10 
LAND & WATER 
Past and Future 
Bv Jason 
June -?T, TOT7 
In this article the writer cxanuncs the social structure of 
(iermany and Great Britain. He ahozvs thai the former is 
a purely military State, and that the latter in ]'ictorian 
times uas built up on a -wrong conception of the industrial 
system. The war, which has compelled Great Britain to 
discover Iter full strength, ha'i brought about a nem 
appreciation of the true valtu of individual life. 
DURING the ninete^ntli century the ideas that 
grew up witlj Die Industrial Rcvohition governed 
mtire ur less consciously our outlook on life. >Iany 
l)eo|)Ie wotild have said to themselves quite frankly 
that there were economic laws, as absolute as the laws of 
nature, which determined the distribution of wealth, and 
that by those laws a larj^e proportion t)f the population was 
condemned to a life of ignorance and poverty. Many who 
would have shrunk from so painful an admission were none 
the less discouraged from expecting any substantial improve- 
ment, because these ideas were present in what some 
psvrhokigists call the sub-liminal consciousness. 
Political economy had produced a Calvinism for this hfe 
which closetl the door of hope as effectually as the Calvinism 
which theology Jiad produced for the life »)f the next world. 
The fundamental cause of this pessimism was the habit of 
thinking of society exclusively as an economic community. 
eoni])eting with other economic communities, which couUl 
only succeed by the ruthless disregard of human rights and 
h'elings. The Industrial Kevolulion put capital in power, 
for men argued that capital created the wealth which society 
existed to secure and defend, and that it was therefore the 
place of capital to dictate to the State the laws and arrange- 
ments of its life. The most extreme application of this 
doctrine was seen, of course, in the resistance to the Factory 
Acts when men like Lauderdale argued that a mill owner 
was to be allowed to work a child of eight as many hours of 
the day and the night as he pleased unless we meant to put 
a stop to all progress in the world. 
The war has shaken this whole set of preconceptions as no 
destructive criticism could have shaken it. In any great 
struggle of this kind there is a certain confhct of ideas which 
iiftects the imagination of 'the combatants. Thus in our long 
war with Kevolutionary l->ance, our ruling class became more 
and more reactionary, because they came to associate all ideas 
of liberty and reform with France, with the atrocities of the 
Terror and her disturbing energy in Europe. The fear of 
what Pitt called in a brilliant phrase " the liquid hre of 
Jacobinism " overshadowed the fear of French power which 
iiad dominated British p'ohtics before the Revolution. 
Similarly in this war we are fightting not merely against a 
powerful enemy, but against a theory of life as well. 
Rougiily speaking, we may say that Germany represents 
in F.urope the ideal which makes the army the model for the 
State. When the father of Frederick the Great gave to 
Prussia the most perfectly drilled infantrj' in the world, he 
gave her the basis on whicJi later rulers were to build up her 
civilisation. The essential features of a m»Iitar\- organisation 
of a very rigid type have been copied into all her civil 
institutions. Our Ambassudor at Beriin, in 1777, described 
the impression made on Ws mind by the success with which 
Frederick the Cireat had applied t<> all the problems of admini- 
stration the method and discipline which his father, first 
and last a drill-ser;t,'eant, had employed to make Prussia a 
military power. ' Ihe Prussian Monarchy reminds me of a 
vast prison in the centre, of which appears the great keeper 
occupied in the care of his captives." More than a century 
later, a few years before the outbreak of this war, Biilow 
gave us the ideal of Ge.nnan administration when he said in 
his book on Imperial Ecmomv, that "ev^ry department should 
be organised as if war "were going to break out to-morrow." 
Germany is a military State and evcrytliing is subordinated to 
the needs of military power. 
What many people, had overlooked before the war, wlien 
a certain indiscriminate admiration of Gennan administration 
was in fashion, was t fiat this ideal underlies all that is humane 
and considerate in lier ])olitica.l system as well as all that is 
brutal and peremptory. The care bestowed cm education, 
health, housing, tjown planmng, springs from a definite 
anxiety for the efltciency of the army. Kvery German is a 
])otential soldier, i-flid every German child who dies or grows 
into a delicate rrran is a loss to the army. -The (ierman 
(iovernment thus •fosters life in the spirit in which a fieneral 
would seek to ctxinbat disease in Mesopotamia or Palestine. 
