ission be made an excuse for subjecting us
to exactly the same tyranny in England. They have not forgotten the "On
the knee" episode, nor the floggings in our military prisons, nor the
scandalous imprisonment of Tom Mann, nor the warnings as to military law
and barrack life contained even in Robert Blatchford's testimony that
the army made a man of him.

*What the Labour Party Owes to the Army.*

And here is where the Labour Party should come in. The Labour Party's
business is to abolish the Militarist soldier, who is only a quaint
survival of the King's footman (himself a still quainter survival of the
medieval baron's retainer), and substitute for him a trained combatant
with full civil rights, receiving the Trade Union rate of wages proper
to a skilled worker at a dangerous trade. It must co-operate with the
Trade Unions in fixing this moral minimum wage for the citizen soldier,
and in obtaining for him a guarantee that the wage shall continue until
he obtains civil employment on standard terms at the conclusion of the
war. It must make impossible the scandal of a monstrously rich peer (his
riches, the automatic result of ground land-landlordism, having "no
damned nonsense of merit about them") proclaiming the official weekly
allowance for the child of the British soldier in the trenches. That
allowance is eighteenpence, being less than one third of the standard
allowance for an illegitimate child under an affiliation order. And the
Labour Party must deprive the German bullet of its present double effect
in killing an Englishman in France and simultaneously reducing his
widow's subsistence from a guinea a week to five shillings. Until this
is done we are simply provoking Providence to destroy us.

I wish I could say that it is hardly necessary to add that Trade
Unionism must be instituted in the Army, so that there shall be
accredited secretaries in the field to act as a competent medium of
communication between the men on service and the political
representatives of their class at the War Office (for I shall propose
this representative innovation presently). It will shock our colonels;
but I know of no bodies of men for whom repeated and violent shocking is
more needed and more likely to prove salutary than the regimental masses
of the British army. One rather pleasant shock in store for them is the
discovery that an officer and a gentleman, whose sole professional
interest is the honour and welfare of his count