SCIENTIFIC RECRUITING.
IT is greatly to be hoped. that Lord Derby will be allowed a free hand, in his gallant effort to squeeze the last drops out of the voluntary sponge—an effort in which, as we have said, we mean to give him our most earnest and vigorous support. Writing on the subject of "Scientific Recruiting "eleven months ago—that is, on November 7th, 1914, when the war was only three months old—we made the suggestion that we must prepare a muster of the men of military age, and then ask theiu each and. all fairly and squarely to come forward and do their duty. On another occasion in the early part of the war we suggested that when the muster-roll was made, the Government should approach each man as he is approached at a Parliamentary election. If under our party system two, or sometimes three, political parties can canvass each man and ask for his vote and interest, surely it could not be beyond the power of all parties acting together to manage so that each man on a list very much smaller than a Parliamentary register should. have to face a direct appeal on the vital question of war service. We went on to describe how the Commissioners of Array, to borrow a title from the old Armada days, should marshal the nation and draw up lists of all recruitable persons. Happily, owing to the National Registration Act, this work is already done. Lord Derby, as Chief Commissioner of Array, will find that the work which Abraham Lincoln's Commissioner, General Fry, had to do for himself has been done for him. The pink forms, which are ready throughout the country. are in effect the muster-roll of our recruitable men. It is upon these pink forms that Lord Derby must get to work for the great and final effort of the voluntary system. The country must, to begin with, be so minutely split up and apportioned that every recruitable man will receive a personal call and. be asked. to serve, and, if he says "No," will have to state why he will not serve. Such a. canvass must not, of course, be conducted in a brutal or offensive way, but after the manner of a Parliamentary canvass. Further, the men must not be merely upbraided. Those who say "No," and give their reasons for saying "No," must be helped with advice, and wherever possible the obstacles which they find to service in arms must be smoothed away. We hope to publish later some specific examples of the kind o reasons—as often as not perfectly bona-fide reasons —which will be raised by a great many men to whom the personal appeal is made. Here we would only say that Lord Derby should, if possible, tell his recruiters to be ready to meet arguments of this kind, aud, further and more important, should himself be prepared to ask Parliament to out away the trammels that now prevent a great many men from joining the colours. It is an entire delusion to suppose that the majority of men who do not join the colours are cowards or slackers. What prevents them is not laziness or fear, but the fact that they are hindered by ' hundreds of the complications of modern existence. Their legs are held firm in a sezies of barbed-wire entanglements, and they cannot get out without assistance—assistance which hitherto the State, though calling upon them so fiercely to come forward, has made not the slightest effort to render. We will give one or two examples to illustrate what we mean:— (1) Alfred Brown, asked why he does not enlist, says he should like to do so, but he is tied by the lease of his house. He is a superior clerk with a salary of .25 a week, and his house costs .e30 a year. He holds a lease which has six years to run, and he cannot break it. If he joined the Army he would have no other source of income but his pay, and the rent of his house would more than absorb the whole of this. He dare not rely on the chance of being able to sublet. If the Government could get over the /ease difficulty for him, he would join the colours.
(2) John Smith insured his life, partly for his wife and partly in order to raise some money with which to enlarge his business. The premiums amount to £25 a year. If he enlisted, he would, under his partnership deed, have to leave the firm. He would not be able to take any money out. But the premiums could not be paid out of his pay as a private, and he naturally will not even discuss the idea of letting the insurance lapse, considering how much he has paid on it and what that lapse would mean to his wife. IT the Government could arrange as to the insurance, he would gladly go.
(3) Richard Robinson has a small shop with £300 or .e400 invested therein. His wife is not strong, and woulci be quite incapable of running the business while he was away. He cannot, therefore, enlist unless the Government will make some arrangement for buying out his business.
There are, of course, plenty of other and much more elaborate complications of civil life which hold men bound. We simply quote three cases as typical examples of the difficulties which even willing and good-hearted men find in joining the colours under a voluntary system. Compulsion would set them free, and would oblige the Government to legislate hi such a way that no man would be able to take advantage of a fellow-citizen's absence at the front.