But the same motive that makes the (ierman State insure 
the Workman and consider his health and housing makes i' 
refuse Ijim the right of free speech, and any control over the 
affairs of his national life : he is never allowed to forget that 
he owes obedience, even in his thoughts, to the ruling caste. 
For the fact that Germany is a military State governs all the 
relations of social life and the claims of personal freedom. 
The statesman asks about a German workman not what he 
should expect as a citizen, but how he should be treated and 
brought up if he is to become a good and obedient soldier, 
ready to shoot foreign enemies, but ready also, as the Kaiser 
has said, to shoot his own parents, if the autocrat requires it. 
Now this theoryi in many respects the antithesis of the 
commercial theory that sprang from the Industrial Revolu- 
tion, has one important feature in common with it. In 
both there is the same underlying refusal to think of the 
workman except as the instrument of a system. The early 
economists could only think of the workman as the instrument 
of the Capitalist, the modern (Jcrman can only think of him as 
the instrument of the fighting State. In both cases all the 
interests of a comnninity are grouped around a single idea, 
and jjoliticians ask about the mass of the people, not what 
their minds demand or what they have a right to expect, 
but how they can best be adapted to the requirements of a 
general and sim])le scheme of lih'. We can see what a State 
becomes if it moulds all life and conduct to the needs of an 
army, and we begin to understand what a State becomes if it 
moulds all life and conduct to the needs of the mill. The 
resistance to the brutal demands made upon luirope by a 
Power which makes its citizens subordinate everything to 
military force, awakens in the combatants a new suspicion of a 
theory which subordinates everything to economic force. 
The (ierman says : " Our military system is the origin of our 
power and therefore the source of such happiness and wealth 
as our people can attain -consequently any course that tends 
to make men and women less tiseful and less patient instru- 
ments of that system will ultimately bring ruin and misery 
upon them." ()ur forefathers put the case for their view of 
the relation of the Capitalist system to society in much the 
same way. 
Characteristic Barbarity 
Germany is carrying out her principle with characteristic 
thoroughness and the barbarity of her methods of war is part 
of her system of life. Behind it all there is this fatal con- 
fusion of means and ends, and the nations that are paying for 
that confusion with their blood and sacrificing everything 
to prevent this philosophy from overpowering the world are 
beginning to look more closely into means and ends in their 
own civilisation. We who aie sparing no effort to save 
J^urope from the creed that says that no human rights count 
against military power are beginning to attach a new value 
to tho.se rights that we have been tempted to surrender to 
industrial power. 
This reaction against the tendency to think of men and 
women as merely instruments is immensely strengthened and 
animated by the experience of the soldier. It has often been 
argued that it is the efiect of raihtary service to make men 
more docile, to weaken initiative and individuality, to give, 
the sense of an enveloping and overwhelming system. But 
there is a great difference between barrack life in peace and 
trench life in war. Nobody who has been trained in one of 
the great camps can mistake the deadening atmosphere of 
these places, or the monotonous and sombre rhythm of their 
life, and it is not difticiilt to understand that man\' people 
expect military service to be an enslaving influence. There 
is indeed no doubt that special care is needed to make camp 
life as it develops when the army becomes more of a machine 
even tolerable to men of Britisli habits. But this experience 
of camp life, which for most soldiers is comparatively brief 
and intermittent, is not going to be the decisive influence 
on the character and imagination of the new army. 
The important fact is that thousands upon thousands of 
men, very many of them at an impressionable age, taken from 
the counter or the stool, the mine or the factory or the work- 
shop, have passed through a revolution. They have been 
brought under new and emancipating influences, the Hfe of 
danger, the life of the open air, the life of comradeship, a 
wide range of experience and adventure, and each of these 
influences is helping to form their character and outlook, to 
break the bonds of custom and tradition. 
Now, though it is a commonplace in sermons about war 
that war makes the life of man cheap, it does not make a 
man's life cheap in his own eyes. The more ready he is to 
'i-k it, the higher the value he puts on it, He offers it to his" 
