The Auckland Star: WITH WHICH ARE INCORORATED The Evening News, Morning Nwes and The Echo. FRIDAY, JANUARY 7, 1916. IS COMPULSION COMING?

Auckland Star, Volume XLVII, Issue 6, 7 January 1916, Page 4

The Auckland Star: WITH WHICH ARE INCORORATED The Evening News, Morning Nwes and The Echo.

FRIDAY, JANUARY 7, 1916. IS COMPULSION COMING?

Tor the cause that lacks assistance. For the wrong that needs resistance, For the future in the distance. And the good that we can do.

The debate in the House of Commons arising out of Lord Derby's report has not yet concluded, and it is still difficult to say how Parliament will finally deal with the much-discussed question of national service. The Bill which Mr. Asquith has introduced provides for compulsion for single men, who have not voluntarily enlisted, and who are not occupied in work regarded as necessary for the country's protection or support during the war. And as Mr. Asquith is still, on his own confession, a keen supporter of voluntaryism, this Bill may be regarded by Hie conscriptionists as an important concession to the principle they uphold. But it must be observed that Mr. Asquith is now supporting this form of compulsion, not becauee ho thinks that it need be applied to the country as a whole, but because he had pledged himself to do so, under the circumstances that have arisen, so as to secure the enlistment of married men Mr. Asquith's advocacy of compulsion its thus in a sense extorted from him by hi 3 previous pledge to married recruits—a pledge which he admits ho did not expect to be called upon to make good— and it is also, as he points out, due to the necessity for finding the additional million men that the House deefded to raise a few days ago. These special circumstances reduce the value of Mr. Asquith's support of.compulsion to very limited proportions, though, after all. the main point, of course, is that, as head of the Imperial Government, he is now asking' Parliament to establish a modified form of conscription at Home. The exceptions suggested are numerous enough, one would think, to satisfy the most exacting critic; and when we have got to the end of the list, we may well wonder how many of the 650,000 defaulters will really be available for service. Finally Mr. Asquith's attitude toward the whole question is sufficiently indicated by the hope he has expressed tha*. "the Bill will be rendered a dead letter by the men to whom it applies coming forward of their own free will." Wβ must, therefore, regard this measure as providing a narrowly limited form of conscription, which" is being applied not ' because Mr. Asquith believes in the system, but because he feels compelled to keep a promise whjch he telta us he had always hoped he would not be called upon to fulfil.

It seems necessary to say all this in order to . explain the character of the opposition that the bill has already had to face in Parliament, and the country. One of the most obvious comments that suggests itself on Mr. Asquith's "apologia " is that if any sort of compulsion has the effect of encouraging enlistment, and is at the same time , as the Prime Minister has stated, required to secure the number of men that Parliament has undertaken to provide, then compulsion in itself for the purposes and duration of this war, must be a national necessity. But Mr. Asquith himself is not inclined to draw this very natural inference; and the supporters of voluntaryism can hardly be expected to draw it for him. The Liberals who still cling to the voluntary system are naturally making the most of the curiously indecisive line of argument that Sir. Asquith has folio-wed; and we must read Sir , John Simon'a speech in the dim light of the Prime Minister's far from illuminating discourse. The ex-Attornejy-General's main argument appears to be that Mr. Asquith has been taunted by his political opponents into keeping the letter rather than the spirit of his bond—a suggestion which found its natural complement in Mr. Dillon's remark that Mr. Asquith had been "trapped" into giving his pledge. It does not appear how Mr. Asquith, with all his well-known astuteness, has thus been outwitted by his insidious foes; nor is it .clear why the fact that the "Daily Mail" or the "Times" urged him to keep his promise should be, as Sir John Simon seems to believe, a good reason for breaking it. But apart from these rather casuistical considerations, Sir J. Simon's ease against the .Bill practically amounts to this, that he does not believe that voluntaryism has been fairly tested by Lord Derby's scheme. It is worth remembering that the leading journals which support voluntaryism all declared their willingness to abide by the result of Lord Derby's experiment; but Sir John Simon is not satisfied. In spite of Lord Derby's report, he does not believe that there are many shirkers in ■Britain, arid he appeals to Parliament "not to tell the enemy that hundreds of , thousands of free men in this country have refused to fight for their freedom."

Unfortunately that is precisely the conclnekra. to which Lord Derby's report ! points; and Sir John Simon might sorely reflect that it is impossible to keep the knowledge of the facts from the enemy, ; while it might also be contended that if Lord Derby's conclusion is inaccurate, j the best thing we could do would be to I induce the Germans to believe it.

All that can bo eaid for Sir John Simon's argument, apart from his refusal to accept the evidence supplied by Lord Derby's report, is that it is a laboured and not particularly ingenious attempt to minimise the importance of Mr. Asquith's Bill on the ground that it is the outcome of the Premier's over-serupuloue desire to redeem his pledge. This is surely a very inadequate contribution to the discussion of national service; and if it represents all that the orthodox Lib- | eral advocate of voluntaryism can say in its defence, the case for Conscription must bo overwhelmingly strong. However, when we turn to the Labour party's criticism of the Bill we are on firmer ground. For here we have certain definite and substantial objections advanced in a most uncompromising way. Mr. J. L. Thomas, one of the most influential Labour leaders in the House, echoed Sir J. Simon's suspicions aa to the value of Lord Derby's report; but he went much further by declaring that "the Conscription proposals arc the result of a huge conspiracy." In justice to Mr. Thomas and the workers, it must be remembered that when they use this extraordinary language they are merely repeating literally the charge constantly reiterated against the supporters of compulsory service by the leading newspapers that still uphold voluntaryism at Home:—That the whole movement in favour of compulsion is a thinly disguised plot to overthrow Liberalism in general and Mr. Asquith in particular, and, in the picturesque phrase generally employed, " to rivet the fetters of servitude on the shoulders of the workers." Wβ can hardly be surprised that the industrialists who have heard these warnings constantly repeated by the leading Liberal and Radical newspapers during the past twelve months should wonder whether conscription may not be intended to deprive the worker of his liberties under the pretext of inducing him to fight for his country. It may seem almost incredible that responsible men should be so far led away by sentimental prejudices.in favour of voluntaryism as to employ weapons of this sort in its defence But there is on record the conclusion reached by several of the leading anti-conscription newspapers ar Home that it would be better for the people of England to lose this war under the voluntary system than to win it by compulsion. Considering these things, it is not strange that the workers, who have been taught to believe that conscription is their natural enemy, should object to the Bill, especially in view of the half-hearted and dubious support that the principle underlying it has received from the Prime Minister himself. We can only hope that the malign influence of the professional politician and the syndicalist agitator will be thwarted by the authoritative declaration of Earl Kitchener that voluntaryism has been given a fair trial, and that, in spite of the splendid results it has achieved, it is "unequal to maintaining the army needed to secure victory." After all, now that the director and controller of our military resources and the Primo Minister have joined hands to require of the nation some measure of compulsion, it is difficult to believe that the great mass of the people, when once the facts are clearly before them, will hesitate long.