Read Ebook: A Woman and the War by Warwick Frances Evelyn Maynard Greville Countess Of

Font size: 10 px 15 px 20 px 25 px 30 px 35 px

Background color: BlackWhiteGrayLight GrayDark GrayDim Gray

Text color: BlackWhiteGrayLight GrayDark GrayDim Gray

Apply/Save settings

Ebook has 425 lines and 63355 words, and 9 pages

For myself, I drink a glass of good wine; failing that I am content with pure water. If we could give our working classes nothing but the best, and at a price within their means, I should look askance at legislation, of whatever kind; but I recognise the old truth that the destruction of the poor is their poverty, and that the working man and woman have always been penalised, and will continue to be, until Government recognises its responsibilities, and rides its supporters of the drink trade with a very tight rein.

Above all I feel that the new legislation that has first restricted and then diluted the working man's drink must not be regarded as an isolated instance, but as part of the vast changes that the war will ensue. The working man will not forego his legitimate refreshment; it is for the Government to see that it is pure and reasonably harmless. Good beer in moderation will not hurt anybody; bad spirits are the foundation of disease and crime, and, in their silent fashion, are always fighting against the best interests of the State. Sometimes, when I read that the perpetrator of some ghastly crime has been sentenced to death or a long term of imprisonment, with all the pomp and circumstance of our criminal courts, I find myself wondering what poison was administered to him in some squalid public-house, and who among those who rejoice that justice has been done, or vengeance executed, have actually derived financial benefit from the drink that turned a man into a beast. We punish the poor fool with a diseased appetite, we confer some honour or reward upon the prime offender. Then when our enemies say that we are hypocrites we are indignant because of their injustice, or contemptuous of their ignorance, knowing as we do, that God is in Heaven, and that business is business.

Finally, and quite apart from the immediate significance of the drink question, I rejoice in any legislation that will help the working-classes to the full possession of their faculties. If drink helps them to forget intolerable surroundings, insufficient pay, the deprivation of their fair share of the world's beauties, let us be glad that it is taken from them in its worst forms. They will see with clear eyes and with wiser heads, they will no longer be at the mercy of those who pander to their weakness in order to keep them weak. They will enter upon the great struggle that lies before democracy with stronger will and stronger armour. They have surrendered much of their power to the public-house, and the longer its shutters are up the more leisure they will have to see that there are better things in life, the greater will be their determination to share them with the fortunate classes.

There is a time of trouble in store; they cannot be too well equipped to meet it.

WAR AND MARRIAGE

The problem that faces a State when it sends its best and most virile men to kill and to be killed has certain aspects that few have the courage to handle. For long years, while Europe was an armed camp, the claims of love were admitted amid the demands of war, but now that the dreaded era--which each nation was hurrying through the medium of extravagant armaments and secret diplomacy--has come upon us, we are without a definite plan for securing the continuity of the best elements in the race. If I thought that this appalling war were no more than the prelude to others, I would pray that every woman might be sterile, but hope, our last and eternal refuge against the ills of life, suggests that this most terrible cataclysm will strengthen the hands of democracy and give it the strength to resist further sacrifices in years to come. While the grass grows the horse starves, and while we think of the generation to come, thousands, hundreds of thousands of Europe's best and bravest lie in their hasty graves, and the cry of Mother Earth is still "they come." What has been done by our rulers to see that the fittest shall leave behind them some to take a share of the white man's burden?

Very little. The men of the middle and upper classes who happened to be engaged have in very many cases been wise and patriotic enough to marry, and their wives have proved themselves as full of courage as of love. In order to marry, men have often been obliged to pay the Church an absurd tax, for the Church has shown itself quite inadequate to the occasion, and trumpery restrictions, meaningless in times of peace and a scandal in time of war, have not been relaxed. The poor man cannot afford a special license, and in many instances has married without the aid or sanction of the Church. As we know, the State decided to recognise the unmarried wives of the nation's brave defenders, a courageous and proper step that evoked the wildest protests from the narrow-minded, the "unco guid," and the fanatics who believe that man was made for morality rather than that morality was made for man. They did not pause to reflect that our absurd and antiquated divorce laws are the chief cause of illicit unions, and that divorce is hardly less hard for the poor to obtain than are decent housing, warm clothing, and nourishing food. Happily, in making this concession to the men who are offering their lives to their country, the genius of red tape contrived to assert itself. Hard though it may be to realise, it was for some time a fact that, if a man home on leave married his unmarried wife in order that his children might bear his name, his wife's allowance ceased because he came under the head of those who married after enlisting! The very quintessence of stupidity could have achieved nothing finer.

