On 5 January 1916, a bill providing for the compulsory enlistment of single men into the British army was introduced in the House of Commons. Four months later, another bill was introduced, extending the principle of eligibility for conscription to all men, regardless of marital status, between the ages of eighteen and forty-one. Both the ‘Bachelor's Bill’ and the later, more comprehensive measure passed the Commons with overwhelming majorities – including large majorities within the Liberal party, which, before the war, had been staunchly opposed to such proposals.Footnote 1 The government's success in the parliamentary division lobbies could not, however, disguise the crisis which the question of conscription posed for British Liberalism. Enforced military service represented perhaps the most controversial curtailment of individual liberty imposed during the prosecution of the war. As one radical MP noted, many in his party had supposed their nation to be engaged in ‘a fight for Liberty against Bureaucracy, for British ideals and for Liberalism in its widest sense against Prussian Militarism and Tyranny’. For such men, the resort to compulsory service embodied nothing less than ‘the negation of Liberalism’.Footnote 2
The apparent irreconcilability between Liberal principles and the measures demanded by the waging of total war has long been a prominent theme in historical writing on British politics during the war years. Indeed, the intractability of the problem of adapting Liberalism to wartime conditions has frequently been cited as a principal cause of the party's rapid subsequent collapse.Footnote 3 As recently as 2004, G. R. Searle reiterated the orthodox view that during the war ‘the Liberals underwent a crisis of morale as they came to realize the incompatibility between their ideology and what actions they needed to take to secure victory’.Footnote 4
Undoubtedly, many of the Liberal MPs who voted for the introduction of compulsory service in 1916 did so without enthusiasm. Some had become convinced that, despite their best hopes and efforts, conscription was now the only alternative to military disaster.Footnote 5 The defeatist tone of the Welsh MP, William Llewelyn Williams, was typical of more than a few Liberals, when he declared that, faced by the necessity of conscription to national survival, ‘however reluctant I may be, however repugnant it may be to me, I will acquiesce’.Footnote 6 Others feared that failure to support the measures introduced by H. H. Asquith's administration would lead to the fall of the government, the destruction of the Liberal party, and the advent of a purely Conservative or Tory-dominated ministry.Footnote 7 The state of morale in much of the party was revealed by the number of Liberal MPs who absented themselves from the parliamentary divisions: eighty-four at the Third Reading of the January bill (although some were away from the Commons on active military service).
Not all Liberals, however, greeted the advent of conscription with such a sense of reluctance and repugnance as Llewelyn Williams. The role of David Lloyd George and, to a lesser extent, Winston Churchill, in the passage of the Military Service Acts has long been recognized, but there was also substantial enthusiasm for compulsory service among sections of the Liberal backbenches.Footnote 8 The Nation conceded that ‘there are heretics here and there’, and noted the presence of ‘a lost Liberal sheep or two’ among the more zealous advocates of conscription.Footnote 9 Historians, similarly, have noted the existence of the ‘Liberal War Committee’, formed in January 1916, which supported compulsory military service with considerable fervour. But groups such as the LWC have remained confined to the shadows in most studies of wartime politics.Footnote 10
Later scholars have generally accepted the Nation's view of the Liberal conscriptionists as ‘heretics’. The assumption has been that these men sacrificed their principles on the altar of national necessity, drifting to the right in their politics, and effectively ceasing to be ‘Liberals’ in any meaningful sense.Footnote 11 This article rejects this interpretation. It reassesses both the scale and the nature of Liberal support for conscription, demonstrating that those who advocated compulsory service were not simply abandoning their Liberalism and moving to embrace the politics of the right. Members of the LWC emerged from across the spectrum of Liberal politics, and most regarded conscription during the war as entirely compatible with their Liberalism. The arguments they advanced to defend their position are examined in the context of pre-war British thinking, to demonstrate that Liberal doctrine was more flexible with regard to compulsory service than has hitherto been appreciated.
I
The existence of an organization of parliamentary Liberals calling for conscription is noteworthy in itself, but more striking still is the speed with which the call was raised. On the outbreak of the war, the National Service League – Lord Roberts's ostensibly bipartisan, but in practice overwhelmingly Unionist, pro-conscription pressure group – announced a suspension of its political activities, in the interests of national unity. As early as August 1914, however, the radical MP for Newcastle under Lyme, Josiah Wedgwood, was predicting the possibility of recourse to conscription, and declaring that ‘I shall not be one of those to ask the government to stop the war and retire from the combat even though such measures are found necessary to prosecute it.’Footnote 12 By May 1915, the Monmouthshire Liberal MP, Ivor Herbert, was demanding ‘National Service for everyone’, and his call was echoed by other Liberals, including his fellow Welshman Ellis Jones Griffith, the Dorset MP Captain ‘Freddie’ Guest, and the member for Orkney and Shetland, John Cathcart Wason.Footnote 13 Liberal advocates of conscription quickly began to organize themselves. In July, Guest, Griffith, Herbert, and Wedgwood, along with four others – Edwin Cornwall, Frederick Cawley, Alfred Mond, and William Dudley Ward – issued what The Times described as a ‘whip’ to their parliamentary colleagues calling for a commitment to ‘submit ourselves without delay to any and every form of discipline to win the war’, and for support in an effort to extract from the government a positive statement on the question of National Service.Footnote 14 A month later, a manifesto for National Service was launched, insisting ‘that every fit man, whatever his position in life, must be made available, as and when his country calls for him, for the fighting line, or, if specially qualified, for National Service at home’. Griffith, Herbert, Mond, Wedgwood, and the Northamptonshire MP, Sir Leo George Chiozza Money, were among the signatories, placing themselves in the company of men such as Lord Northcliffe, and the reactionary and eccentric Unionist MP, Admiral Lord Charles Beresford.Footnote 15 Within another month, twenty Liberal MPs, along with twenty Unionists, addressed a letter to Asquith, asking the prime minister to receive a deputation urging the early adoption of a measure of compulsory military service.Footnote 16
As the activities of men such as Northcliffe, and the re-emergence of National Service League agitation during 1915 made clear, there existed powerful support for conscription outside the Liberal ranks. Yet, the Liberal conscriptionists often outstripped even their Unionist counterparts in their zeal, and in the extent of their demands. By October 1915, Herbert, Cornwall, and the Aberdeenshire Liberal, William Cowan, were calling in parliament, not simply for the recruitment of those unmarried men aged eighteen to forty-one who were eventually to be enlisted under the first conscription bill, but for ‘the services of all the male population of the United Kingdom between the ages of 18 and 65 [to] be placed at the disposal of the King for such duty as His Majesty may determine’.Footnote 17 That same month, following another parliamentary debate, the Nation remarked sourly that Freddie Guest's extreme stance on the question of compulsion had at least ‘had the advantage of dividing the conscriptionists, the more moderate openly dissociating themselves’ from him.Footnote 18
