TY - JOUR
AU - Morgan-Owen, David
AB - Abstract This article examines how shifts in political culture affect the formation of strategy. It does so by focusing upon the role that ‘public opinion’ played in debates over strategy in Britain from 1870 to 1914. The article makes three contributions. First, it challenges the notion that linkages between democracy and strategy were creations of the twentieth century or the result of developments in air power. Second, it deepens our understanding of civil-military relations in this period by examining how the armed forces responded to the age of mass politics. Finally, it contributes to recent work on the concept of ‘public opinion’. Intellectual history and the history of political thought have not enjoyed a close relationship with military history.1 Partly for structural, disciplinary reasons, and partly due to radically different epistemological traditions, neither body of scholars has appeared eager to bridge this divide.2 Yet in some respects this disjuncture is surprising: the history of war has long included a focus upon military thought and ideas of strategy, and war has played a prominent part in the history of international thought.3 There are therefore solid grounds upon which to assume that the disciplines can profitably be brought into closer dialogue with one another. This article aims to take a step in that direction by bringing the conceptual history of ‘public opinion’ and the history of military thought into communication. Adopting this approach allows us to take a fresh perspective both on how contemporaries understood the ‘democratization’ or ‘civilianization’ of war, and upon the relationship between the public sphere and military strategy. The role an entire national population might play in wartime preoccupied a variety of military thinkers in the late nineteenth century. Whether as a source of manpower for a mass army, or as a potential target for military operations, civilians came to be weighed in the military scales. Yet military thought was also influenced by changes in political culture, in particular the growth of democracy and the increasing importance of ‘public’ and ‘popular’ opinion. Before 1914 many observers became convinced that ‘popular panic’ could have a direct influence upon the conduct of war – whether through toppling a government, or inducing it to change the course of naval and military operations in response to a public outcry. The first section of the article will examine this discourse, and highlight the ways in which notions of public irrationality played a prominent role in debates over strategy. In some respects it is entirely unsurprising that military thinkers may have subscribed to pessimistic theories about the rationality and patriotism of crowds. Media historians have identified a growing pessimism among politicians and political theorists from the 1880s regarding the public sphere as a site for educative or politically informed public discussion – a trend from which military elites were not insulated.4 Indeed, the importance of discipline within military culture, and the continued prevalence of aristocratic or ‘gentlemen’ officers in both army and navy, could be seen as encouraging a sense of martial superiority over an ill-defined ‘mob’ of working-class people.5 What is more significant is the manner in which a body of military thought sought to mitigate the threat it perceived from various forms of ‘public panic’. As the second half of this article argues, a variety of prominent military figures and their supporters embarked upon campaigns of public education intended to ameliorate the danger of irrational outbursts of popular sentiment undermining the empire’s ability to make war. Through public speeches, meetings, rallies and a series of publications, military thinkers sought to alter the course of ‘public opinion’ in a considered, deliberative fashion that reflected an enduring belief in the rational nature of the public sphere. They viewed doing so as a requirement of the highest strategic significance, as aligning ‘public opinion’ with the logic of strategy was vital in order to ensure that the entirety of the nation’s effort could be put forth in wartime. This discourse reflected the endurance of a belief in the public sphere as a rational forum for debate, far beyond its supposed decline in the late nineteenth century. It also illustrated that an attachment to this view of ‘public opinion’, which has been closely associated with liberal political thought, was shared across the political spectrum – including many who did not fit neatly into traditional understandings of ‘left’ and ‘right’. By tracing the interaction between strategic thought and political culture, this article makes three contributions. First, it challenges the notion that linkages between democracy and war entered the mainstream of strategic thought only in the twentieth century.6 As we shall see, the British example compelled statesmen and their military advisors to devote considerable and prolonged attention to this dynamic before 1900. Second, the article deepens our understanding of civil-military relations in this period by examining how the armed forces responded to the age of mass politics. Historians have illustrated how eager both services were to court popular interest and the lengths to which they went in order to do so, but little attention has yet been paid to how shifts in political culture broadened the politics of civil-military relations beyond the corridors of Whitehall.7 Doing so reveals a strong sense among military leaders that a shift had occurred in the relationship between government, people