Unfortunately the majority of those at the front are unmarried. It was considered sufficient to find them physically sound, to vaccinate and inoculate them and then to send them to take their chance. The question of the years to come was never considered. There is no department of War Office or Admiralty that embraces eugenics. I have looked in vain through the speeches of statesmen for a single recommendation to our defenders to marry and leave behind them some pledge of their affection, some asset for the real national treasury that does not consist of gold, as is popularly supposed, but of vigorous men and women as anxious to live for their country as they are willing to die for it. To be sure every wife would have cost the country three pounds a month for the term of the war, and this thought may have given our prudent legislators pause; but I venture to suggest that a wife as a national asset is cheap, even at that price.

The balance has been redressed to some extent, in fashion at once inevitable and unsatisfactory. The billeting of great masses of virile young men in various centres throughout the country, and the opportunities that the new life has afforded resulted in an increase in the number of illegitimate births. I have heard of this from many quarters, and have every reason to believe, in spite of denials, that no district in which large numbers of soldiers have been gathered together will prove an exception to the general rule. Whatever the moral aspect of the question, it cannot be overlooked or ignored. I deplore the promiscuity, though I believe that a wise and daring statesmanship, ready to meet new conditions with new remedies, would have avoided it; but I would like to plead for the foolish mothers, often little more than girls, and for the babes, who in many instances will never see a father's face.

I am not urging humanity in place of morality, for most people lack the moral courage to listen to such a plea; it is rather in the interests of the State that I urge the proper, and even generous, treatment of all those who, before this year is ended, will have entered the world unwanted and unwelcomed. They will be the children of men in the first flush of manhood, of men not lacking in courage and character , of men whose fault was that they could not resist temptation in its least resistible form. We must think of the psychology of the soldier who knows that in a few short weeks he may be among the nameless dead, who has embarked upon the greatest of all adventures, and says, "Let me rejoice and be merry, for to-morrow I die." Doubtless in many cases he will return and marry the mother of his child if fate permits, often he will not return, and a soldier's death may well clear a soldier's name.

I am quite sure that many excellent people will find this plea immoral, that they will say it is condoning irregular sex union, that it is removing the burden from those who have transgressed. I deny these suggestions even before they are made. To my mind there is more immorality, more glaring offence to the Creator in one battlefield full of dead and mangled humanity, than in all the illegitimate children who will have come crying into our tear-stricken world before the war draws to its end. Those who rule over Europe and, being unable to settle their differences, sent millions of men, who have no quarrel, to deface the earth and slaughter one another, are morally responsible for every change in the normal life of mankind. Those who replenish the earth are better than those who destroy it.

War is a monstrous immorality that seeks to destroy the world; the illicit unions, to which I refer in the interest of those who pay the penalty--the mother and the child--are a minor immorality from which, with a little care, a little loving-kindness, and a little fore-knowledge, much good, much deep morality may spring.

There is not much time to lose; there will be much opposition to overcome, and the work of helping the helpless will be widely condemned by those who, having no feelings, are always able to control them. But the effort is worth making, and so I plead here, first, for ample facilities for those who wish to marry before they go abroad; secondly, for the legitimation of the children whose fathers, now at the war, come back and marry the mothers, and, lastly, for some special care of the mother and children themselves.