Finally, in January 1916, the Liberal War Committee itself was formed. The initial membership numbered nineteen, with Cawley serving as the group's chairman. Mond and Sir Henry Dalziel, the MP for Kirkcaldy Burghs, acted as vice-chairmen, Sir Charles Henry and Sir Arthur Basil Markham were treasurers, and Frederick Handel Booth and John William Pratt served as secretaries. Cowan, Herbert, and Ellis Griffith were appointed to a special sub-committee to consider possible amendments to the government's National Service Bill which had been introduced in the Commons a week earlier.Footnote 19 MacCallum Scott, who declined an invitation to join the group on its foundation but was to become a member in August 1916, noted that Dalziel and Booth had prepared the ground carefully. Even before Christmas 1915, the pair had been ‘systematically approaching every man who they think can be influenced’, and throughout January 1916, Booth in particular was ‘very busily engaged in nobbling men. He is all over the place.’ The avowed purpose of the new committee was to support ‘a national policy for the rigorous prosecution of the war’. It was often referred to as the ‘Liberal Ginger Group’ because of its professed desire to ‘ginger up’ the government – although critics often used the epithet pointedly in reference to the colour of Handel Booth's hair.Footnote 20
If the LWC kept minutes of its meetings, or other formal records, they do not appear to have survived. But the committee was not shy of publicity, and their activities were often reported in the press. By May 1916, the group was convening, theoretically, on a weekly basis in the House of Commons, although meetings were sometimes postponed or cancelled at short notice.Footnote 21 Several members were also in close touch with Sir Edward Carson's ‘Unionist War Committee’, which had been formed a week before its Liberal counterpart by Unionist backbenchers who were also restless for a more rigorous prosecution of the war, although the two groups continued to meet separately and act independently of one another.Footnote 22 The Liberal committee embarked upon a vigorous campaign of criticism against Kitchener at the War Office until the latter's death in June 1916, and championed a raft of policies intended to further the prosecution of the war, from the creation of a separate ministry of the air to the introduction of daylight saving time.Footnote 23 But it was by their full-throated advocacy of compulsory service that they attracted most attention. The first meeting of the LWC, in January 1916, pledged members to support the government's National Service Bill in all its stages.Footnote 24 Yet, several members of the committee were at pains to demonstrate that, whilst they welcomed the ‘Bachelor's Bill’ as signalling the government's acceptance of the principle of conscription, they still hoped for a more comprehensive measure of compulsory service.Footnote 25
In March 1916, the LWC passed a resolution calling for the general enlistment of all men of military age, married as well as single. This firm declaration was applauded by The Times, which noted that the Unionist War Committee ‘have not yet pledged themselves on this fundamental question of policy’.Footnote 26 Indeed, Leo Amery found the Unionist committee ‘all in an awful stew at the idea of passing a resolution about universal compulsory service lest it should in any way make things awkward for Bonar Law’.Footnote 27 Orthodox Liberal opinion was less impressed by the LWC's boldness, the Nation confining itself to a sour remark about ‘the panting haste of the Liberal “gingerists” to be in front of their Conservative rivals with a sort of stop-press vote for universal Compulsion’.Footnote 28
Whilst Liberal conscriptionists were undoubtedly in the vanguard of the campaign for compulsory military service, the extent of the practical political influence which the LWC was able to assert towards the introduction of conscription is more questionable. The committee itself was only formed a week after the first Military Service Bill had been introduced in the Commons, and attempts by ‘ginger’ Liberals to introduce amendments expanding the scope of the bill – for example by providing legislative machinery for the future calling up of married men, and by extending liability for enlistment to those youths attaining the age of eighteen years during the course of the war – were rejected by the government.Footnote 29 Asquith maintained that only considerations of military necessity would influence his administration's policy on recruitment, and insisted that he remained ‘unmoved in his determination not to surrender to organized clamour’.Footnote 30 The clamour itself, moreover, was not always as organized as it might have been. The Commons debate on the ‘Bachelor's Bill’ in January 1916 revealed divisions within the LWC between those who sought to press the government for the most comprehensive measure possible, and those who wanted the committee to devote its efforts simply to getting the principle of conscription on to the statute book with the minimum of delay and controversy.Footnote 31 In March 1916, the committee was plunged into a minor crisis after Henry Dalziel revealed in the pages of Reynolds's Newspaper that Churchill, whilst on leave from his regiment in France, had written a lengthy and, it seems, somewhat controversial letter to Cawley, setting forth his views on the political situation.Footnote 32 Many in the LWC were deeply irritated by Dalziel's indiscretion, and tensions came to a head days later, when Dalziel stormed out of an ill-tempered LWC meeting, leading to a flurry of rumours at Westminster that the committee was on the verge of breaking up.Footnote 33
In fact no split occurred, but the LWC's political influence remained limited. The Nation derided the group as ‘in numbers only less contemptible than in personnel’.Footnote 34 The committee could boast no members of political standing equal to the anti-conscriptionist members of the cabinet, such as Simon, Runciman and McKenna, against whom they came to be ranged, and never reached a size comparable to Carson's Unionist group, which boasted a membership of some 150.Footnote 35 But, although the lack of surviving records makes it difficult to reproduce a comprehensive LWC membership list, the number of Liberal conscriptionists was not as negligible as the Nation might have liked to think. In April 1916, The Times reported that the committee numbered about fifty, by which time the Nation itself had reported that ‘the Cawley group is being enlarged, and now contains sixty members’.Footnote 36 In neither case was a list of names supplied, however, and these figures probably included some MPs who merely attended meetings without formally accepting LWC membership. In December 1916, the Westminster Gazette described the committee as numbering thirty-four, although the Daily Chronicle reported that a further twenty MPs were ‘up for election’ to the group.Footnote 37 The Morning Post published the names of thirty Liberals who attended an LWC meeting that month, but noted that these included a few who ‘have not up to now shown any great eagerness to help the “ginger” group’.Footnote 38 Clearly, the LWC continued to expand, even after compulsory military service had been secured, and it is not always possible to be certain when individual MPs formally joined the group. According to MacCallum Scott's diary, Henry Guest, Lewis Haslam, and Sir Leo Chiozza Money had become full members of the committee by March 1916, and William Young, George Lambert, R. L. Harmsworth, and A. W. Yeo were at least attending some meetings.Footnote 39 The evidence points to the existence of a hard core of between thirty and forty committed Liberal conscriptionists, who had, by the introduction of the second Compulsory Service Bill in May 1916, either joined the LWC itself, or else signalled their support for conscription by other means such as the manifestos and petitions already mentioned in this article. In addition, there were perhaps a score more MPs who were in contact with the committee, often attending meetings as guests, many of whom were to join the group later that year.