and armed forces, and that this would have important implications for the conduct of war. Finally, the article contributes to recent work on the concept of ‘public opinion’, both by illustrating the concepts enduring salience before the First World War, and by showing that groups traditionally associated with Unionism and the radical right remained convinced of the importance of public deliberation and discussion. Doing so illustrates the difficulties of assuming the contemporary armed forces were inherently right leaning, or that the notion of a rational public sphere was the sole preserve of liberal political thought. * The evolution of military thought during the nineteenth century has long been the subject of intense historical interest, yet the same cannot be said of how strategic thought responded to changes in political culture. On one level this stems from the orthodoxy of civil-military relations that members of the armed forces operate outside the realm of politics. What benefit can there be, after all, to reconstructing the political thought of figures divorced from the conduct of politics? The answer to this challenge is twofold. First, the military formed a prominent and proactive element of late Victorian and Edwardian politics.8 Both as a subject for debate and as protagonists in the political process, the armed forces were features of and contributors to contemporary political culture.9 Second, how prominent military officers and thinkers understood politics and political economy in their broadest sense cannot but have had significant implications for their attitudes to warfare. This was particularly true for Britain, whose defence policy was largely occupied with the protection of its seaborne trade, upon which a majority of the country’s foodstuff travelled. For Britain, any divide between military thought and politics was thus somewhat artificial: military prowess was vital in order to sustain a unique form of political economy predicated upon seaborne trade, which in turn shaped patterns of employment, production and politics. Situating military thought within that wider context is therefore vital in order to fully understand it. The worlds of military and political thought overlapped in numerous ways. This article will focus primarily upon the issue of public opinion and its impact upon military affairs. Sophisticated debates exist on numerous aspects of who the ‘public’ were, and what their role within contemporary politics was.10 For our purposes the most salient features of those discussions are the distinction between the ‘public’ and the ‘masses’ and the rationality or otherwise of the public sphere. As James Thompson has persuasively argued, concepts of ‘public opinion’ stressed its enduring nature, its inherent rationality, and its formation as the result of deliberation and intensely held convictions.11 This contrasted with views of the ‘crowd’ or ‘mob’ as being ‘any disorganised or weakly organised assemblage of people’.12 A key distinction between the two was the issue of rationality: crowds were viewed by many, though not all, contemporaries as being susceptible to outbursts of emotional irrationality – something epitomized for many liberal commentators by the jingoism of the Boer War years.13 J. A. Hobson summed up this critique in his polemic The Psychology of Jingoism, in which he dismissed the popular jingoism of what he referred to as the ‘masses’ as ‘merely temperamental violence, without any real substratum of intellectual conviction’.14 This understanding of the ‘crowd’ as susceptible to dishonest ‘scaremongering’ had a long antecedence, reaching back to Richard Cobden’s critiques of Palmerston in the 1850s. It was also a widely held view among contemporary liberals, who remained committed to the ideal of a public sphere in which ideas could be weighed and debated in a rational fashion. As William Gladstone lamented during the navy scare of 1893–4, ‘The situation [is] almost hopeless when a large minority allows itself in panic and joining hands with the professional elements works on the susceptibilities of a portion of the people to alarm’.15 This critique has had a significant impact upon subsequent writing on the public sphere in this period of British history.16 Yet, as it was intended to at the time, it presents a simplified account of the role of the military in contemporary politics, viewing them as part of a dishonest, primarily Unionist establishment who used fear as a means of controlling the working classes. An element of truth certainly exists in this depiction, although it is by no means as clear cut as has often been assumed.17 As David Edgerton and Matthew Johnson have both argued, the armed forces and the employment of military power were often much more acceptable to those on the political left than is commonly believed.18 Moreover, as we shall see, prominent military thinkers and many senior officers remained deeply attached to the power of deliberative debate in a manner much akin to classic nineteenth-century liberal attitudes. Indeed, an awareness of the increasing political importance of the demos led to a sense among military elites that public rationality was becoming more and more significant as a factor in the making of strategy. This underlined the endurance of liberal notions of a rational public sphere well past the Boer War, and also challenges the notion that warfare and strategy – decried as essentially irrational activities by classical radicals such as Richard Cobden – could not contain strong elements of liberal thought. * The importance of popular will to the conduct of war had been a feature of military