Conscription; D. Webster

Tms bill indeed is less undisguised in its object, & less di rect in its means, than some of the measures proposed. It is an attempt to exercise the power of forcing the free men of this country into the ranks of an army, for the general purposes of war, under color of a military service. It is a distinct system, introduced for new purposes, & not con nected with any power, which the Constitution has con ferred on Congress. [261 ] But, Sir, there is another consideration. The services of the men to be raised under this act are not limited to those cases in which alone this Government is entitled to the aid of the militia of the States. These cases are particularly stated in the Constitution-"to repel invasion, suppress in surrection, or execute the laws." But this bill has no limita tion in this respect. The usual mode of legislating on the subject is abandoned. The only section which would have confined the service of the Militia, proposed to be raised, within the United States has been stricken out; & if the President should not march them into the Provinces of England at the North, or of Spain at the South, it will not be because he is prohibited by any provision in this act.

Recruit By Draft This, then, Sir, is a bill for calling out the Militia, not according to its existing organization, but by draft from new created classes;-not merely for the purpose of "repel ling invasion, suppressing insurrection, or executing the laws," but for the general objects of war-for defending ourselves, or invading others, as may be thought expedient; -not for a sudden emergency, or for a short time, but for long stated periods; for two years, if the proposition of the Senate should finally prevail; for one year, if the amend ment of the House should be adopted. What is this, Sir, but raising a standing army out of the Militia by draft, & to be recruited by draft, in like manner, as often as occasion may require? The question is nothing less, than whether the most es[262 ] sential rights of personal liberty shall be surrendered, & despotism embraced in its worst form. I have risen, on this occasion, with anxious & painful emotions, to add my admonition to what has been said by others. Admonition & remonstrance, I am aware, are not acceptable strains. They are duties of unpleasant perform ance. But they are, in my judgment, the duties which the condition of a falling state imposes. They are duties which sink deep in his conscience, who believes it probable that they may be the last services, which he may be able to render to the Government of his Country. On the issue of this discussion, I believe the fate of this Government may rest. Its duration is incompatible, in my opinion, with the existence of the measures in contemplation. A crisis has at last arrived, to which the course of things has long tended, & which may be decisive upon the happiness of present & of future generations. If there be anything important in the concerns of men, the considerations which fill the present hour are important. I am anxious, above all things, to stand acquitted before GOD, & my own conscience, & in the public judgments, of all participations in the Coun sels, which have brought us to our present condition, & which now threaten the dissolution of the Government.

When the present generation of men shall be swept away, & that this Government ever existed shall be a matter of history only, I desire that it may then be known, that you have not proceeded in your course unadmonished & un forewarned. Let it then be known, that there were those, who would have stopped you, in the career of your meas ures, & held you back, as by the skirts of your garments, [263 ] from the precipice, over which you are plunging, & draw ing after you the Government of your Country. -Challenge To Congress It is time for Congress to examine & decide for itself. It has taken things on trust long enough. It has followed Executive recommendations, till there remains no hope of finding safety in that path. What is there, Sir, that makes it the duty of this people now to grant new confidence to the administration, & to surrender their most important rights to its discretion? On what merits of its own does it rest this extraordinary claim? When it calls thus loudly for the treasure & the lives of the people, what pledge does it offer, that it will not waste all in the same preposterous pursuits, which have hitherto engaged it? In the failure of all past promises, do we see any assurance of .future performance? Are we to measure out our confidence in proportion to our disgraces, & now at last to grant away every thing, because all that we have heretofore granted has been wasted or misapplied? What is there in our con dition, that bespeaks a wise or an able Government? What is the evidence, that the protection of the country is the object principally regarded?

Conscription is chosen as the most promising instru ment, both of overcoming reluctance to the Service, & of subduing the difficulties which arise from the deficiencies of the Exchequer. The administration asserts the right to fill the ranks of the regular army by compulsion. It con tends that it may now take one out of every twenty-five [264 ] men, & any part or the whole of the rest, whenever its occasions require. Persons thus taken by force, & put into an army, may be compelled to serve there, during the war, or for life. They may be put on any service, at home or abroad, for defence or for invasion, according to the will & pleasure of Government. This power does not grow out of any invasion of the country, or even out of a state of war. It belongs to Government at all times, in peace as well as in war, & is to be exercised under all circum stances, according to its mere discretion. This, Sir, is the amount of the principle contended for by the Secretary of War.