Ironically, the LWC probably came to enjoy greater political influence in the months following the introduction of full compulsory military service than they had in their efforts to secure conscription itself. The committee remained active for the duration of the war. Sir Ivor Herbert succeeded Cawley as chairman in February 1917, and was himself succeeded by Sir Ivor Philipps four months later.Footnote 40 With compulsory service safely on the statute book, the committee turned its attention to other questions, including Balkans policy, army medical provision, and food rationing.Footnote 41 The third secret session of the Commons, held in May 1917 to discuss recruiting questions and the submarine menace, was convened largely as a result of LWC agitation, and the committee offered enthusiastic support to the government's bill extending conscription to Ireland, introduced in April 1918, though never implemented.Footnote 42 But the group attained perhaps its greatest prominence during the political upheavals surrounding Asquith's fall from office at the end of 1916. Members of the committee were conspicuously absent from a meeting of Liberal MPs summoned on 4 December to express their continued confidence in the prime minister, but after Asquith resigned the following day, the LWC itself convened and pledged hearty support to Lloyd George and his new administration.Footnote 43 The fact that, as the Morning Post noted, this latter meeting was attended by a number of MPs who had not previously been close to the committee suggests that the LWC was evolving into the nucleus of an organized Lloyd George faction within the Liberal party.
Lloyd George had enjoyed good relations with the committee for some time. He himself had become convinced of the inadequacy of the voluntary system of recruitment by the middle of 1915, and by the end of the year was threatening resignation if steps to introduce conscription were not undertaken.Footnote 44 By January 1916, C. P. Scott noted that the minister of munitions was often to be seen in conversation with Dalziel, Booth, Markham, and Chiozza Money in the House of Commons tea room, and there were widespread suspicions that the formation of the LWC was part of a plot to unseat Asquith – something denied by Booth in an interview in The Sunday Times.Footnote 45 In the ensuing months, Lloyd George addressed the committee on several occasions, securing the confidence they no longer expressed in many of his Liberal cabinet colleagues.Footnote 46 But the committee had never been simply a ‘front’ for the ‘Welsh Wizard’. There were those in the group who looked to Churchill, rather than to Lloyd George, for inspiration and leadership. At an LWC luncheon in March 1916, Dalziel, Mond, and Markham had attempted to entice Churchill, who attended as a guest whilst on leave from the front, to return and lead the ‘forward movement’ in the Commons.Footnote 47 Even in December 1916, the Westminster Gazette calculated that only twenty-five out of thirty-four members of the LWC could be counted on as firm Lloyd George men.Footnote 48 During the meeting on 7 December, at which the committee pledged itself to support the new prime minister, George Agnew and William Pearce pressed the group to confine itself to a simple declaration of support for any administration that would conduct a more vigorous prosecution of the war, without naming individual ministers, and MacCallum Scott urged that ‘it would be unwise to make ourselves a mere Lloyd George group’. But eventually the ‘Lloyd George’ resolution was carried nem. con., with MacCallum Scott alone abstaining from the vote.Footnote 49 Thereafter, the LWC provided the backbone of Lloyd George's Liberal support, and several members of the committee were rewarded with office in the new coalition. Cawley became chancellor of the duchy of Lancaster, Mond was made first commissioner of works, and soon afterwards Freddie Guest was appointed Coalition Liberal chief whip. David Davies became one of the members of Lloyd George's private secretariat, the ‘garden suburb’, with responsibilities including war strategy and munitions.Footnote 50
The support of the committee was politically useful to Lloyd George. Wealthy individuals such as David Davies represented a potential source of independent financial backing, whilst Henry Dalziel delivered the support of Reynolds's Newspaper, which had become increasingly vocal as the war progressed, both in its criticism of the ‘laxity’ of Asquith's direction of affairs, and in its support for Lloyd George's bid for the premiership.Footnote 51 But the committee's most invaluable political contribution was the semblance of Liberalism which the presence of men like Cawley in the post-Asquithian government added to the new premier's Unionist-dominated coalition.
II
In the context of the wartime fracturing of the Liberal party, the LWC have often been misrepresented as a grouping from the ‘right’ of the party. Trevor Wilson compared them to the Whigs who had seceded from the Liberal party in the 1880s, and Michael Freeden has asserted that wartime Liberal conscriptionists emerged almost exclusively from the ‘moderate’ wing of the party, which had been distinguished before the war by its opposition to the social collectivism of the ‘new Liberal’ welfare reforms.Footnote 52 In fact, the picture was far less clear-cut. Indeed, it is difficult to imagine a group of Liberals more diverse in their wider political opinions than those who came to embrace the cause of compulsion after 1914.