NURSING IN WAR TIME

Abuses cling to a crisis as barnacles to a ship, and every aspect of war has its own peculiar abuses. While millions do their duty with quiet heroism, there is always a minority that takes advantage, that corrupts others--or itself. Some believe that fraud and foolishness stay at home, that they cannot approach the field of arms, but this is far from being the case.

My thoughts turn back to the South African war, when certain scandals were supposed to have reached their zenith; I look around me to-day, listen to the well-authenticated stories brought to me by relatives and friends, and know that South Africa did not tithe the possibilities of folly and excess. For once I am not pleading for my own sex, I plead for one part of it against the other, for a majority against a minority, for those who are doing what they are paid to do, against those who are voluntary workers. The position comes a little strangely to me when I look at it in this light, but the highly trained, conscientious, painstaking hospital nurse, whose patient heroism proclaims her a true follower of Florence Nightingale, has been exposed to scandalous annoyance for no good purpose and to no useful end, and I feel that I must plead her cause, since she is in the last degree unlikely to plead it for herself.

Society women of a certain class made themselves so notorious in the military hospitals and elsewhere during the South African war that at least one General threatened to send them home and another refused to allow any more to come out. As soon as the greatest struggle of our history started in August, 1914, certain women of means and position proceeded as silently and unostentatiously as was possible under the circumstances to equip hospitals and to set about their self-appointed work. They laboured conscientiously and sought no more publicity than was necessary to enable them to collect money from philanthropists and friends. They did their best, some were already qualified by previous experience, others acquired their knowledge under the most trying conditions possible. They have worked since war began, well content to "scorn delights and live laborious days," some who are near and dear to me have said that they have well-nigh forgotten the old life and the comforts they deemed indispensable only a little while ago. I think it may be claimed for them that they have played a good part, and that in helping others they have not sought to draw attention to themselves or minimise the credit due to the trained sisterhood of love and pity that cheers the wounded and comforts the dying as "The Lady with the Lamp" taught them to do in the far-off days of the great Crimean struggle. They have made many friends and no enemies; the hero of the trenches and the assaulting party has not given more to his country, for both have given their all, the man his strength, the woman her practical sympathy, and both a high degree of physical and moral courage.

Unfortunately there is in London to-day a very large company of young women to whom war was little more than a new sensation. They are not old enough to understand or young enough to be restrained. In normal times they must be "in the movement," however foolish that movement may be, and a war that staggers the old world and the new leaves them very much where they were before. Under the rose they have not diminished their aforetime gaiety, dances and dinner-parties have been the order of the hour. They have not been trumpeted by the section of the Press that delights in recording vain things, but those who view the currents of London's social life know that I am writing the simple truth. There is nothing to be said; let those laugh who may and can at such a season, their laughter proclaims them what they are.

Unfortunately the people I have in mind have not been content to devote themselves to brainless frivolity because they must sample every sensation that the seasons provide, they invaded the sanctuary of the hospital nurse. Scores found their way to the great London hospitals in town to face what they were pleased to regard as training; I have known some who have danced till 3 a.m. and have presented themselves at the hospital at 8 o'clock! Everybody knows that the training of a real hospital nurse is a very serious matter, that it makes full demand upon physical and mental capacity, and that a long period is required to bring the seed of efficiency to flower or fruit. The social butterflies made no such sacrifices; they acquired a trifling and superficial knowledge of a nurse's work, and then set their social influence to work in order to reach some one of the base hospitals where they might sample fresh experience. If they were really useful there it would be unkind to offer a protest, but the general opinion is that they did more harm than good. They subverted discipline, they were a law to themselves, they were too highly placed or protected to be called to order promptly, they showed neither the inclination nor the capacity for sustained usefulness. To sit at the end of a bed and smoke cigarettes with a wounded officer does not develop the efficiency of a hospital.

One heard repeatedly in the early months of the war that this girl or that had gone to the front, and one imagined devotion, self-sacrifice, self-restraint, and a dozen kindred virtues. Unfortunately it is chiefly in the realm of imagination that these virtues existed. For the rest the interlopers wanted limelight, and plenty of it, their pictures flooded the illustrated papers, and to read what was written of them the inexperienced person might imagine that they were bearing the heat and burden of the day, the solitude and anxiety of the night, while in very truth they did no more than search for fresh sensation in an area that should be sacred.