Freedom Denied Is this, Sir, consistent with the character of a free Gov ernment? Is this civil liberty? Is this the real character of our Constitution? No, Sir, indeed it is not. The Constitu tion is libelled, foully libelled. The people of this country have not established for themselves such a fabric of des potism. They have not purchased at a vast expense of their own treasure & their own blood a Magna Charta to be slaves. Where is it written in the Constitution, in what article or section is it contained, that you may take chil dren from their parents, & parents from their children, & compel them to fight the battles of any war, in which the folly or the wickedness of Government may engage it? Under what concealment has this power lain hidden, which now for the first time comes forth, with a tremen dous &baleful aspect, to trample down &destroy the dear[265 ] est rights of personal liberty? Who will show me any constitutional injunction, which makes it the duty of the American people to surrender every thing valuable in life, & even life itself, not when the safety of their country & its liberties may demand the sacrifice, but whenever the purposes of an ambitious & mischievous Government may require it? Sir, I almost disdain to go to quotations & references to prove that such an abominable doctrine has no foundation in the Constitution of the coun· try. It is enough to know that the instrument was intended as the basis of a free Government, & that the power con· tended for is incompatible with any notion of personal liberty. An attempt to maintain this doctrine upon the pro· visions of the Constitution is an exercise of perverse in· genuity to extract slavery from the substance of a free Government. It is an attempt to show, by proof & argu ment, that we ourselves are subjects of despotism, & that we have a right to chains & bondage, firmly secured to us & our children, by the provisions of our Government.

Supporters Of Conscription The supporters of the measures before us act on the principle that it is their task to raise arbitrary powers, by construction, out of a plain written charter of National Liberty. It is their pleasing duty to free us of the delusion, which we have fondly cherished, that we are the subjects of a mild, free &limited Government, &to demonstrate by a regular chain of premises & conclusions, that Govern ment possesses over us a power more tyrannical, more ar· [266 ] bitrary, more dangerous, more allied to blood & murder, more full of every form of mischief, more productive of every sort & degree of misery, than has been exercised by any civilized Government, with. a single exception, in modern times. But it is said, that it might happen that an army would not be raised by voluntary enlistment, in which case the power to raise armies would be granted in vain, unless they might be raised by compulsion. If this reasoning could prove any thing, it would equally show, that whenever the legitimate powers of the Constitution should be so badly administered as to cease to answer the great ends intended by them, such new powers may be assumed or usurped, as any existing administration may deem expedient. This is a result of his own reasoning, to which the Secretary does not profess to go. But it is a true result. For if it is to be assumed, that all powers were granted, which might by possibility become necessary, & that Government itself is the judge of this possible necessity, then the powers of Government are precisely what it chooses they should be.

Apply the same reasoning to any other power granted to Congress, &test its accuracy by the result. Despotic Thinking If the Secretary of War has proved the right of Congress to enact a law enforcing a draft of men out of the Militia into the regular army, he will at any time be able to prove, quite as clearly, that Congress has power to create a Dic tator. The arguments which have helped him in one case, [267 ] will equally aid him in the other. The same reason of a supposed or possible state necessity, which is urged now, may be repeated then, with equal pertinency & effect. Sir, in granting Congress the power to raise armies, the People have granted all the means which are ordinary & usual, &. which are consistent with the liberties & security of the People themselves; and they have granted no others. To talk about the unlimited power of the Government over the means to execute its authority, is to hold a lan guage which is true only in regard to despotism. The tyranny of Arbitrary Government consists as much in its means as in its end; & it would be a ridiculous & absurd constitution which should be less cautious to guard against abuses in the one case than in the other. All the means & instruments which a free Government exercises, as well as the ends & objects which it pursues, are to partake of its own essential character, & to be conformed to its genuine spirit. A free Government with arbitrary means to admin ister it is a contradiction; a free Government without ade quate provision for personal security is an absurdity; a free Government, with an uncontrolled power of military conscription, is a solecism, at once the most ridiculous & abominable that ever entered into the head of man.