Some members of the LWC, admittedly, came from the moderate wing of pre-war Liberalism. The first thing that struck MacCallum Scott about the committee was the enormous wealth behind it, and the Liberal conscriptionists included a number of millionaires, including Sir Arthur Markham, Sir Charles Henry, Sir Alfred Mond, Harold Pearson, and Herbert Raphael.Footnote 53 David Davies had as strong a claim as any man in the Edwardian party to the Whiggish epithet – a wealthy landowner, he had been endorsed by both Liberals and Unionists when first elected for Montgomeryshire in 1906. Freddie Guest was a former Unionist who had joined the Liberals over the issue of free trade in the face of the Chamberlainite tariff reform challenge. Clifford Cory, Walter Waring, and Herbert Raphael had all been prominent opponents of what they saw as the socialistic trend of Liberal policy before 1914.Footnote 54 But the Liberal conscriptionist ranks also contained a significant number of MPs who had been enthusiastic social reformers before the war. Dalziel, Greenwood, Chiozza Money, Pratt, and Wedgwood were all acknowledged social radicals.Footnote 55 The founding members of the LWC also included the Lib-Lab MP for Stoke-on-Trent, John Ward, who, even as he expounded the case for conscription in parliament in January 1916, was acknowledged by the Daily Chronicle as ‘a Radical of Radicals, a Democrat of Democrats, and not less a staunch champion of Labour now that he is an officer in the army, than when he was plain John Ward of the Navvies’ Union'.Footnote 56
Wartime advocacy of conscription thus bore no relation to pre-war attitudes on social policy. More significantly, it also bore little relation to pre-war attitudes on questions of national defence. Eight members of the LWC had previously been members of Rosebery's Liberal League, who might have been expected to take a strong line on military questions, particularly during wartime.Footnote 57 But at least nine other members of the wartime ‘ginger group’, including five of the nineteen founding members, had voted, against their own front bench, for reductions in the naval estimates in at least one key parliamentary division in the years before the outbreak of the war, and several had appeared on a 1908 Navy League ‘blacklist’ as members of the ‘Little Navy’ group in the Commons.Footnote 58 MacCallum Scott had been secretary of the anti-armaments ‘League of Liberals against Aggression and Militarism’, and as late as December 1913, J. Annan Bryce, one of the founding members of the LWC, had led a deputation of backbench Liberals, protesting to Asquith about the excessive scale of Churchill's naval estimates.Footnote 59 Wartime Liberal divisions over the question of compulsory service did not correspond to any of the major fault-lines dividing the pre-war party.
The process by which the diverse members of the LWC came to advocate conscription after 1914 varied. As one of those Liberal MPs with first hand experience of military service during the war, Freddie Guest claimed in the Commons to be putting forth the demand for conscription on behalf of the army itself. The Times spoke admiringly of ‘this bronzed man with erect military bearing’, and of ‘the case for National Service [which] was the burden of Captain Guest's message from the fighting forces’.Footnote 60 Several other prominent Liberal conscriptionists, including Freddie's brother Henry Guest, Josiah Wedgwood, Hamar Greenwood, Walter Waring, Dudley Ward, and Ivor Phillips, were also serving in the armed forces by this time. By contrast, and in line with his earlier career as a political and economic journalist, Chiozza Money's advocacy of compulsory service was based upon considered arguments about the shortcomings of voluntarism as a system of national organization, dwelling on the dangers inherent in the ‘promiscuous and costly recruiting’ of men in industries vital to the war effort, ‘while there still remain unrecruited men whose labour is of a different order, and who can much better be spared for the fighting line’. For Chiozza Money, conscription represented not simply a blind drive to enlist the maximum possible number of men into the armed forces, but a scientific policy of national organization. Above all, this meant a system of ‘controlled’ recruitment, in which it was as important to keep certain men out of the army as it was to get others into it.Footnote 61 The same concern was expressed by Ellis Griffith at a meeting in Carnarvonshire in June 1915, where the Anglesey MP insisted that ‘men who were making munitions ought not to have been enlisted’, and called upon the government to bring such useful workers home from the front.Footnote 62 As parliamentary private secretary to Lloyd George at the ministry of munitions, Chiozza Money drew up a confidential memorandum in November 1915, proposing the establishment of a ‘Department for the General Organization of Labour during the War for all purposes’. This department was to survey the entire labour force in the country and seek to ‘distribute them most effectively’ as between:-
