followers of the Government, or supporters of the Opposition said it has to be'; that it seems to me we have to say in England, if the Territorial force is to prove the efficient force we should all wish it to be. The employers in South Africa form a troublesome factor, as they do in England, but they come in for drastic treatment in the Colony.

In the Defence Act, the effect of section 8 is as follows:

It shall be the duty of any employer to give all proper facilities for enabling citizens in his employ punctually and faithfully to carry out a. The prescribed period of military training in the Defence Force; b. The service in a Rifle Association;

c. The Cadet training

to which they may be liable.

Any employer who fails to give the facilities aforesaid, or who prevents, or attempts to prevent, or penalises, or attempts to penalise, any employé, or person seeking employment from him from entering upon and carrying out the training or service aforesaid shall be guilty of an offence.

Section 109 names as penalty a fine not exceeding 100l., or in default of payment, imprisonment with or without hard labour for a period not exceeding one year, or imprisonment without the option of a fine, or both fine and imprisonment.

In other words South Africa means to have a citizen army worthy of the country and of the empire; she intends to bring up her youth to realise the fact that their first duty in life is to their country, and, in sporting parlance, she warns employers off the course if they do not run straight.

I do not wish to draw a comparison between the employers in South Africa and those in England. The position of the employers in England is one of the greatest difficulties of the voluntary system of service.

Every employer of labour in South Africa is equally affected by the Defence Act, because where no direct compulsion exists it is, nevertheless, just behind the door, to be called in at a moment's notice. My quotations from the Defence Act, I think, show this quite clearly.

In England the case is quite different, only, perhaps, one employer in fifty, or in a hundred, is affected, and no direct, no implied, no possible compulsion is present, or invocable; the result is that the patriotic employer is placed by the State at a distinct disadvantage-a disadvantage which increases directly with his patriotism, since the more of his hands that he allows to join the Territorial force the more his pocket suffers. Not only does he suffer for the time, but he may be unable to carry out a large and valuable order, which his unpatriotic neighbour takes up, and his custom is gone for ever. This is where the voluntary system is so scandalously unfair, penalising the patriotic and

bolstering up the unpatriotic employer. I can recall to mind, in the days of the Militia and Volunteers, cases of intimidation on the part of employers that I could not have believed possible in a country that at any rate professes to possess feelings of patriotism.

Where I think General Smuts has shown great common sense is in not destroying the forces he found in being' when he entered upon his defence scheme. He accepted the Natal Militia and the Volunteers of Cape Colony and the Transvaal under certain conditions, but in the event of a sufficient number not coming forward for the quota deemed necessary, then the residue will have to be supplied through the ballot.

Here, again, it seems to me we might with advantage learn a lesson from South Africa.

Is the danger less to this country than it is to South Africa? Is the loss of trade to the employers greater, is the loss of money and of time greater to those undergoing training in England than in South Africa? I cannot think so; and I call to mind what a back-Veld Dutchman said to me: We want to have something between the militarism in Germany and the apathy in England.'

My experience of the Dutchman is that he generally hits the right nail on the head.

In South Africa each district has to find its quota, so might each county in England find its quota. In Wiltshire we can do so, why not in the other counties?

But it is one matter to have the numbers, it is another, and a very serious matter, that the force should be efficient. I cannot believe that this can be the case unless the infantry attends a training camp for at least fourteen days in each year, and unless the Field Artillery are given every facility for field practice. An inefficient artillery is simply an encumbrance, even more, a positive danger in the field, as it at all times requires protection, whilst harmless as a weapon of offence in inexperienced hands.

I write with but one object-namely, to point out how essential it is to do our utmost to make this Territorial force of value. Better far to put all the money spent on an inefficient force into making our Regular Army still stronger and even more efficient, unless the country is prepared to go one step further and make each county furnish its quota of men, and these men in a state of efficiency.

METHUEN.

LABOUR AND INTERNATIONALISM

THE more closely one studies the social movement at the present time the deeper becomes one's conviction that every question of national policy, whether domestic or foreign, should be considered in the first instance in its relation to the welfare of labour within the nation. It is the neglect of this duty-often on the part of people otherwise patriotic-which is mainly responsible for the internationalisation of the working classes, expressed in the device on the banners of every labour procession, 'Proletarians of all lands, unite!' It is, on the other hand, the want of a proper public sense of the interdependence of the external and internal life of a nation which lays us open to a sudden panic such as that of last autumn, when it was discovered that the railway strike was paralysing the country in face of a threatened foreign invasion; and which rendered us indifferent to the warning contained in paragraphs in a few of the best informed daily newspapers announcing the coincidence this summer of a strike in the French ports with the London Docks Strike.

