MR. ASQ MAWS PRIME BLUNDER.
MR. ASQUITH'S ruling maxim has been " Wait and See." We have waited, and what do we see ? We see ourselves on the verge of civil war, a province in arms to resist the Legislature, a distracted Parliament, an Army rendered immobile by the strain put upon its allegi- ance, and a Government unable to force their will upon Ulster. Yet at the same time the Government declare that in no circumstances will they regain their power of action by a direct appeal to their masters and the masters of us all—the electors of the United Kingdom. We all know what it means when a servant who can at a crisis find out what are his master's wishes refuses to ask for orders. It means that he wants to do something which he knows his master will not sanction. It is to this pass of national humiliation and national danger that Mr. Asquith has brought the British people. MR. ASQUITH'S ruling maxim has been " Wait and See." We have waited, and what do we see ? We see ourselves on the verge of civil war, a province in arms to resist the Legislature, a distracted Parliament, an Army rendered immobile by the strain put upon its allegi- ance, and a Government unable to force their will upon Ulster. Yet at the same time the Government declare that in no circumstances will they regain their power of action by a direct appeal to their masters and the masters of us all—the electors of the United Kingdom. We all know what it means when a servant who can at a crisis find out what are his master's wishes refuses to ask for orders. It means that he wants to do something which he knows his master will not sanction. It is to this pass of national humiliation and national danger that Mr. Asquith has brought the British people. At the present moment everyone is asking how it is that a man of such transcendent ability as Mr. Asquith, a man whose mind is not bemused by personal ambition, and a man also who is no doubt at heart sincerely anxious to do his best for the nation, can have let things drift into a position so perilous. No one can profess for an instant to think that he is pleased with the situation. Then why did he let it come about ? Because he was faced with hard realities rather than with words, because he found a situation in which finesse, management, ingenious accommodation, and Parliamentary cleverness were of no avail—a situation in which things, not phrases, count, and where the meshes of a net of talk were too light to hold the things that they had entangled. To be specific, Mr. Asquith forgot that you cannot argue with armed men. You cannot control them by successful dialectic. When a year ago Mr. Asquith decided to allow the Ulstermen to arm and to organize themselves into a military force, he only left two courses open for himself—either to meet them and beat them by a superior force, or else to give in to them. Men who take up the sword must be dealt with by the sword, or be allowed to have their way. When Mr. Asquith tried, or perhaps it would be more fair to say let his lieutenants try, to meet the Ulstermen with the argument of force, he found the instrument turn in his hand. He found he could not use the Army to put down the Uletermen's protest and to force them under a Dublin Parliament. In the abstract, of course, there is no answer to the plea of the Labour men that Mr. Asquith, having once determined upon using the Army, should have
insisted upon its use, and should have court-martialled, and if necessary shot, the men who refused to carry out the orders of their superiors. Unless he was prepared to do that, it was madness to try to put down the resistance of Ulster by force. But of course it is idle to talk about such abstractions. In the first place, the Government did not dare to give an absolute order. The officers never refused to obey, for the very good reason that they never received a command. They were asked a question and they gave their answer, and then the Government backed down. Everyone knows that public opinion would no more have justified Mr. Asquith in shooting, or even imprisoning, the officers of the Cavalry Brigade than public opinion in America would have justified Abraham Lincoln had he tried to insist that the regular officers who joined the South were mutineers and must be given up to military execution. Throughout the Anglo-Saxon world we have always told our soldidrs that they have not ceased to be citizens and have not forfeited the duties of citizenship by becoming soldiers. But in the last resort this means that if the nation is so divided as to reach the point of civil war, the Army will be divided also. For good or ill, it must be rent in two like the nation. This is a fact that statesmen do not talk about, for such talk may anticipate evils they wish to avoid ; but they all know that there are certain strains too great to be placed upon any army, and that everything that is possible must be done to avoid them.