The type of mind that can seek refuge from self and boredom in such surroundings cannot be stricken into seriousness; tragedy cannot reach it. To do a very minimum of work, to attach themselves to the most "attractive" cases, to carry small talk, gabble and gossip into places where so many come to die, these were the main efforts of the young society nurses, and all these outrages were carried on for months on end. The real nurses and sisters were, I am told, bitterly indignant. They asked no more than to be left alone to do their best; but they knew how hard it is to make an effective protest, and they had little or no time to do so. They recognised by reason of their training, the full motive of the excursion into the region of suffering; that craving for excitement, or, in bad cases, erotomania was the motive power. They found their work impeded by the sisterhood of impostors that responds so readily to a fashion of its own making, and their chief hope was that this sensation might pass as so many others have passed, and that the brainless, chattering, thoughtless, empty company, tired of blood and wounds, would find some paramount attraction nearer home.

If there are any who are prepared to think I have overstated the case or have traduced the young women who were lately "somewhere in France," let them find out from their particular heroine how much time she gave to training, how she received her appointment, and how much real hard work she did day by day. That a few have striven hard and nobly I would be the last to deny, but these are not enough either to leaven or purify the mass or to elevate the action of a class that might have been better employed. Let us remember, too, that suffering is always with us, and that even when war is over there will be far too much in all the great centres of our own country. Are these butterfly nurses prepared to remember in the future the profession they invaded? Will they respond to the calls that are made to help, not young, attractive and valiant men, but men, women, and children in every phase of helplessness and hopelessness? I do not think so. There is neither notoriety nor limelight in the sober, serious life of the hospital nurse and sister. Above all there is a hard and necessary discipline that calls for much moral courage to render it tolerable. Physical courage is seldom lacking either in men or women who are well-bred, and it may be freely granted that a certain measure was demanded even of the butterfly nurses; but there is no redemption in this. To savour the full sense of life without courage is impossible. One might as readily make an omelette without breaking eggs. In this case it is courage misdirected, energy misspent.

I feel very strongly about this scandal--so strongly that I have not hesitated to write what is bound to offend some of my own friends; but there are times when it is impossible to be silent if one would live on tolerable terms with one's self. I feel that in these days woman is called upon to make supreme sacrifices, that what she is giving even now is less than will be required of her later on, that her war record and her record when peace is about to return will be scanned closely and critically by generations of really free women yet unborn. To know of a blot upon woman's war-time service record and to make no attempt to erase it is impossible. The record of the real nursing sisterhood is brilliant in the extreme. Why should it be obscured for the sake of a few highly placed and foolish young women who sought with the minimum of labour to make the maximum of effect? It is unjust, ungenerous, and altogether unworthy of the representatives of families that in many cases have earned their ample honours legitimately enough.

Great Britain owes more than it can ever repay to the nursing sisterhood; and it is intolerable that while their silent heroism passes with so little recognition, any girl of good family who assumes a uniform she has not won the right to wear should pose as the representative of a sisterhood she is not worthy to associate with, of whose tradition she is ignorant, of whose high discipline and complete restraint she is intolerant. There are three classes of women in our midst. The first earns reward and claims it, the second earns reward and does not claim it, the last claims reward and does not earn it. Of these classes the real nurse belongs to the second, and the butterfly sisterhood to the third. At such a season as this there is no room in our midst for the last, and it would be well for us all if authority could spare a moment from manifold activities firmly and ruthlessly to suppress its future activities. The hardship involved would be of the slightest and the benefit serious and lasting.

TWO YEARS OF WAR--WOMAN'S LOSS AND GAIN

The long-drawn-out agony of strife is now two years old and, as each day adds its tale of slaughter to the incalculable total, we women may pause in our war work for a moment and endeavour to estimate our own position. We are no longer as we were, "like Niobe, all tears." Niobe, if I remember rightly, taunted the gods, and for this offence all her children were taken from her. We women did nothing to cause our own misfortune; on the contrary, we strove in our little way to promote peace, and to that end, above many others, we sought a hearing in the councils of the nations.