A Sacrifice Sir, I invite the supporters of the measures before you to look to their actual operation. Let the men who have so often pledged their own fortunes & their own lives to the support of this war, look to the wanton sacrifice which [268 ] they are about to make of their lives & fortunes. They may talk as they will about substitutes, & compensations, & exemptions. It must come to the draft at last. If the Gov ernment cannot hire men voluntarily to fight its battles, neither can individuals. Into the paradise of domestic life you enter, not indeed by temptations & sorceries, but by open force & violence. Nor is it, Sir, for the defense of his own house & home, that he who is the subject of military draft is to perform the task allotted to him. You will put him upon a service equally foreign to his interests & abhorrent to his feelings. With his aid you are to push your purposes of conquest.

The battles which he is to fight are the battles of invasion; battles which he detests perhaps & abhors, less from the danger & the death that gather over them, & the blood with which they drench the plain, than from the principles in which they have their origin. If, Sir, in this strife he falI if, while ready to obey every rightful command of Gov ernment, he is forced from home against right, not to con tend for the defence of his country, but to prosecute a mis erable & detestable project of invasion, & in that strife he fall, 'tis murder. It may stalk above the cognizance of hu man law, but in the sight of Heaven it is murder; & though millions of years may roll away, while his ashes & yours lie mingled together in the earth, the day will yet come, when his spirit & the spirits of his children must be met at the bar of omnipotent justice. May God, in his compas sion, shield me from any participation in the enormity of this guilt.

The operation of measures thus, unconstitutional & ille[269 ] gal ought to be prevented, by a resort to other measures which are both constitutional &legal. I express these senti.. ments here, Sir, because I shall express them to my con stituents. Both they & myself live under a Constitution which teaches us, that "the doctrine of nonresistance against arbitrary power & oppression, is absurd, slavish, & destructive of the good & happiness of mankind." With the same earnestness with which I now exhort you to for bear from these measures, I shall exhort them to exercise their unquestionable right of providing for the security of their own liberties. A military force cannot be raised, in this manner, but by the means of a military force. If administration has found that it can not form an army without conscription, it will find, if it venture on these experiments, that it can not enforce conscription without an army. The Govern ment was not constituted for such purposes. Framed in the spirit of liberty, & in the love of peace, it has no powers which render it able to enforce such laws. The attempt, if we rashly make it, will fail; & having already thrown away our peace, we may thereby throwaway our Government.

PART II The following extract is from the notable book Why Don't We Learn From History by B. H. Liddell Hart (London: George Allen & Unwin, Ltd., 1944). The author, a distinguished British military authority, is the Military Historian and Critic for Encyclopae dia Britannica. [270 ] WE learn from history that the compulsory principle al ways breaks down in practice. The principle of restraint, or regulation, is essentially justifiable insofar as its appli cation is needed to check interference with others' free dom. But it is not, in reality, possible to make men do something without risking more than is gained from the compelled effort. The method may appear practicable, be cause it often works when applied to those who are merely hesitant. When applied to those who are definitely un willing, it fails, however, because it generates friction and fosters subtle forms of evasion that spoil the effect which is sought. The test of whether a prinCiple works is to be found in the product.

EffiCiencysprings from enthusiasm-because this alone can develop a dynamic impulse. Enthusiasm is incompat ible with compulsion-because it is essentially spontane ous. Compulsion is thus bound to deaden enthusiasm because it dries up the source. The more an individual, or a nation, has been accustomed to freedom, the more deadening will be the effect of a change to compulsion. History Speaks These logical deductions are conflrmed by analysis of his torical experience. The modern system of military con scription was born in France-it was, ironically, the mis begotten child of Revolutionary enthusiasm. Within a gen eration, its application had become so obnoxious that its abolition was the primary demand of the French people following Napoleon's downfall. [271 ] Meanwhile, however, it had been transplanted to more suitable soil-in Prussia. And just over half a century later, the victories that Prussia gained led to the resur rection of conscription in France. Its re-imposition was all the easier because the renewed autocracy of Napoleon III had accustomed the French people to the interference and constraints of bureaucracy. In the generation that followed, the revival of the spirit of freedom in France was accompanied by a growth of the petty bureaucracy, parasites feeding on the body politic. From this, the French could never succeed in shaking free; and in their efforts they merely developed corruption-which is the natural consequence of an ineffective effort to loosen the grip of compulsion by evasion.

