To End All Wars_ A Story of Loyalty and Rebellion, 1914-1918 - Adam Hochschild [101]
It was clearly a great boon to the government to have an organization of "workers" attacking the Independent Labour Party and other antiwar groups, which officials of the new League quickly did, at public meetings and in its vociferously chauvinist weekly, the British Citizen and Empire Worker. For every demand the League made for better pay or public ownership of key industries, there were louder attacks on "shirkers" from the war effort and on traitors to the empire. The prowar press was delighted; the Times described one League demonstration as "beyond all question ... the authentic voice of the working classes." Less than a year after its founding, this surprisingly well-financed organization would claim 74 branches around the country, staging 100 patriotic mass meetings a week.
There were, of course, millions of working-class Britons who were genuinely prowar. The League, however, was the brainchild of someone who was anything but proletarian: Alfred, Lord Milner. "I am trying, very hard, but quietly," he wrote to a friend just before the League went public, "to further a purely working-class movement which I hope will knock out the ILP ... among Trade Unionists [and] which will make Imperial Unity and Citizens' Service [i.e., conscription] planks in its programme." The enthusiasm of the Times for this "authentic voice of the working classes" was also Milner's doing, for the paper's editor was a close friend and disciple, a former member of the South African Kindergarten.
"It would be difficult to imagine," a biographer comments, "anyone less suitable than Milner to inspire a working class movement." But the League was his creation and his alone: he had found the perfect person to run it, Victor Fisher, an experienced socialist journalist, and then quietly lined up the necessary funders: Waldorf Astor, MP, a young member of a famously non-working-class family, and later the shipping magnate Sir James Knott. The cash was put into a special account at the London Joint Stock Bank, from which Milner personally doled it out to Fisher, checking his expense reports. "Shall we call the a/c the 'Imperial Fund'?" Astor asked. Milner replied: "It would not be necessary or perhaps desirable, to give it any name.... I am a Director of that Bank, so no questions would be asked, and nobody need know anything about it except ourselves."
Fisher himself received a full-time salary plus £1,000 a year for expenses, with a remarkable guarantee that his salary would be paid for three years even if the League ceased operations. Milner met with most of the speakers before the League's first big public meeting, but after that he kept a low profile, although he saw Fisher in private almost every week. He did not mind working with trade unionists, for he had always been open to what some Britons called "gas and water socialism." Public health? Better schools? Public ownership of electric power? No problem: such things were entirely tolerable if they made the economy more efficient and the working class more enthusiastic for the empire—and the war.
The month the new League was founded, conscription finally began. The mass-production slaughter on the fields of France and Flanders required it, to feed the army's relentless appetite for human bodies. A military draft was a radical change for Britain, and because even some prowar MPs were uncomfortable with it and needed persuading, the new law provided a surprisingly broad exemption for conscientious objectors, or COs, as they came to be called. Special tribunals were set up around the country, and if one of these boards agreed that a man had a principled objection to bearing arms, whether religious or secular, he could do alternative service—either in a Non-Combatant Corps within the army or in supervised work gangs doing farm labor, forestry, and other manual jobs that kept the wartime economy going at home. Those exempt from the draft included some