But it was not to be. Our claims were ridiculed or ignored, and now man-made war has swept over Europe like a blight, and we are left to aid our country through the day and to mourn, when the long day's work is done, for our fathers and brothers, our husbands and sons. Yet perhaps the worst is not with those who mourn. The Immortals can sport with them no longer. When the last of Niobe's twelve children had passed, the limits of Latona's vengeance were reached. To have killed the mother too had been a kindness.

The woman whose son or husband has been snatched from her knows the fullness of sorrow, but anxiety for their fate must pass her by, while those of us whose loved ones are on the battlefield would hardly hope for a moment's peace of mind if it were not for the duties that engage our working hours and sometimes earn dreamless sleep. In a wonderful procession that tramped through muddy London under the rain a year ago I saw a great petition by women for the means not only to serve, but to forget.

After all, this claim to national service is no more than was advanced in the old days when access to the heads of the Government was barred and the hooligans of a great city were allowed to give full rein to their impulses. Then our rulers thought they could dispense with women, to-day we are recognised as indispensable. That is all, but it is very much, and it sets me the question that is the title of this brief paper--What has woman lost and what has woman gained?

This is not only true of the women of England, it applies equally to the women of every belligerent country, friend and foe alike, and it may be said that between the women of the world there is a common sacrifice and a common sympathy. All have suffered, all must continue to suffer, on a scale that this old world of ours, with all its crimes and tragedies beyond number and beyond belief, cannot parallel. It is this truth that steadies our nerves and strengthens our hearts and sets us looking, past the ultimate sacrifice, to what may lie beyond, not for ourselves but for others.

All that we have has been taken or is being demanded of us. Is there in all the world something to which we may look forward with confidence, something that may justify hope? I think there is. Without any sense of pride we may claim that woman has at least vindicated the claims she advanced in those peaceful days that seemingly lie so far behind us. She claimed that she was worthy to play her part in the conduct of national life, that she was in very truth indispensable to it; she was told, by brutal word or brutal deed, that her ambitions outran her capacities. One year of war has given the lie to this assertion. Woman, even before the coming of compulsion, encouraged her dearest to go, if needs be, to their death, in a war for which she has no shadow of responsibility before God or man. Conventions, agreements, treaties, alliances, in all these things she has no share, but as soon as they materialise in war she must pay the heaviest price.

The excitement and glory of a struggle in which the fighter feels that he has surrendered his life to high causes is not for her, she must be content with the pale reflex or with the tragedy. In her heart she may know that man incurs the penalties of his ambitions or bad diplomacy or unpreparedness for upheaval; but those penalties press heavier on women than on men, for, even granting that the love of husband for wife and wife for husband be equal, yet the passion of a mother for her child and her grief when he is snatched from life in the hours when life is unfolding all its possibilities, is something beyond the strength of man to grasp.

But woman has not failed on account of her griefs, she has strangled them--or she has tried to with all the strength that has been given to her--and she has gone out into the market-place and said, "What more do you require of me? Ask and I will give, direct and I will obey." Hers has been the supreme sacrifice, and now at the moment when all that seemed worth striving for had passed, she sees suddenly a fresh horizon, the Pisgah view of the Promised Land.

She realises that man is at last beginning to understand and even to acknowledge her place in the world, that the future cannot repeat the errors of the past, that the day-dawn of her emancipation is visible. This war, reconciling so many differences, rebuking so much pride and bringing so many men and women face to face for the first time in their life with life's actualities, has united all workers, irrespective of class or sex. It is seen now that woman has a part to play in the conduct of the State, and that there are spheres of activity in which women might and must work for the common good. She and man together must build up a new civilisation out of the wrecks of the old one, not only here but throughout the strife-stricken world. Old barriers, time-worn prejudices, a blind conservatism--what part have these in the mental attitude of nations freed from overwhelming peril?

