify the sacrifice of those who by reason of their love of England will never return to us.

There is another and a sacred ground for this appeal. Let us remember the nameless dead, those whose heroism is expressed in part of a crowded line of small print, who had nothing but their lives to offer to their country, who had no chance in life and who when the bands of the body were breaking gave their last anxious thoughts to little ones doomed under our harsh system of social life to drift where and how they can. Who among those they died to leave in security and a sufficiency of the world's goods would come forward and say, "In spite of all these dead men did for me I will oppose a measure that will give their children useful and honourable lives, because what is left to me of life will be passed without some luxuries I have enjoyed hitherto?" I venture to say there are none who would put this sentiment in words. Yet there are thousands, tens of thousands whose deeds will say it for them, not because they are utterly selfish, callous, or hard-hearted, but because they lack the saving grace of imagination. The most of the evil that disfigures the earth is due to this inability to see beyond our own needs. In the labour, the upheaval, the expense of a movement needed to equip the generation that will so soon succeed our own, we overlook the salient truth that it is no more than the fulfilment of a solemn duty, a pledge that binds us to the dead though it was never given. For who will suggest that the poor men, the bulk of those who fought and died for England, faced their fate to maintain the slum and the gin palace and the labour of the poor prostitute who sells her body that she may eat to live, or drink to forget how she is living? Surely they died for the faith that was in them, with some dim fore-knowledge of happier days for those they left behind. We are the executors of their unwritten testament. If, as so many believe, there is some form of consciousness in the unknown world of which they are the sudden denizens, will they not be looking even now to see if we whose debt is so great have determined to pay it? And what better faith can we keep than by giving to the lives they have left behind the simple rights that were denied to them? Every rich man, every member of the comfortable classes claims these benefits for his children, and if the war has given birth to a true spirit of brotherhood, the children of the poor cannot be forgotten. They lack the means, we have them. From this simple truth and the consequent, inexorable duty there is no escape with a clean conscience.

XIX

THE PRUSSIAN IN OUR MIDST

War throws a blinding light upon the strength and the weakness of nations, and in England we may claim that we have faced the light without any revelations of which we need feel ashamed. Our mistakes have been rather of temperament than character, and whether in mustering our millions on the voluntary system or surrendering our hard-won liberties to an authority that has shown no sign of suffering from wisdom in excess, or giving fully and freely of our resources to the national cause, we may claim to have shown in our collective capacity a generous response to the most varied and unexpected demands. Incidentally we have discovered in our midst a body of men, happily small in number, and not too significant in position, who would fain embody in our national life the worst vices that we are said to be fighting in the one foe that counts. These men, whose political sagacity exists in inverse ratio to their prejudices, are ever prompting the worst elements in our rulers and threatening and intriguing against the others.

To them war is no frightful necessity imposed upon a free and peaceful people, but a providential opportunity for taking occasion by the hand; the voice is the voice of Prussia, but the hands are English hands.

Our Prussians have always been in evidence, but, while the government of the empire was trusted to their friends, they were content to be quietly active. It is now nearly ten years since a Liberal Government came into power, and with the advent of Radical legislation our Prussians--they call them Tories over here--became active.

When taxation threatened their superfluous wealth, they called heaven and earth to witness that such an outrage had no sanction. When the House of Lords, long the supreme force of obstruction, was threatened they grew frantic, and at many a well-spread board declared themselves ready to dine--I mean die--in the last ditch before submitting to the indignity of democratic government.

When Home Rule was on the tapis they declared for revolution and civil war, and it needed Armageddon to burst the bladder of Sir Edward Carson's threats. In justice be it said that when the tocsin sounded the Tories responded to the nation's need, and forgot for a time their ineffective selves.

But as soon as the gravity of the task was revealed they decided that the authorities were useless without their judgment in aid. Cabal succeeded criticism, plots of exquisite silliness were hatched, matched, and dispatched. Then came the call for more soldiers, and our Prussians turned Conscriptionists.