thought long before the late nineteenth century. The French Revolution and Napoleonic Wars had transformed the conduct of war in numerous ways, but perhaps most obviously they had illustrated the power of ‘the people in arms’. As the Prussian military thinker Carl von Clausewitz identified, ‘the people’s war’ had ‘added so immensely to the strength of the side that first employed them that the opponent was carried along and had to follow suit’.19 His writings took the relationship between the socio-political characteristics of a nation, and the conduct of war, seriously, underlining the linkage between the dynamics of politics and the management of conflict.20 This theme continued to be developed during the nineteenth century, in the context of political and military change. The Franco-Prussian War sparked a new debate over the role of the people in shaping the conduct of war, inspired by the resistance of the Paris commune to the siege it endured between 1870–1,21 and by the eve of the First World War, military thinkers across Europe were acutely concerned at the potential for domestic revolution to unhinge their military preparations.22 Yet while political historians have identified significant traditions of thought regarding ‘the people’, ‘the public’, and their relative importance and behaviour, military historians have yet to apply these approaches to the process of democratization that occurred in strategic thought in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries.23 If ‘the people’ became a target in wartime, who were ‘the people’ and what did military thinkers expect them to do in the event of war? In the case of Britain, military thinkers and politicians became increasingly concerned that ‘panic’ of one kind or another might be a source of grave vulnerability to the empire. Yet on closer inspection this discourse reveals a complex web of competing understandings of contemporary society and its relationship to war, rather than a coherent body of ‘military’ thought. * The importance of mass opinion as a factor in strategy intensified in Britain in the second half of the nineteenth century. Fundamentally, this was a result of the unique form of political economy that shaped the state and empire’s development during this period. The repeal of the Corn Laws was crucial in this respect, as it paved the way for a fundamental re-shaping of the British economy away from agriculture and towards industrial production. This aided significant population shifts from the countryside into major cities, as labour was freed from working the land and transitioned towards factory and workshop production. The vital fact underpinning these shifts was the availability of affordable imported food. Grain imports increased by over 100 per cent in the twenty-five years between 1870 and 1895, with their cost increasing by only 13 per cent over the same period.24 The security of food imports thus became the foundation of late Victorian Britain’s economic and political equilibrium, with many manufacturers dependent upon low food prices to depress wages and thus to sustain a competitive edge over international rivals. The price of food had provoked riots in favour of the repeal of agricultural protection in the 1840s, and maintaining a low bread price thus became an article of faith for politicians in subsequent decades, especially as political awareness spread to an ever-increasing constituency of the working classes. The importance of maintaining the affordability of food was further exacerbated by a prolonged industrial slump and consequent unemployment after 1875, which fostered concerns about socialism and unrest among the urban poor. In short, the cost of food was a political issue of great sensitivity, and one that was reliant upon the smooth functioning of Britain’s import system. The strategic importance of this relationship was widely appreciated by Britain’s military and political leadership. Senior admirals began to press the government about the urgent necessity of taking additional steps to safeguard Britain’s floating trade and its food supply in the mid 1870s.25 By the early 1880s this had led to widespread public discussion about Britain’s vulnerability by a variety of military and naval officers, politicians, and commentators in the press. The fundamental issue at stake was the relationship between democracy and war, and the empire’s susceptability to a temporary interruption of its delicate system of seaborne imports. Speaking in the House of Lords in June of 1893, Lord Winchilsea reasoned along precisely these lines: In May, 1887, when there was a rumour of war with Russia, the price of wheat went up to 65s. 10d. per qr, and in the Crimea war bread went up to 11d. per loaf. If the price should go up to one shilling per loaf, that made a difference in extra payment to the people of the country of £109,000,000 a year as compared to the price of bread at this moment … not only would there be a rise in the price of bread, but in the price of raw material as well. The margin of profit would disappear; the price of bread would be raised to a point at which the working classes would be unable to pay for it, while large numbers of labourers and artisans would be thrown out of employment owing to the inability of manufacturers to employ them. What would be the effect? Was it to be supposed that in a Government ruled by the people, the people would wait until the condition of affairs equalized again? Would the people believe the assurances of the Government when it was known that the Government had nothing else to give? He concluded with a dark prediction: ‘The result of an outbreak of