The soul of my sex would be as desolate to-day as the ruined cities of Belgium, Poland, and Servia, were it not for the certain knowledge that our sacrifice has not been made in vain. We have the right to hope that our share in the work of the world is to be acknowledged at last, and that the spheres of our activity are to be widened. In this way, and only thus, we shall be able, in years that have yet to be, to influence thought and to influence action, to bring a humanizing note into the great chord of life. We shall strive through the sisterhood of women towards the brotherhood of man, and we shall be working among those who will be able to see for themselves what one-sided rule and one-sided domination have done for progress and civilisation after their slow ascent to a position that at best left so much to be desired.

The women of my generation will sow where they may not hope to reap, but there is nothing new for woman in this experience. It is her mission in this world to sacrifice herself, from the hour when she accepts motherhood until the end. Her happiness is derived from the contemplation of the happiness of others, she lives in the new lives with which she renews the world. She will leave contentedly to others the prizes for which she laboured in years of peace and suffered through the season of war. It will be sufficient for her dimly to foresee the time when those who have replaced her will give birth to sons with no more pangs than Nature demands, and give birth to daughters in the belief that they will not be widowed or fatherless or childless through catastrophes of man's own making.

So it seems to me, looking back at the cruel record of two years, that woman, for all her losses, has gained, that what she has lost is matter for her private sorrow, and what she has gained is matter for universal joy. She has found the uses of adversity, she has accepted self-sacrifice for the sake of those who will be the better able to enjoy the rich fruits of life. In this knowledge she will labour, for the sake of this truth she will persevere with a confidence in the future that no shifting tides of chance can shake. And her watchword in the coming year is, Hope.

CHILD LABOUR ON THE LAND

It is a commonplace that war brings in its train evils without number, but there are certain ills that are added to the inevitable ones either by greed of gain, indifference to progress or a determination to make profit at the expense of the State. We have in our midst at all times certain people who are concerned only with their own ends, and who regard all the means to those ends as legitimate. War time reduces the measure of restraint that the common sense of the community imposes upon its greedier members. They find and seize their hour when normal conditions are upset. It would be easy to multiply instances, but in writing this paper I am concerned with one only--the employment of children on farms.

To the average man who does not know a swede from a turnip or the difference between sainfoin and clover this is a small matter; to those of us who know the land and its problems, who administer estates large or small, who are morally if not legally responsible for the happiness and well-being of village communities, it is a tragedy.

I can remember hearing my elders talk of the bad old days when the gang system prevailed all over England. The ganger was a contractor of irregular labour. He would enter a district in charge of his wretched company of men, women, and children, and would supply their labour at fixed rates to the farmer who needed it. He charged so much a day for each hand; he saw to it that one and all did their full day's work. They were fed abominably, housed in barns and out-houses, and lived in a promiscuity that would revolt a gipsy. At last even the thick-skinned countryside could endure the abomination no longer, and the "ganger" disappeared. It took years for the Legislature to discover that, apart from the cruelty involved in the custom, it was creating fresh material for gaols and asylums, that children needed education rather than field labour, that the mothers could not combine maternity with hard work in the fields, that if you deprive people of the means of living decently they will revert to the state of savagery.

Rural education is a poor thing enough. Children may have to walk two miles or more, in all weathers, to the village school. Their father cannot afford to buy them good boots or a water-proof coat; it is beyond his means to give them nourishing food, and so help them to fight the diseases of childhood; but he feels that something is being done for them, and, as a rule, he does nothing to make them wage-earners before their time. Now they are taken from school two years before an age that the trade unions hold to be insufficient; they are sent on the land to work for a wage of eighteen pence a day, in any weather, on any soil, without the proper clothing and with insufficient food. There they will undersell the rural labour market, they will be robbed of their childhood, they will go without supervision at a time when they need it most. And the Bumbles of our Education Councils have nodded thick, approving heads.