The suggestion that conscription of men should be associated with conscription of wealth was dismissed as an impertinence, it sufficed if all that others possess were sacrificed for the State. Our Prussians talked incessantly of men and duty, but where finance was concerned they were content to warn the worker not to squander his extra wages earned by unremitting labour during a week seven days long. They saw with clear vision the iniquity of depriving the capitalist of half the wealth he is amassing as a result of the bloodiest war in history, and have protested almost in unison against the decree. They forgot with amazing ease that conscription is the force that has set the Prussian Jack-boot above all law human and divine; they clamoured for it here, doubtless with an eye upon the possibilities of coercing in days to come a proletariat of toilers forced to live under military law in time of peace. Disguised as patriots they thundered from a hundred platforms, they thumped a thousand tubs, while their hirelings in the Press wrote stodgily in admiration and support, pointing out that certain hard-jawed, soulless politicians would alone avail to save England from itself. As though England would endure to-day the undiluted political opinions of a Carson, a Milner, a Halsbury, or a Walter Long. Excellent men, no doubt, but never in their lives less than half a century behind the times.

Politicians and papers were aided by the truth that even the voluntary system has its flaws and hardships, its inequalities and petty tyrannies, and the Prussian remedy for the whip of voluntary service is the scorpion of conscription.

Those who do not agree with our Prussians are traitors to the height, although if our Prussians are patriots Dr. Johnson's definition of patriotism becomes dangerously true.

The question of peace discussion has been the latest consideration of these gentry. Personally I have no use for peace until we have won our victory or suffered our defeat. I believe we shall win, and that our first duties as victors will be to take whatever steps are needed to give peace permanence.

But I cannot follow our Prussians over one yard of their mile-long way. They would impose the methods of Berlin and Vienna upon all who dare to have opinions of their own, they would repress individuality, they would out Herod the Herods of the censorship who daily murder so much childishness, they would in fact reduce free men to the level of the citizens who serve their rulers for "cannon fodder."

In one of the reactionary dailies written by Tories for Tories I have been reading with infinite disgust a tribute of admiration to the "Stern Methods" of the Central Empires in dealing with "War Cranks," _i.e._ with people whose sense of what they, rightly or wrongly, believe to be truth is so strong that they will sacrifice position, even life, to tell the truth when they see it. "Hungarians," writes our Prussian, "who were only suspected of not approving of the war were interned or publicly shot." Such a policy has more to justify it "than have the liberties which are accorded to certain sects who with their ideas form an insignificant, and almost negligible minority." These sentiments are even worse than the English used to express them. One Hungarian publicist, M. Pazmaudy, aged sixty-nine, went to prison for three months for writing an unpublished letter to a newspaper in which he denounced the war as wholesale murder. A teacher who pointed out to his class that war is the fruit of rulers' jealousy rather than of the people's animosities, a statement that is probably true of nine-tenths of the war recorded by history, was condemned to three years' hard labour. Our anonymous Prussian rejoices in these barbarities, and a paper supposed to represent the educated classes of England is not ashamed to print this revelation of an unsound or distorted mind.

In the early days of the war, Bernard Shaw reminded us that we, too, have our Junkers, and his statement has been proved up to the hilt. Our soldiers and sailors are fighting the Prussians abroad, and it is the duty of those of us who cannot help beyond England's boundaries, to fight the Prussians at home, for it is abundantly clear that we have them in our midst, those who are working night and day to give us Militarism, Absolutism, and every form of Central European slavery under another name. They desire an England of conscript workmen, they seek the destruction of Trade Unionism, and the abolition of socialism, though it is only by adopting that dread creed that the Government contrived to save our credit and to feed us. They wish to destroy the German militarism, and what it stands for, but only to take over the whole business, lock, stock, and barrel as a going concern. The truth is that the Tories can no more change their skin than the leopard his spots.