1. Recruits for the Army and Navy.
2. Munitions Workers.
3. Workers for export.
4. Producers of material commodities for home consumption.
5. Transport Workers.
6. Imperial and Local Government Workers.
7. Wholesale distributors.
8. Retail distributors, and
9. Producers of services.Footnote 63
III
However necessary it might appear to have become by 1916, advocacy of compulsory service remained potentially problematic for those claiming to hold Liberal principles. By supporting conscription, members of the LWC were acquiescing in the introduction of a system which, in the words of one scholar, ‘was seen by Liberals of most schools as a paradigm of the very system they believed themselves to be fighting’.Footnote 64 Many historians have assumed simply that ‘principle’ no longer mattered to those Liberals who came to advocate conscription. A. J. P. Taylor asserted that, after two years of the fighting in Europe, Liberals were faced with two alternatives – ‘abandon liberalism or … abandon the war’ – and that many opted for the former.Footnote 65 Trevor Wilson agreed that, for those Liberals who supported the introduction of compulsory service, ‘the war and its efficient conduct took precedence over all other questions, including the principles of their party’. In Wilson's opinion, such men effectively surrendered the right to call themselves Liberals: ‘By placing the war before everything else they in effect abandoned their Liberalism, moving over, in their ideology, their policy, and their political associations, into the Conservative camp.’Footnote 66 Michael Bentley has similarly referred to the ‘win-the-war position’ which demanded from its adherents ‘unflinching prosecution of the fighting, regardless of principles, traditions and old-fashioned loyalties’.Footnote 67
Some Liberal conscriptionists were indeed prepared to argue that principles which held good in peacetime must of necessity be suspended in times of crisis. Freddie Guest insisted that he ‘did not recommend the change from a voluntary to a compulsory system on principle, but purely on grounds of expediency, urgency, and as a temporary measure’.Footnote 68 Even Josiah Wedgwood – throughout his long parliamentary career normally one of the most outspoken defenders of individual liberties – felt moved in 1915 to declare that ‘in times of war you have got to sacrifice the individual to the community’.Footnote 69 Of course, suspending one's principles for the duration of an emergency was not necessarily the same as abandoning them altogether. But during the war, several members of the LWC were so moved by considerations of national necessity that they appeared ready to renounce their Liberalism altogether. On one occasion, Ellis Griffith proclaimed that ‘I am told by many that I am going against the traditions of my party. Am I? I care nothing for the traditions of my party. I am concerned about the interest of my country.’Footnote 70 Henry Dalziel and Handel Booth were not even convinced of the desirability of retaining a purely Liberal government, and by 1915 were among the most enthusiastic advocates of a reconstruction of the ministry on ‘non-party lines’.Footnote 71
Other traditional articles of Liberal faith, besides voluntarism, also appeared to be falling by the wayside for some conscriptionists. Dalziel, for example, demanded the internment of resident alien enemies of military age. He expressed deep alarm that ‘there were nearly 20,000 enemy aliens in London who had practically complete liberty’, and warned that, in the event of a Zeppelin attack on London, ‘no doubt it would be found that thousands of them had their allotted posts’. He also advocated the removal of magistrates of German origin, to prevent the ‘humiliation’ of such men ‘pronouncing in broken English sentence on an Englishman for some paltry offence’. Despite maintaining that he was ‘not a man who would suggest interfering with liberty’, Dalziel even talked of the desirability of measures to prevent individuals speaking in public against the war, insisting that ‘at a time like this it was liberty gone mad to make our people when going through the parks listen to someone who was denouncing the whole purpose and conduct of the war’.Footnote 72 Even more unfortunate terms were used by Arthur Markham, who, calling for the introduction of labour from overseas Dominions to assist in munitions production, declared that ‘I would use Chinese labour if it would bring the war to a successful conclusion, even if I had to put them in compounds.’Footnote 73
It is also a fact that several of those Liberals who supported conscription during the war subsequently left the party for the Conservatives. Of those who remained in parliament after 1918, Freddie Guest, his brother Henry, Alfred Mond, William Cowan, Hamar Greenwood, and Walter Waring all joined (or, in the case of Guest, re-joined) the Tory party, although Waring was never re-elected as a Conservative. This does not necessarily mean, however, that Wilson is correct to assert that pro-conscription Liberals were simply those en route to the Conservative party. It certainly does not prove that such men had already ‘abandoned their Liberalism’ by 1916. Mond contested four elections after 1918 as a Liberal, before finally joining the Conservatives in 1926, and Henry Guest only joined the party in 1930, fighting his first election as a Conservative as late as 1937. In most cases, the act of crossing the floor in the years after 1918 represented not so much a disavowal of Liberalism as a detestation of ‘socialism’, and a conviction that by the inter-war years, supporting the Tories represented the best means of keeping Labour out of office.
The vast majority of the LWC, moreover, were anxious to remain within the Liberal fold. Henry Dalziel, Charles Henry, William Pratt, Edwin Cornwall, William Dudley Ward, Ellis Griffith, John Cathcart Wason, A. W. Barton, Sir Edward Beauchamp, Sir Clifford Cory, J. H. Edwards, R. L. Harmsworth, F. G. Kellaway, George Lambert, John Ward, Sir Joseph Walton, A. W. Yeo, and William Young all continued to sit in the Commons as Liberals (admittedly usually as Coalition Liberals) in the post-war years. David Davies did likewise before rebranding himself an ‘Independent’ in 1926. H. W. Carr-Gomm and T. O. Jacobsen both continued to contest elections in the Liberal interest after 1918, though without success. Evidently, none of these men regarded their wartime position on conscription as having placed them beyond the Liberal pale.Footnote 74 Even in 1918, with the LWC's efforts on behalf of conscription still fresh in the memory, there was little evidence that members of the committee were regarded as those Liberals closest to Toryism. Several LWC members were opposed in the 1918 election by Conservatives. Booth, Jacobsen, and Carr-Gomm, fighting the election without the endorsement of the coalition ‘coupon’, all faced official Coalition Conservative candidates. Guy Wilson was offered the coupon but rejected it and was defeated by his Tory opponent, whilst George Lambert took the Coalition Liberal whip only after defeating the couponed Conservative candidate at South Molton. Mond, Yeo, and Henry Guest all faced Conservative challengers, despite having been awarded the coupon, and Ivor Philipps and Dudley Ward, both solid Coalition Liberals, faced a significant Conservative challenge in the two-seat constituency of Southampton, which they had held together since 1906. Clifford Cory faced an ineffective challenge from an ‘Independent Conservative’ at St Ives, and other Liberal conscriptionists fighting in 1918 with the coalition's endorsement, such as Pratt and Cowan, avoided a Tory challenge only after Conservative Central Office intervened to quell grass-roots Unionist unrest.Footnote 75
Some Liberals who supported conscription were so committed to the progressive tradition that they joined the Labour party after the war. Josiah Wedgwood turned down the offer of the coalition coupon in 1918, was re-elected unopposed, and a year later took the Labour whip. He became chancellor of the duchy of Lancaster in the first Labour cabinet, and was to sit in the Commons as a Labour, and then as an Independent Labour member until 1942. Although less successful, Chiozza Money similarly declined to stand as a coalition candidate after the war, and contested South Tottenham in 1918 and Stockport in 1920 in the Labour interest. He was elected to the Fabian Society's Executive in 1919, alongside Sidney Webb and Clement Attlee.Footnote 76 MacCallum Scott and Croydon Marks also joined the Labour party after the war, in 1924 and 1929 respectively, though neither man subsequently contested a parliamentary seat.