That there is to-day an international spirit moving among the working classes, giving rise, not always where distress is greatest, to anti-militarist and anti-patriotic tendencies, no one can deny. It is not proposed here to deal with its causes in any detail ; 1 nor is it possible within the limits of this article to discuss them in their bearing on the preparation for national defence, account

1

1 In the Nineteenth Century of March 1907, under the title Conservative Opportunists and Imperial Democracy,' I referred to one of the causes of this in the following words: Whatever may have been the faults of the old land system, the man in the country in former days had a deeper conception of the value of national independence, a deeper sense of the common interest of all classes of society in its defence, than the modern artisan who lives in a tenement, and whose employer is often merely a board or syndicate, deprived for him of all individuality, and often recognising no responsibilities beyond those of a paymaster. For men such as this-wandering in times of industrial depression far from their families in search of employment-patriotism must be the most extraordinary rather than the commonest of virtues. If they are to be given a country to die for, if they are not to turn in despair to vain illusions of internationalism and crude socialistic imaginings, a number of positive changes and reforms are necessary in the conditions under which they live.' At the close of that article I ventured to say 'there will be a rude awakening for them (i.e. Conservative opportunists) when the democratic sentiment that they have ignored and refused to lead is, in its isolation in a Little England, demanding the confiscation of property.'

ing on the one hand for the resistance of a section of the working men to any attempt to establish a system of universal military service which, in their opinion, would strengthen the forces which might be used against their class during a strike, and on the other, for the opposition of some among the governing classes to the creation of a citizen army, adequate for the defence of these islands, which might be less amenable than the existing army for the suppression of a revolt of labour. It is rather intended to suggest the inferences, to be drawn from the past history of internationalism, as to the effect of this spirit on the attitude of labour towards national defence should national independence be suddenly and overtly threatened.

Internationalism, that is to say the union of men of different nationalities in a common cause, is not an idea, as is sometimes believed, that has suddenly sprung up in the revolutionary soil of modern times. It has always existed. Whenever men have. been moved by a great ideal they have sought to gather to its support, in a common faith, men of all nations. The greater the ideals the greater have been the efforts; and where they affect humanity most profoundly, as in face of the oppression of the unknown, they have most nearly succeeded in breaking down national barriers. The missionaries of the Christian religion for instance-in obedience to the command which was at first confined to the lost sheep of the house of Israel,' but was ultimately extended to all nations'-were internationalists, and the Roman Catholic Church has so far been the most successful of all international organisations in the western world. With a common ritual, a common language, a common standard of conduct and morals, and an internationalised clerical hierarchy, it was well equipped to overcome those differences in character and in interests which have grouped mankind in nations rising and falling, ebbing and flowing in the struggle for the possession of the earth. Had these differences been artificial, as maintained by a school of thought which existed in all ages and is not without its representatives to-day, they would surely have disappeared before so potent a force. And yet, as any text-book of history tells us, nations of the same religion warred against one another, and nations opposed in religion joined forces against a common foe. National interests persisted and dominated all others. To go back no further than the century following the Reformation, when, if at any time, Roman Catholics might have been expected to unite in defence of their religion, we find the aid of the armies of Protestant England welcomed by Roman Catholic nations of the Continent, and the great three-faced Cardinal in France, who suppressed Protestants within his own borders to insure a united nation, siding with German Protestants

in the religious struggles of the Thirty Years' War in pursuance of a foreign policy which made for the national aggrandisement of France. Throughout this period, as in all others, it is seen that wherever a people has arrived at a consciousness of national unity the forces of interest and sentiment interpenetrating produce a patriotism which is the dominating motive of their action.

As the ideal represented by the Roman Catholic Church failed to produce internationalism, so have all subsequent ideals failed. In the eighteenth century the philosophers preached the rights of man' to the oppressed among all peoples. France formally accepted the new ideal, and the armies of the Revolution started out on their international mission to unite mankind in a democratic brotherhood. The aristocratic governments whom they attacked ultimately defeated them at Waterloo, having learnt from the disasters that befell their arms that the only way to avert the danger that threatened them was by an appeal to the patriotism of the peoples whom they governed.

Napoleon conquered, it was thought that democracy was crushed; but aristocracy had an uneasy feeling that the seed had been sown widecast by the French, and that the accursed thing, the governed asking for equality in the government, might spring up again-as it did with a vengeance all over Europe thirty-three years later. So it endeavoured to render its own internationalism permanent and met in Congress for that purpose at Vienna, where it was lavishly entertained by the impoverished Austrian Government. Its object was to form a kind of European aristocratic trade union; emperors, kings, princes, kinglets, and princelets, all were there; Turkey alone was not invited. This Congress was the parent of, and may be and has been quoted as a precedent for, all international congresses that have met subsequently on a class basis, socialist, trade union, or syndicalist. The enemy? There was only one, democracy,

otherwise called French idea's.

But nationality asserted itself. Every Power struggled to aggrandise itself. Small nations with natural affinities sought to be united, but the big nations kept them asunder-for the time being—just as Richelieu had kept the German States apart two centuries before. Aristocracy found itself too weak to overcome national instincts even among the representatives of aristocracy at the Congress; just as the same instincts triumph at a Socialist Congress to-day. So it fell back upon religion.

The Emperor of Russia, Alexander the First, persuaded Prussia and Austria to join him in founding the Holy Alliance

2 It will be remembered that his descendant initiated the International Peace Conferences at The Hague at the end of the same century shortly before the Russo-Japanese War.