It is to them the ideal, merely the ideal, in the wrong hands. They see beyond the horizon of war the dawning of a democratic era that shall destroy privilege, and make our national freedom greater than it has ever been, and the prospect is more bitter to them than defeat. So while our men, so recently civilians, are proving the strength and resources of comparative freedom--what has been done is as little with what still remains to be done--our Prussians are putting forward all manner of chains for unfettered limbs, and are declaring that without them nothing can save the Empire. It is pleasant to reflect that after this war comes to its appointed close the vigorous democracies of Canada and Australia that have followed the United States along the road of political freedom will be finding representatives at the Council Board of Empire, and that they will be alert and vigorous to put an end to the machinations of our Prussians whose attack upon liberty will not readily be forgotten. When we attempt to measure the sacrifices that have been made in freedom's name since August, 1914, when we remember the spirit that has led men contentedly into the jaws of death, when we understand what our fighters have fought for, there is an indescribable sense of loathing for the men who, secure in England, are plotting to transfer Prussian principles across the North Sea. Their failure to achieve anything commensurate with the villainy of the attempt is neither palliation nor excuse.

Every one who has studied social conditions knows that our national ability to pit the unprepared British Empire against Germany armed to the teeth, has been due to the fact that our Empire holds millions who believe from the bottom of their hearts that it is worth living in and dying for. What would the Prussians make of our Empire if they were allowed to direct it? A happy hunting-ground for Junkers and a hell upon Earth for free men is the very best that they could accomplish.

Political insight, democratic foresight, prevision of the inevitable march of events, all these gifts are denied them. They have no sympathy with any freedom that could exist beyond the realms of the privileged classes, they are too blind to see the writing on the wall that tells them they have been found wanting.

This war has witnessed plenty of mistakes, some trivial, some serious; it has witnessed the birth of a certain number of oppressive and retrograde measures, and the death of national liberties of which we look with hope, even with certainty for the joyful resurrection.

Whatever has been bad, retrograde, or dangerous to democracy has won the unstinted approval of our Prussians; every other act of our rulers they have condemned.

XX

THE GROWN-UP GIRLS OF ENGLAND

Before the war, I heard some shrewd feminists say that the frivolity associated with the life of women at the time when they have ceased to be girls and have "come out," is a matter of environment rather than choice. They went so far as to assert that if a worthier goal were offered, a majority would seek it without a moment's hesitation. For all my sympathy with feminism, despite my heartfelt conviction that man needs woman's help in the task of administering the world that lies beyond the home, I had doubts, grave doubts. I thought that those who said these things had gone a little beyond their brief, and I remembered the French aphorism, "_la jeunesse n'a qu'un jour_." It seemed to me that an innate knowledge of the time-limit was the foundation of frivolity, and here, perhaps, I was looking back thirty years or more to the radiant season of my own _début_, and was remembering how the girls who became matrons were expected to play the rest of their part in the life symphony on muted strings. True it is that I helped to post-date the passing of the girl and the coming of the matron, but in those feverish times we all thought that the race was to the swift.

It may be that this conviction coloured my views; I believed that for the vast majority of young girls with prospects of a good time, there would be no pleasure in serious endeavour of any kind: that a sense of responsibility could not precede the State recognition of women and a sweeping measure of educational reform. As recently as the summer season of 1914, I found the new players feverishly excited by the old, old game, and pleasure instead of losing its savour seemed to have widened its boundaries and assumed shapes more fantastic than ever. I heard girls who were standing on the threshold of their career prattling of the joys to come as though life did not compass within its horizon one solitary sorrow or disappointment. Women of experience are, I think, stirred by these enthusiasms in their sisters or daughters, or young friends: they have learned a part of life's lesson, and know glad memories for an inalienable possession. It follows that they rejoice to see those who are near and dear to them treading the primrose path in the spring of their years, realising that when they look over the old road in the autumn days, their memory will help to gladden it with even fairer blossoms. If we know youth for the season of mental intoxication, we are not the less grateful to the gods who grant it to one and all, and if we are quite honest with ourselves we have been rather a little sorry for the girls who are serious before their time. But, while so many happy children, for after all they were little more, were bringing their healthy appetite to the banquet of life, "dawn was at hand to strike the loud feast dumb."