To make our meaning clear—Mr. Asquith a year ago, when he was confronted with the possibility of Ulster arming, should have said to himself : "I must come to my decision now. I must not wait and see. I must either stop this resort to arms at once, or else be pre- pared to give in to it later. If I do not atop it at once, I can only stop it by warlike means, and war involves the use of the Army. But in all human probability I shall be barred the use of the Army because it, like the nation, will be divided. Against a foreign enemy I can rely upon the Army in all circumstances. It will obey orders without any thought of the merits. In the case of civil war I cannot expect that. Whether it is right or wrong that the merits should be considered it is useless for me to argue. I know that they will be considered. Before a military force is formed in Ulster I can, by the use of the police and by prosecu- tions in the Courts, deal with the situation without employing the Army. If I wait till it is a case for the soldiers it will be too late. Therefore, if I am going to stand up to Ulster, I must act now." Mr. Asquith, instead of obeying these primary maxims of statesmanship, pre- ferred to wait and see, with the result that he has had to admit what a year ago he ought to have known, had he looked ahead, that he would be forced to admit. There can be no question as to his admission. He tried to use the Army, and when a section of the Army refused to be used, he in fact, though not in name, allowed them to make good their refusal, and so acknowledged the justice of the con- siderations we have just put forward. The Army cannot be used as a solid unit in civil wars. You cannot, unless it is made up of mere mercenary hirelings, expect it to have no opinions on a supreme issue.
We shall be told that by our argument that true statesmen do not try the impossible feat of arguing with armed men, and do not attempt to put strains upon the soldiers which they will not bear, we are admitting the right of the soldiers to refuse to put down strikes, and that our policy will recoil upon our own heads. We refuse to consider the matter on such partisan lines. We are not in the least frightened by the bogies raised by the Labour Party. The action of the officers at the Curragh forms no precedent for the hypothetical refusal of soldiers to do what is vaguely called "putting down strikes." In the first place, no soldiers ever can or will be asked to put down a strike. Putting down a strike would be a totally illegal act. Men have a right to strike, and any Government who were so insensate as to try to use the troops to prevent men exercising their undoubted right not to work when they did not want to work would, we trust, find that such illegal orders to the Army would not be carried out. What the Army is called upon to do is not to put down strikes, but to protect private property from destruction, and prevent citizens who desire to proceed with their lawful work being coerced by riotous
mobs. When the soldiers were used at Tonypandy or in the railway strike, or, again, when preparations were made for using them during the coal strike, it was not to interfere with the right of the members of the Trade Unions to strike, but to prevent the coal mines being destroyed or to protect men who were quite willing to run trains from being killed or injured while exercising their right to work. Whe:i, then, the Labour Members try to frighten us by telling us that we shall never again be able to use the Army to put down strikes, we are quite undisturbed. The Army will never be used to shoot down strikers for striking, but it will be used, and there will never be any difficulty in using it, to preserve order, and to prevent the miseries inflicted upon the general population by such burning and rioting as took place at Tonypandy, or by the starvation of the people through attempts to prevent free labourers running trains.
Another peculiarly empty threat which has been used by the Labour men and by the Radical Press deserves a word or two. We are told that, as a result of " the plot at the Curragh; the Army will have to be democratized and "the power taken out of the hands of the classes." We can only say that, instead of our having any objection to the Army being democratized, we shall be very glad to see the process carried out. The only way to democratize the Army is, of course, to have compulsory service as in France—a system under which all men, rich and poor, will be forced to go through a military training and to do military service for the State. If that should prove the result of the action taken by the officers at the Curragh, it will indeed be a blessing in disguise. As has been shown again and again on the Continent—it was shown during strike disorders not only in France but in Sweden—a democratic army based on universal service is not a weak instrument, but the most potent instrument that can be possessed by the Executive for dealing with riot and disorder, and especially with the attempts of a small section of the community to paralyse the national life by illegally seizing some of the essential services, as, for example, the means of transport or the coal mines. A national Army will deal more, net less, sternly with outrages intended to intimidate the non-Union workers than will a professional Army primarily designed for oversee service.
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