It is generally recognized today that this rampant growth of bureaucratically-induced corruption was the dry-rot of the Third Republic. But on deeper examination the cause can be traced further back-to the misunder standing of their own principles which led a section of the creators of the French Revolution to adopt a method fundamentally opposed to their fulfillment. It might be thought that conscription should be less detrimental to the Germans, since they are more respon sive to regulation, and have no deeply rooted tradition of freedom. Nevertheless, it is of significance that the Nazi movement was essentially a voluntary movement-exclu sive rather than comprehensive-and that the most im portant sections of the German forces-the air force and the tank force-have been recruited on a semi-voluntary basis. There is little evidence to suggest that the ordinary cCmass" [272 ] of the German army has anything like the same enthusi asm; and considerable evidence to suggest that this con scripted mass constitutes a basic weakness in Germany's apparent strength.

A Conviction Twenty-five years spent in the study of war, a study which gradually went beyond its current technique to its well-springs, changed my earlier and conventional belief in the value of conscription. It brought me to see that the compulsory principle was fundamentally inefficient, and the conscriptive method out of date-a method that clung, like the ivy, to quantitative standards in an age when the trend of warfare was becoming increasingly qualitative. For it sustained the fetish of mere numbers at a time when skill and enthusiasm were becoming ever more necessary for the effective handling of the new weapons. Conscription does not fit the conditions of modern war fare-its speCialized technical equipment, mobile opera tions, and fluid situations. Success increasingly depends on individual initiative, which in tum springs from a sense of personal responsibility-these senses are atrophied by com pulsion. Moreover, every unwilling man is a germ carrier, spreading infection to an extent altogether disproportion ate to the value of the service he is forced to contribute.

The System Looking still further into the question, and thinking deeper, I came to see, also, that the greatest contributory [273 ] factor to the Great Wars which had racked the world in recent generations had been the conscriptive system-the system which sprang out of the muddled thought of the French Revolution, was then exploited by Napoleon in his selfish ambition, and subsequently turned to serve the in terests of Prussian militarism. Mter undermining the eighteenth century "age of reason," it had paved the way for the reign of unreason in the modern age. Conscription serves to precipitate war, but not to ac celerate it-except in the negative sense of accelerating the growth of war-weariness and other underlying causes of defeat. Conscription precipitated war in 1914, owing to the way that the mobilization of conscript armies dis rupted national life and produced an atmosphere in which negotiation became impossible-confirming the warning, "mobilization means war." During that war its effect can be traced in the symptoms which preceded the collapse of the Russian, Austrian, and German armies, as well as the decline of the French and Italian armies. It was the least free States which collapsed under the strain of war-and they collapsed in the order of their degree of unfreedom.

By contrast, the best fighting force in the fourth year of war was, by general recognition, the Australian Corps the force which had rejected conscription, and in which there was the least insistence on unthinking obedience. Freedom Impaired A system of conscription entails the suppression of indi vidual judgment-the Englishman's most cherished right. [274 ] It violates the cardinal principle of a free community: that there should be no restriction of individual freedom save where this is used for active interference with others' free dom. Our tradition of individual freedom is the slow ripening fruit of centuries of effort. To surrender it within, after fighting to defend it against dangers without, would be a supremely ironical turn of our history. An argument in favor of conscription has long been the rule in the continental countries, including those which remain democracies, we need not fear the effect of adopt ing it here. But the deeper I have gone into the study of war and the history of the'past century, the further I have come towards the conclusion that the development of con scription has damaged the growth of the idea of freedom in the continental countries, and thereby damaged their efficiency, also-by undermining the· sense of personal re sponsibility. There is only too much evidence that our temporary adoption of conscription in the last war had a permanent effect harmful to the development of freedom and democracy here. For my own part, I have come to my present conviction of the supreme importance of freedom through the pursuit of efficiency. I believe that freedom is the foundation of efficiency, both national and military.

Thus it is a practical folly as well as a spiritual surrender to "go totalitarian" as a result of fighting for existence against the totalitarian States. Cut off the incentive to freely given service, and you dry up the life-source of a free community. We ought to realize that it is easier to adopt the com pulsory principle of national life than to shake it off. Once [275 ] compulsion for personal service is adopted in peacetime, it will be hard to resist the extension of the principle to all other aspects of the nation's life, including freedom of thought, speech, and writing. We ought to think carefully, and to think ahead, before taking a decisive step towards totalitarianism. Or are we so accustomed to our chains that we are no longer conscious of them? [276 ] PATRICK HENRY'S CHOICE h~ Ben moreett IN 1775, an American patriot stood before his neighbors in a small church in Virginia and challenged the tyranny of government-his own government-in a ringing statement on liberty and death.