During the war itself, many in the LWC hotly refuted the charge that they had ‘abandoned’ their Liberalism. When, following the fall of the Asquith coalition, conscriptionist Liberals pledged themselves to Lloyd George and his new, Unionist-dominated administration, they were at pains to maintain their identity as Liberals. As The Times reported, ‘They hold that their Liberalism is as good as anybody else's, and will not change their name or surrender their title to a place in the party because one of the Liberal leaders has plumped for a more vigorous prosecution of the war.’Footnote 77 Denying that he had betrayed his progressive roots by advocating conscription, Josiah Wedgwood claimed to represent ‘the views of all the fighting leaders of the labour movement … and the leaders of every syndicalist movement’.Footnote 78 Declaring himself to have been a socialist before the war, Chiozza Money insisted that ‘nothing has occurred in the war that has led me to desert the socialism which I profess’.Footnote 79 Even Ellis Griffith, despite his claim to care nothing for the traditions of party next to the needs of country, felt moved on at least one occasion to repudiate the imputation that Liberals who advocated conscription had abandoned their Liberalism.Footnote 80 In taking this line he was supported by The Times, which described Griffith as being as good a Liberal as the Nation itself.Footnote 81
Despite the obvious reasons for refusing to take such protestations at face value, it is clear that in many cases they were not made disingenuously. The Nation might scornfully have predicted that the LWC would ‘soon exhaust its stock of Liberal “principles”’, but, on the contrary, many committee members were prominent in their defence of traditional Liberal policies, other than voluntary recruitment, which appeared to come under threat during the war.Footnote 82 Alfred Mond apparently saw nothing incongruous about advocating conscription, whilst simultaneously attacking McKenna's (limited) introduction of tariffs when chancellor of the exchequer, as being ‘in violation of the principles of Free Trade’.Footnote 83 The government's introduction of protectionist Indian cotton duties in March 1917 also provoked opposition from several members of the LWC, including Barton and Cawley, both of whom represented Lancashire constituencies.Footnote 84 Nor did an enthusiasm for compulsory military service necessarily imply an abandonment of other liberties traditionally sacred to Liberalism. When Lloyd George's government proscribed the overseas circulation of the Nation in April 1917, Dalziel, Wedgwood, and MacCallum Scott all criticized the action in parliament, and the journal received letters of support from several other members of the LWC.Footnote 85
More audaciously, many Liberal conscriptionists rejected the assumption that compulsory service itself was ‘illiberal’. As Michael Freeden has noted, many of the staunchest Liberal opponents of compulsory service – even those from the left of the party, who before the war had supported greater state collectivism on ‘new Liberal’ lines – were so appalled by the prospect of military conscription that they became more cautious in their attitudes toward state coercion, and retreated to an insistence on individual self-determination and voluntarism as the cornerstones of British Liberalism.Footnote 86 The Liberal conscriptionists of 1916, however, sought to justify compulsory service – and simultaneously to defend their own ‘Liberal’ credentials – precisely by appealing to pre-war precedents in Liberal state collectivism. By 1914, Liberalism had to a considerable extent moved beyond its nineteenth-century laissez-faire traditions, accepting some restrictions on individual liberty for the sake of collective welfare. Members of the LWC such as Ellis Griffith argued that it was inconsistent to present compulsory military service as anathema to Liberalism, since ‘we have compulsory education and taxation’, and the temperance and trade union interests in parliament relied upon compulsion for the enforcement of their views.Footnote 87
Foreign precedent, too, was invoked by Liberal conscriptionists to refute the argument that progressive principles and compulsory military service were incompatible. In August 1915, Ellis Griffith and Chiozza Money published an article in the Manchester Guardian, in which they argued that ‘to represent that National Service is in derogation of liberty is to ignore the National Service of free Switzerland and the National Service of our own daughter nation, free Australia’. It was also, so they claimed, a slander on Britain's European allies, for already, ‘upon the soil of France and Flanders British liberty is being largely upheld by Belgian and French conscripts, supported in the east and south by the conscripts of Italy, of Russia, of Serbia, and of Montenegro’.Footnote 88 Chiozza Money returned to this theme during the debate on the ‘Bachelor's Bill’ in January, 1916, insisting that compulsory service could be accommodated comfortably within a democratic society. ‘Has the Swiss National Service system changed the democratic spirit of the Swiss people?’, he demanded. ‘Has the National Service of the Australian Commonwealth changed the aspirations of the democracy of Australia, where there is no Tory party, but where there is a Liberal party and a Labour party, which claims to be even more democratic than the Labour party in this country?’Footnote 89 These arguments were echoed by Lloyd George himself during the debate on the second National Service Bill in May 1916, when the minister of munitions insisted that, since the time of the ancient Greeks, ‘every great democracy which has been challenged, which has had its liberties menaced, has defended itself by resort to compulsion’.Footnote 90
Such claims were greeted with scorn by critics, but the position of Liberal conscriptionists was strengthened immeasurably by the refusal of many of the more orthodox Liberal leaders to oppose their arguments on grounds of ‘principle’. In the retrospective context of life under the post-war Lloyd George coalition, many Liberals came to remember Asquith as a champion of Liberal values. But during the war Asquith had consistently refused to allow his policy to be determined by ‘abstract attachment to a priori principle’, declaring in the Commons that ‘I have nothing at the back of my mind which would make me go to the stake, or through some less severe form of penance, in defence of what is called the voluntary principle.’Footnote 91 Most of the prime minister's Liberal colleagues in the cabinet adopted a similar stance. Birrell regarded the ‘Bachelor's Bill’ as ‘nothing more … than a disagreeable necessity’.Footnote 92 In January 1915, Haldane – soon to be forced out of the cabinet on the formation of the coalition – had echoed his chief in refusing to take up ‘any attitude based on abstract principle’ on the question of conscription, but had noted in the House of Lords that ‘by the Common Law of this country it is the duty of every subject to assist the Sovereign in repelling the invasion of its shores and in defence of the realm’.Footnote 93 This admission allowed Ellis Griffith to argue that the lord chancellor had implicitly sanctioned conscription into the army fighting on the continent, since, if compulsory service in the event of foreign invasion was in accord with the constitution, ‘is it not right to extend the doctrine under the circumstances of the present moment, when in substance we are defending the realm as truly on the fields of France as if the invader were on British soil?’Footnote 94
Even Runciman and McKenna, whose hostility to compulsory service was sufficiently pronounced that they threatened resignation over the issue, were motivated less by a commitment to any immutable principle than by concerns that raising an army of the size demanded by the conscriptionists would break the British economy. Herbert Samuel urged Runciman not to abandon the government arguing that ‘the only thing that would justify resignation would be … a conviction that, on grounds of fundamental principle, compulsory service ought never to be established in this country, and that view you do not hold’.Footnote 95 It was only in retrospect, following the collapse of the first coalition, that Liberal ministers began to employ the rhetoric of ‘principle’ to justify their wartime actions.Footnote 96 Even Sir John Simon, who (alone) resigned from the cabinet over conscription, citing ‘convictions which cannot be upset by considerations of mere expediency’, later came to regard his opposition as a ‘mistake’.Footnote 97 The qualified and limited nature of this opposition permeated down through much of the parliamentary party. As John Turner has observed, a considerable number of Liberal MPs voted against the government on multiple occasions during the debates on the Military Service Acts, without doing so on the Final Readings.Footnote 98 Perhaps the devil was in the detail, but clearly Liberal opposition was in many cases based on something less than an absolute commitment to the voluntary principle.