One of the great advantages of compulsion is that it automatically cuts all these wires and ropes, and. so sets men free. It tends to be a liberating rather than an enchaining process. But if we are not going to cut the tangle by compulsion, then at any rate Parliament should help Lord Derby and his recruiters by some system of legislative disentanglement. The next thing that Lord Derby must do if he is to make a success of his scheme is to do his very best to create what we may call a national atmosphere favourable to recruiting. He must not be content with merely local meetings or one or two speeches by Members of Puha,went. He must fix a period for a great recruiting effort throughout the country, an effort like that of a revival meeting, and he must let it go on for a week or fortnight. During that time the members of the Government and all the best speakers in the country must address public meetings, and address them not with platitudes, but for once speak plainly man to man with the 'nation, and tell them how imperative is the need. They should warn the nation also that if the recruitable men will not come by themselves they must be fetched, and should let them know further that, if they insist upon being fetched, the fetched men must not expect the same extraordinarily generous treatment that has been given to those who have willingly offered themselves. The Press, at the same time, must be organized to make a simultaneous and sustained appeal. Here again it must be made not by a part of the Press, but by the whole Press, and not by means of frigid and badly drawn appeals in the advertisement columns. It must be a real Press campaign, under which each page of every paper for a fortnight at least must contain appeals, direct and indirect, showing what is a man's duty. The social atmosphere of the nation, that is, must be, as it were, absolutely saturated with appeals to the recruitable men to do their duty. For the eligible men the spirit of the appeal must 'lie in their beds, walk up and down with them.' It must always be before their eyes, so that when the actual canvasser comes the ground will have Leen prepared. In a. word,, we must borrow from the hypnotists, and there must be a mass of suggestion so strong that it will lead men unconsciously to the recruiting office.
There is yet another way in which Lord Derby could use the Press, a way which we have so often recommended in these columns—that is, the appeal through the newspaper coupon. If every paper each day throughout the recruiting campaign had in a conspicuous position a coupon which could be easily filled in and posted without a stamp, we are certain that a great deal would be accomplished. The coupon would simply bear upon it some such undertaking as the following : TO MEN OF MILITARY AGE (17-40).
Fill in this Form, cut it out, and send it in an unsealed envelope, without a stamp, addressed as follows :— EARL KITCHENER, LG., London.
FORM.
I desire to join the Army for the period of the War, and I will present myself for onlistrwAnt if you will inform me of the time and place where I should attend.
Name (in full) Address (in full) Occupation
We are certain that a great many men who would not be reached in any other way would be recruited by the coupon plan. It may be urged that if there is to .he a personal canvass there is no place for the newspaper appeal through the coupon. That is a mistake. The Government pink forms will not include the names of men in a great variety of trades—as, for example,. nannitiou workers, miners, railwaymen, agricultural labourers, and so on, it being deemed unwise to draw too large a number of men from these industries. At the same time, and though it is not thought desirable, to put pressure upon men in these trades, it has never been suggested that if individuals among them greatly desire to enlist they should not be allowed to serve their country in. the field. Mon are not going to be enslaved, as it wore, and deprived of freedom of choice because they are agricultural labourers, let us say. If an agricultural labourer is determined to serve in arms, he must be allowed to do so. All we must not do is to put special pressure upon him and give him the impression that he is doing wrong if lie sticks to •the plough. A good many men in the exempted trades could be reached through the coupon system, and there, will be a very :large number of other people who, in various ways, will escape the personal canvass. There is one more " tip " which we may venture to give to Lord Derby by way of a reminder, for it is one which we expect he has already considered. When the standard was unfortunately raised very high for the Army, there were of course an enormous, number of rejections on so-called physical grounds... A good many of. the million or so of men thus rejected have now joined, but there are still a large number who were hurt by the first rejection and have ever since refused to serve, 'alleging that they wore kicked . out of the recruiting office with ignominy, and that they are not going to give the sergeants another chance to "turn them down,:" and so on. Recruiters should be specially instructed to do their best to, reason such men out of their sulks. Other men, again, are unaware that the changes in the standard will now allow them to enter the ranks. The allowance of spectacles is of course one of the great changes. There are, next, it great many men who were rejected because of bad teeth who could have found their way in if the Government had supplied free dental assistance. There is also the case of the ruptured man who can be cured by an operation. The recruiters ought to be able to undertake to provide this ophthalmic, dental, and surgical assistance for the would-be recruit. After all, it is really an absurdity not to give such help free, considering that we are already spending some £10 to £12 per head to get recruits. We must not end without ono e more wishing Lord Derby success with his enterprise. Compulsionists as we are, we shall be truly delighted if, by a system of scientific recruiting, be succeeds in maintaining a flow of twentyfive thousand to thirty thousand recruits a week for the next year. • If he does that, we shall be quite prepared to say that the demand of the voluntaryists for one more voluntary effort has been amply justified.
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