It is hard to write patiently of such retrograde devices, put forward, as all such proposals are, in the name of the country's needs. If these needs be genuine, which I doubt, if there be no adequate supply of female labour to be obtained for a fair price, why should the children of our poorest, the little ones whose physique has never been strengthened by sufficient nourishing food and by the hygiene of the home, be called upon to bear the burden single-handed? Why should not Eton and Harrow, Rugby, Marlborough, Winchester, and other schools without number, serve the national need? The lads at these expensive establishments can at least complete their education after the war, they can carry health and strength to the fields, they can acquaint themselves at first hand with the realities of labour, a knowledge that, with the changing times ahead, will be valuable to many of them who will inherit land in days to come. Will the farmers who are sending to the fields the half-grown children of their ill-paid labourers contribute their own to work by their side? I am sure that the mere suggestion will rouse the wildest indignation; but all the children, whatever their advantage or disadvantage, are British citizens, and it is not too much to suggest that those who have a stake in the country should at least do as much as those for whom fortune provided no birthright. Let us be democratic in deeds as well as words. I am quite sure that, if the doubtful privilege extended to the rural labourer's children were conferred at the same time upon the children of all patriots, the councils would expunge their fatuous resolutions from their minute books; they would make all possible haste to forget them.

But it may be urged that, in pleading for the children, I have overlooked the crying needs of the countryside, that I am ignorant of the real need for labour to deal with the increased area of the corn and for the late-sown spring crops, for it is clear that, as soon as the proposal for universal child labour is made, the scheme falls to the ground.

I am well aware of the existing conditions--what landlord is not?--and I have a remedy for them. It is not a popular one, but I am not searching for popularity. In spite of the genuine sacrifices that have been made by many classes of the community, much more remains to be done. We have all over the country racing stables full of lads who cannot go to the war and of men who have passed serviceable age. Hard work in the fields from April to the time the last corn is under the stack thatch would do them all the good in the world, and, with some knowledge of all classes of horses, I believe that horses would survive and the superiority of the British sires would not be lost.

Having depleted the racing stables, even at the cost of reducing the number of race meetings, I would turn my attention to the golf clubs: their name is legion. What an army of "ineligible" caddies might be recruited for the fields and given the chance of earning a living intelligently! I go so far as to hint that thousands of the elderly gentlemen who still pursue the golf ball might find more useful occupation in ministering to the country's genuine needs.

Let me pass from one monstrous suggestion to another. I would enroll the gamekeepers and the gillies; for once I would leave the wild pheasants to breed as they will and the grouse to work out their own salvation. A desperate remedy, but then our disease is dangerous. We need corn even more than pheasants, and other game birds can look after themselves. There might be an epidemic of poaching, in which case I would sentence every poacher to three months' hard labour--on the land. We have in this country to-day hundreds, I might say thousands, of sturdy middle-aged men who are now following occupations that, while they are perfectly reasonable in times of peace, are superfluous, even derogatory, to-day.

There is yet another class that can be mobilised to serve the country's need. I would like to see the last remaining footmen and the valets of middle age allowed to enjoy a summer of useful activity. They, too, may be in their right place at normal times; now their country needs them more than their masters do. A little hardship would be involved, but I do not believe there are many employers of superfluous or ornamental labour who would, if the matter were put before them fairly and temperately, place their own petty comforts before the country's need for food. We hope and believe that we may rely upon our Fleet to feed us, but why should we run risks? No war is won until it is lost, and if by ill-fortune we experienced a shortage, I do not think that the owners of racing stables, the renters of shooting and fishing, the members of golf clubs and the employers of men servants could acquit themselves of a serious responsibility. If all these sources of supply are tapped, and it is still found that the supply of labour in the fields is inadequate to the nation's needs, let us proclaim a national holiday in all the schools of the country, and let the high and the low born, the rich and the poor, seek the fields together. But until all sources of adult labour have been exhausted let us spare the little ones, and in any case let us see that those whose share of the good things of life is smallest are not called upon to endure trials and make sacrifices that we would shrink from demanding of our own children.

COMRADES

Share on: WhatsApp @Hash Facebook Tweet