Nor was such ideological flexibility simply a response to the unprecedented circumstances of the war. In April 1913 Haldane, who until the previous year had served as secretary of state for war, had declared publicly that he objected to conscription ‘not from the Liberal point of view but from the military point of view’, enabling the National Service League (NSL) to argue that ‘prominent Liberals in the cabinet only look on universal training as unnecessary’, and not as fundamentally incompatible with their Liberalism.Footnote 99 Haldane's successor at the War Office, J. E. B. Seely, had actually sat on the NSL's Executive Committee before joining the Liberal party in 1904.Footnote 100 Behind closed doors, Lloyd George and Churchill had been prepared to accept a form of compulsory militia training as part of a deal establishing a coalition government during the Constitutional Conference of 1910, and in April 1913 these two were joined by Haldane himself in declaring themselves in cabinet (though not in public) to be in favour of ‘compulsory territorial training’.Footnote 101
The LWC were thus on surprisingly firm ground when they argued that their advocacy of conscription need not disqualify them from calling themselves ‘Liberals’. But this was not the full extent of their case. At their most audacious, the LWC argued not simply that the supposed incompatibility between conscription and Liberal principles was artificial (or at least, highly subjective), but that compulsory service itself represented an inherently progressive policy. LWC propagandists asserted that conscription had the advantage over traditional, voluntary, methods of recruitment of being founded upon ‘justice as between individual and individual’. It was widely acknowledged that under the voluntary system, as it had operated before the outbreak of the war, the ranks of the British army had been filled with the dregs of the working classes – men for whom military enlistment was often the last alternative to poverty.Footnote 102 Asquith had himself conceded in 1915 that ‘our system of voluntary recruiting … operates, as it has been hitherto practised, in a haphazard, capricious, and, to some extent, an unjust way with regard both to individuals and to classes’.Footnote 103 Liberal conscriptionists could therefore adopt the ostensibly progressive stance of denouncing voluntarism as retrograde, and urging that ‘the defence of the country is an obligation that should fall equally upon all citizens according to their capacity to render service’.Footnote 104 Such arguments were not, in fact, entirely novel in Britain during the war. Universal military training to create a ‘citizen army’ had been advocated by the Marxist Social Democratic Federation (SDF) – in line with the position of the Socialist International – for many years before 1914, as a democratic alternative to a ‘mercenary’ professional standing army in the employ of the plutocratic classes.Footnote 105 Lord Roberts's National Service League had devoted considerable effort in the years before the war to appealing to Liberal and Labour audiences, by portraying its programme of compulsory military training as a ‘radical’ and equitable reform, ‘distributing the burdens of national defence equally among all classes, instead of allowing them to weigh crushingly on the proletariat’.Footnote 106 The Liberal War Committee never acknowledged these earlier efforts of the NSL and SDF, perhaps because none of the wartime Liberal conscriptionists had shown any interest in compulsory service before 1914. But, after two years of war, the LWC argued that the injustices of voluntarism were more evident than ever. A truly voluntary system of recruitment, they claimed, left it up to individual conscience whether or not to enlist. After August 1914, however, government recruiting methods and social pressures worked to create a form of ‘moral compulsion’ which rendered the idea of entirely free enlistment illusory, and the LWC unleashed its vitriol against the ‘so-called voluntarism’ under which ‘the appeals of recruiters have been enforced by taunt, insult, and intimidation’.Footnote 107 In this light, compulsory service could appear not simply as a practical necessity, but as a moral imperative. As Ellis Griffith explained, ‘my contention with regard to National Service is not that necessity makes it just, but that justice makes it necessary’.Footnote 108 Not least among the reasons why conscription proved so divisive for the Liberal party during the war was the fact that its supporters were able to associate it directly with a principle – ‘justice’ – which most Liberals believed to be fundamental to their creed, but on the precise meaning of which few could agree.
Social ‘justice’ was not, of course, an exclusively Liberal political virtue, and although many Unionists tended to emphasize the purely military necessity of conscription, some – including Bonar Law – also touched upon the elements of justice and equality that universal compulsory service offered.Footnote 109 The LWC, however, sought consciously to locate their arguments about the justice of conscription specifically within the progressive Liberal tradition. For Cawley, the ‘democratic’ quality of the compulsory system was its most distinctive feature. ‘As a Radical’, he declared, ‘believing in one man one vote, I believe also in one man one rifle.’Footnote 110 Indeed, from an early stage, the LWC combined support for compulsory service with calls for the political enfranchisement of every man in the fighting forces.Footnote 111 Few British progressives had traditionally regarded military service as a duty incumbent upon the citizen, yet this association of political rights with individual responsibilities was, in some ways, quintessentially Liberal.
