i8 
LA N D &- \V A T E R 
May 25, 1916 
world — no foreigner, still less any Englishman acquainted 
with the nature of his own country — would for a moment 
have conceived the thing to be possible. 
If you had said in June, 1014, " Two years hence 
Great Britain will have enrolled for the purpose of the 
State in a great war five millions of men. She will have 
fighting in various fields of that war, fully equipped and 
at their full strength, 70 di\isions. She will have trained 
behind those divisions ample reserves for many, many 
months to come. She will be also in process of training 
further reserves so large that she can ' see her war ' 
long beyond the limits set by our Allies and our rivals," 
you would have been saying something which would not 
have been condemned as exaggerated, or foolish, or mad, 
but as simply meaningless. 
You would have been told in the first place that the 
mere making of rifles for such a force was beyond the 
power of Great Britain did she work at nothing else for 
many years. It would have been pointed out to you that 
there were not instructors neces.sary for tlie training of 
half, or even a quarter, of such forces. You would have 
been given some idea of the number of guns an army 
expects to have to the thousand bayonets, and upon 
that point alone you would have been put out of court. 
We do not yet see the thing at alL That we do not 
see it in its tnie proportions goes without saying. 1 
repeat that we do not see the thing at all any more than 
a man upon the surface of a mountain sees a mountain. 
It is a prodigy. 
Now there are in connection with that prodigy two 
things e.specially to be remarked. The first is the social 
medium in which it took place and against the apparent 
character of which it took place. The second is the 
economic effort which accompanied and made possible 
the militarj'. 
The society from which this immense effort proceeded 
with such immense rapidity was not a democratic society. 
It was a society such as has often been developed by 
powerful commercial and maritime states in the past ; a 
society essentially oligarchic in character. Its main 
interests were the interests of trade. Its main civic 
discussion was the discussion between its increasing vast 
proletariat majority and a capitalist class decreasing 
in numbers, but adding to its wealth with every decade. 
This society had never been asked to undertake within 
Uving memory' any complete national effort against an 
equal foe. That experience which has moulded all the 
national tradition of the German Empire and of the French 
Republic, of the Southern as of the Northern States in 
America, was here quite lacking. 
It is true, indeed, that those who cared to note the 
steps of a certain moral revolution through which the 
country was passing would have marked as peculiarly 
significant the vohmtary recruitment during the South 
African war. 
But in the first place it was upon no such scale as this. 
In the second place, it was accompanied by a very high 
rate of remuneration. In the third place, and most 
important, it came just after the period when' the par- 
ticular problems presented and the particular passions 
aroused by the South African conflict were keenly alive. 
The more important thing that has been done in the 
last two years had no such advantages. It arose from a 
circumstance unexpected, and in a state of the public 
mind towards any potential enemy in Europe which can 
iiardly be called a belligerent state of mind at all. 
There had been in a comparatively small section of the 
educated classes an insistence for some years upon the 
rivalry between the German Empire and Great Britain. 
That a conflict upon this scale was coming was not con- 
templated for a moment. Even those few who saw such 
things in the future saw them in the shape of a duel 
between this country and one great rival. It prepared 
against the danger of invasion, and at the most demanded 
nothing more than a sort of militia, universal indeed, 
but trained only for the purpose of an island defence. 
It is important to emphasise this point at a moment 
when it is largely forgotten. An army for fighting abroad 
enormously greater than the hypothetical little " Ex- 
peditionary Force " was never in the contemplation of 
the most imaginative. 
The thing is entirely new. It has been called into being 
absolutely from the beginning and, as one may say, almost 
out of nothing, so far as the moral forces creating it are 
concerned. And that is one part of the miracle. 
Those who know the history of the coimtry in the past 
will be the most ready to grasp the truth with regard to 
the second part of that miracle : I mean the fact that 
the effort was voluntary. 
Until quite a few weeks ago — until, indeed, the whole 
thing was done and hardly anything remained to do — 
the creation and the recruitment of this enormous body 
of men, to a large extent its training and organisation 
too, were due to spontaneous effort. 
Voluntary Effort 
Those who knew little of their own country and nothing 
of the past, chose sometimes to point out how much of 
public advertisement, of persuasion, and (in cases) of 
individual pressure were necessary to produce enlistment, 
What these men evidently did not know, or could not 
conceive (from a happy insularity), was the light in 
which the thing appears when we consider either the past 
of this country or the history of our .Mlies and rivals. 
The Germans, for instance, spend much of their slow 
and mechanical research upon the lives of their neigh- 
bours. They are nearly always lacking in judgment, l3ut 
commonly well stocked with detail. They have, before 
the war broke out and during its progress, grossly 
misunderstood subtlety, magnanimity, human and 
other characters alien to their own. But at least they 
were acquainted with the material circumstances upon 
which mere calculation could be based. It was their 
trade. 
Now the Germans undoubtedly took it for granted that 
the voluntary effort in this country would not only fail, 
but fail early and ignominiously. 
All their press, particularly their satire (if anything so 
heavy can be called satire) took for granted what seemed 
to them — and not only to them — an obvious truth ; 
that no nation, and least of all an industrial nation such 
as ours, feeling all the strain between capitalist and 
proletariat, could produce, without legal enforcement 
of ser\-ice, anything but a comparatively small pro- 
fessional army. The German mind has had to suffer S(3 
many disillusionments in the last two years that it is now 
frankly bewildered, and it is giving forth the chief mark 
of bewilderment — which is self-contradictory statement. 
But in nothing has it begun to be more bewildered than 
in this particular point of the British voluntary system. 
The (ierman mind is so slow to appreciate anything 
through the senses that its jeers at the continuance of 
such a system and its incredulity of the British power to 
raise anything beyond the first few divisions, continued 
past the bloody . and complete defeat suffered by 
the fJerman army in front of Ypres. It continued on 
and on until there were at least twenty British divisions 
in France alone opposed to the German lines. Then 
and then onlj- did the German popular mind at last — 
whatever the (German higher command may have thought 
— begin to change in this regard. 
To-day— and for some months past— that miscon- 
ception of England has so utterly disappeared that pro- 
bably the German mind has half-forgotten it ever enter- 
tained it. 
The economic effort which has accompanied this pro- 
digious transformation in the armament of Great Britain 
has not been as novel in quality, though in scale it has 
been as remarkable. 
Briefly, the wealth of England has been " mobilised " 
as thai of no other belligerent— and it is not perhaps 
wholly to the advantage of this country or its future 
that- it should have been so. Our wealth was, to use a 
continental metaphor, more " liquid." It was therefore 
more easily tapped. But whether it were wisely tapped 
or no might form a suitable matter for discussion in other 
pages than these. If a man owns a ton of wheat in the 
Argentine and a hundred bales of cotton in Egypt, he is 
possessed of wealth more movable and more easily 
exchangeable than some highly improved farm in Picardy 
or Lombardy. The temptation to realise in consumption, 
or to acquire for consumption by exchange, goods of 
this kind, thereby saving the less mobile wealth of 
others is considerable, and that temptation has been 
yielded to. Great Britain has financed the Alliance 
very largely, herself entirely (without recourse as yet in 
any marked degree to foreign or neutral aid), she has thus 
