December 5, 1918 
LAND ^ WATER 
13 
ber that only the active elements' in any community really 
treasure freedom. The more passive portion is usually 
thankful for humane or tolerant handling, and this portion 
has suffered little from control, and it may desire to per- 
petuate control as widely as possible. In most classes the 
long strain of war has undermined the memories of freedom. 
All of us know and remember much less about it than we 
think. Month by month the mesmeric spell of the war-time 
State has grown greater pari passu with the mental fatigue 
•of the nation. 
In the form in which the war will leave it the State cannot 
help becoming a subject of political controversy, and perhaps 
the predominating issue. For some it has been immensely 
profitable. Great numbers have ffiund it, in certain respects, 
■a. comforting bulwark. By the time the war ends it will 
probably have increased its hold, if not on the affections, 
at least on the obedience of the more passive sort. It has 
answered th'e prayers of many theorists, in whose eyes it 
■approaches the ideal of social order. It offers careers, in 
«qual profusion, to the ambitious and the humble. Its 
various friends will combine to preserve it^ — or, at least, as 
much of it as they can. It will die very hard, you may be 
sure. 
On the other hand, history suggests that the reaction 
in favour of freedom will be very strong. For freedom is 
almost the only ideal that will unite the great majority of 
Englishmen in a burning enthusiasm. To-day there are 
many signs that the reaction is maturing among the civil 
population. The efficiency of the present controls is sus- 
pected bv a public which has no means, as yet, of ascer- 
taining the truth. Their economy is in graver doubt. After 
peace is made investigation will be possible. But will it be 
profitable ? Detailed proof or disproof of charges and sus- 
picions will probably fail to appeal to the nation, which will 
be thankful to drop the administrative organisation incidental 
to the war, and with it all inquiries into its efficiency. The 
robuster sort of man in the street will not trouble greatly to 
■count the pence or to cross-question the paymasters. He 
knows that almost every one, as contractor, or customer, or 
servant, has been handling public money, and he thinks 
this unwholesome. He thinks it, too, in the circumstances 
perhaps unavoidable. But when the time comes he is likely 
to say with all the emphasis in his power that he has 
had enough of this sort of thing, and that it must now 
stop. 
It can hardly be doubted that, on the whole, the movement 
towards freedom will succeed. The war, after all, has been 
fought for freedom. With freedom vindicated in world 
politics its cause elsewhere must gain thereby. Speculation 
about the many moods of the returning armies is not very 
safe. But it is not the unsafest surmise that they will value 
very highly the recovery of their personal liberty. The 
bureaucracies will find plenty of enemies among them. ■ But 
the friends of freedom must not underrate the numbers of 
those who will- seek to perpetuate the present system, or 
their influence with the indifferent classes which they may 
contrive to attract. The fight may be long and severe. The 
genie in the old story came readily out of his jar, but was 
difficult to put back again. In human affairs the motive 
often fails to govern or limit the results of action. Start a 
thing for one reason and it will persist for another, when 
the first exhausts itself, or it will live on from its own weight 
and bulk. 
Indulge an idea as an adventure, embrace it in an 
emergency, and it will become your habit and tyrannise over 
your policy. It is thus that our servants become our masters. 
It has often been thus with military power in States, though 
never before to the same extent with the civil side of State 
activity. The genie has come to our help very effectively 
against Germany. Nevertheless it is against him that we 
shall have to fight our Nachkrihg. 
It is instructive to compare the present crisis with that 
of igo6. Then freedom was too strong for the State : now 
the State has become too strong for freedom. The problem 
in those days was — or, rather, would have been, for the 
nation as a whole ignored its existence — how to enable the 
State to help industry on lines that may be labelled as 
"scientific," and are essentially non-political and non- 
partisan. That is still the problem. What would have been 
thought too much then, what many at the present moment 
may think too little, remains, under the new conditions as 
under the old, the directest scope for State action in industry, 
since the nation's love of liberty is at least as great as its 
respect for Government. But there is a momentous differ- 
ence in the procedure to be followed. Apathy and pre- 
occupation were then the obstacle. Now, it is all-round 
encroachment and the aggressive machine of emergency 
Government. It is one thing to make new grafts upon a 
modest tree, another to lop away branches and shoots of the 
rankest overgrowth. The latter must be the work of time. 
Nos is it likely to be done with absolute thoroughness. The 
State can never be quite the same after this war ; and, 
indeed, very few wish that it should be this. 
The Future ot Industry 
For there exists a very real basis of possible agreement for 
all parties as regards the action of the State in industry. 
Among the war activities of the State are many of those 
which have been indicated above as the right policy after 
1906. The State has been obliged by the war to face the 
general problems of many industries. What business imagina- 
tion and methods and co-operativeness have done in fostering 
general eft'iciency the nation has already an inkling of. It 
will realise the results later, when the history of that aspect 
of the war is more public. It is enough at present to insist 
that certain work which rests on the central and relatively 
disinterested point of view, and to which broad knowledge, 
initiative intelligence, and co-operative ideas of organisation 
are essential, has been undertaken in many departments. 
A tradition is being evolved and machinery has been built up. 
These good things are mixed up with many growths which, 
though useful for the nonce, are noxious to freedom. How 
to uncover and to disentangle what is worth preserving is a 
serious problem. There are as many problems as there are 
industries. In all of them, however, the guiding idea is 
clear. 
An intelligence staff, in the broadest sense of the 
phrase, must be set to work on the general interests of pro- 
duction in the specific industries, all questions of preference 
as between capital and labour, producer and consumer, and 
so on, being rigidly excluded. A condition of freedom*is an 
impartial State. What State action should be in detail the 
war has shown fairly clearly in some industries. In others 
there is less to go upon. In others, again, which the State 
has scarcely touched, conditions have changed very little 
since igo6. All cases alike deserve special study, and no 
single scheme is Hkely to fit more than one industry. 
The Stick : A Story by A. A. Milne 
THERE are always bores in a mess who want 
to talk about their adventures when you want 
to talk about yours. MuUins was as bad as any 
of them, but with this difference. The adventures 
of the others were adventures in search of the 
material ; a petticoat, a golf ball, a gun emplacement. 
Mullins had only spiritual adventures! If, during those 
ear y days of training, he had fallen off the cliffs into the sea, 
he would have told you of his emotions on the waj' down, 
and said not a word of the splash at the bottom. Recovering 
in hospital, he would not have wondered whether he would 
always carry on his body the scars of the accident ; he would 
have contemplated only the new scars on his soul. "Do I 
look different ? " he would have asked his nurse, quite seri- 
ously, his face swathed in bandages, and would have been 
surprised at her polite prevarication. What he would have 
meant would have been "Don't you understand that, as a 
result of this extraordinary experience, I am a finer Mullins 
altogether ? " 
This is not to say that he was indifferent to his personal 
appearance. He was very tall and thin, talked in a high 
voice, and walked with his head well back in the endeavour 
to balance a pair of glasses on a nose apparently not meant 
for glasses. Had he been indifferent to his appearance, he 
would have worn spectacles. Spectacles may or may not 
be ugly, but they would have hidden from you the essential 
Mullins. The essential Mullins, in a material world where 
people fight each other, and the short-sighted must suffer 
no handicap in the battle, could be expressed more clearly 
by pince-nez. So Mullins strode past you on the parade- 
ground with his head in air, and if you did not realise at a 
glance all the astonishing things that he meant to himself. 