The ‘justice’ argument was also sufficiently sophisticated to recognize that enlistment did not represent an equal sacrifice for all men. Families with a large number of dependants, for example, would experience the greatest degree of hardship if their principal wage-earner joined the army. As Griffith demanded in the Commons, how could it be in accordance with the principle of justice that some parents should send their only sons to fight, while in other families, ‘three, four, and five sons of eligible age do nothing but shirk their duty’?Footnote 112 By the end of 1917, Griffith was in contact with Milner (at that time minister without portfolio in Lloyd George's War Council) about the possibility of securing priority in demobilization for married men and fathers – a suggestion which conflicted with the government's own plans for demobilization in order of ‘trade priority’, although Milner did concede the possibility that, within any particular trade group, individual priority might be given to married men.Footnote 113 Even before this, the Military Service Tribunals set up to hear individual appeals against conscription frequently took personal circumstances into account in their deliberations, much as the Liberal conscriptionists had urged.Footnote 114
At its boldest, the Liberal case for conscription portrayed military service as just one plank in a broader programme of progressive wartime state collectivism. Many Liberals who came to support conscription during the war – and particularly those who emerged from the left of the pre-1914 party – were also prominent advocates of a wartime ‘conscription of wealth’. In January 1916, Chiozza Money suggested a scheme for a ‘general levy upon all classes, graduated according to their means’. The levy was to be partly a tax and partly a forced loan, and the scale of the tax was also to be graduated according to means. According to Money, such a proposal would not only make possible the raising of some £500–800 million by ‘equitable and economical’ means, it would also have ‘the splendid effect of automatically creating a savings fund for every working person in the country, which could be drawn on at the end of the war, or in cases of distress during the continuance of the war’.Footnote 115 Such ideas might be presented as a logical extension, in the more exacting circumstances of wartime, of the social and fiscal innovations of the pre-war Liberal governments. For the LWC, greater powers of state compulsion need not represent simply the means to secure victory. The state, even as it curtailed individual liberty, might remain a benign agency in society – dedicated to justice and equality between citizens, and exerting greater control over the lives of its citizens expressly for the furtherance of the common good.
The LWC's arguments about the progressive nature of compulsory service did not always succeed in convincing others in the wider Liberal party. Erstwhile colleagues at Westminster accused them of acquiescing in the ‘surrender of a great principle’.Footnote 116 Some also faced considerable discontent from their local constituency associations. In the 1918 general election, Ellis Griffith was subjected to a strong challenge from elements within the Anglesey Liberal Association, and subsequently went down to a surprise defeat at the hands of the unorthodox Labour candidate, General Owen Thomas. Griffith attributed his defeat at least in part to his wartime advocacy of conscription.Footnote 117 Many other members of the LWC, however, experienced no such problems, and retained the substantive support of their local Liberal associations. Henry Dalziel, for instance, although subjected to occasional critical letters from disgruntled constituents, received the hearty endorsement of local Liberals for his ‘patriotic actions’ during the war.Footnote 118 Just as was the case at Westminster, the experiences of conscriptionist Liberals in their own constituencies defy generalization.
IV
With almost morbid fascination, scholars have picked over the Liberal party's struggle to comprehend and overcome the unprecedented challenges of waging a total war – a struggle in which the party appeared to tear itself, irretrievably, to pieces. Some have seen in these years apparent proof of the impossibility of attempting to fight, ostensibly in defence of the Liberal ideal, a war which demanded means so antithetical to Liberalism. Even those who have not regarded the Liberals as congenitally incapable of overseeing such a conflict have dwelt upon the shaking of Liberal certainties, and the lack of coherence in the party's intellectual response to the problems of war. Most studies, implicitly or explicitly, have painted a picture of a party divided between those who (with a greater or lesser degree of reluctance) accepted the need to abandon hitherto firmly held principles in the face of the unprecedented demands of the war, and those who clung tenaciously to the tenets of their political faith regardless of circumstances. The former group have frequently been regarded as at least indirectly culpable for the Liberal party's dramatic decline. As H. W. Massingham declared, a party could scarcely ‘commit suicide more effectually than by surrendering its principles, which are its spiritual life’.Footnote 119
Compulsory service was alien to pre-war British Liberalism. European progressives who had championed ‘citizen armies’ in the years before 1914 – and to whose precedent the LWC pointed during the war – belonged to a different tradition. With its island position and supreme navy, Britain had long since ceased to require a large standing army for military purposes, and most Liberals were satisfied with a small voluntary force that could never threaten civil liberties or civilian authority. After August 1914, however, Britain faced an unprecedented military commitment in Europe, and traditional Liberalism could offer no formula for the recruitment of the soldiers now needed. In the absence of any firm declaration of principle from the party leadership, the LWC argued that compulsory service represented the fairest and most equitable method of recruitment available. They were applying the fundamental – though vague – Liberal principle of ‘justice’ in an unprecedented fashion. But they legitimately pointed out that Liberalism was no longer the Gladstonian ideology of laissez-faire individualism which it had been a generation earlier. The more thoughtful among the Liberal conscriptionists went further still, attempting to tie compulsory military service into a broader programme for the prosecution of the war along progressive and egalitarian lines. Michael Bentley has argued that conscription could be defended on ‘Liberal’ grounds as being ‘the most effective expedient available to bring an end to the war that was making Liberalism impossible’.Footnote 120 But the LWC's advocacy of compulsory service represented something more subtle than the acceptance of militarism as a weapon to combat militarism. For the Liberal conscriptionists, equality of sacrifice – personal, military, and financial – represented the most ‘Liberal’ means by which a total war could be fought.
Unsurprisingly, this new contested interpretation of Liberalism was rejected by many of the LWC's erstwhile colleagues. Undoubtedly, the existence of a pro-conscription Liberal organization did much to undermine the coherence and stability of the wider party. It was predictable that more orthodox Liberals would hurl the charge of ‘heresy’ at those who had abandoned voluntarism, and understandable that historians should have repeated the charge. But it is not sufficient simply to dismiss the Liberal conscriptionists as men who abandoned their principles. ‘Liberalism’ in Britain had shown itself to be a flexible ideology in the Edwardian years, and, after 1914, in the context of an unprecedented struggle for national survival, the members of the Liberal War Committee believed that it could accommodate a wartime policy of compulsory service. If the First World War killed the Liberal party, the LWC undoubtedly played a part. But the Liberal advocates of conscription neither desired nor believed that by their actions they were damning Liberalism.