war’, he warned, ‘no matter how strong our fleet might be, would be to strangely move the working classes of the country, possibly to social disorder and panic: the people would come knocking at the doors of Parliament to insist that they should have their food supply guaranteed’.26 Winchilsea was far from alone in reaching these conclusions. In a letter to the Times in November that year, Captain (retired) Philip Colomb – one of the most prominent public commentators on naval affairs in contemporary Britain and a lecturer at the Royal Naval College – posed almost precisely the same question: ‘If we fail, then, to keep the routes, outward and homeward, moderately clear, we must face a very great rise in the price of food and a very great fall in the price of labour. How is the “living wage” to be got at under the circumstances?’27 The newspaper’s editorial on the issue took much the same perspective, noting that Britain’s ‘maritime security … is a question which affects the “masses” even more than it does the “classes”’.28 These debates prefigured arguably the best known exposition on the subject, Ivan Bloch’s Is War Now Impossible?, published in English in 1899. As Bloch concluded, simply, ‘In considering the effect of a future war it is essential to examine the manner in which it will react on the needs and condition of the people’.29 These conclusions were debated in public meetings at the Royal United Services Institute (R.U.S.I.), where Bloch was invited to lecture on his thesis in 1901.30 This discourse revealed a variety of anxieties over the effects of democracy upon British society, and the patriotism of the British working classes.31 The notion that hostile interference with British trade might incite stoicism and sacrifice on the part of the nation was nowhere to be seen, although it should be noted that Winchilsea was engaged in lobbying the government to establish state grain supplies in order to militate against the disruption to food supply that a war might cause, and his rhetorical excesses must be considered in this light. Yet debates regarding the relationship between food supply, social order and strategy were by no means entirely defined by negative prejudices against the lower orders. Indeed, opinion divided between which sections of society would prove most susceptible to panic in the event of significant interruption to seaborne trade: the commercial classes who would suffer a loss of profit and industry, or the working classes who would be subject to potential unemployment and shortages of food. The issue of rationality sat at the heart of this debate. A Royal Commission convened to investigate the supply of food and raw materials in war time addressed the issue thus: Two causes distinct from each other will contribute to produce an increase of prices in time of war. There will be what we may call the economic rise caused by actual deficiency, if any, of imports, as also by the enhanced cost of transport and insurance; and what may be termed the ‘psychological’ rise, due to apprehension and uncertainty as to what is going to happen. In the view of the commissioners, the problem of ‘psychological’ concern was more acute than the risk of serious disruption to the volume of food entering the country: ‘owing to panic and uncertainty … prices would rise on the outbreak, or even more on the apprehension, of war, far higher than could be accounted for by economic causes’. They continued, ‘This is what has been described as the “psychological” rise, and from the nature of the cause, it is almost impossible to form any reliable estimate as to its probable extent’.32 This perspective borrowed heavily from the commissioners interpretation of the testimony of a key witness – Hubert Llewellyn Smith of the Board of Trade – who introduced the distinction between ‘economic’ and ‘psychological’ causes. Llewellyn Smith was a key source of information for the Commission in his capacity as Deputy Comptroller-General of the Commercial, Labour and Statistical Department of the Board of Trade. He had been the first witness called, returning on a second occasion, and providing a wealth of statistical information on imports, exports, freight rates and other issues. His research confirmed Llewellyn Smith in the view that the physical disruption to trade was likely to have a minimal impact upon the volume of goods entering the country. More likely, in his view, was a commercial panic at the outbreak of war that would drive up insurance and freight rates and create a consequent increase in the price of bread. The period of danger therefore became the length of time during which uncertainty in the market would drive up the price of food. Llewellyn Smith was relatively optimistic on this score, suggesting that prices would ‘be rapidly corrected by the accumulation of data as to what was the real risk of capture and also by competition’. He was also sanguine that the working classes could meet a temporary rise in prices: ‘I rather rely on their resources and their known power of meeting an emergency of that kind provided it does not last long’.33 He was supported in this viewpoint by the testimony of Charles Booth, the noted expert on the working poor for whom Llewellyn Smith had worked as a researcher in the late 1880s.34 Booth stressed the ‘elasticity’ in the lives of the working poor, and the difficulties of forecasting their behaviour without considering a wide range of other factors. Not least among these was ‘sentiment’, or the belief of the working classes in the righteousness of the national cause – a factor that had allowed the citizens of Paris to withstand a Prussian siege for over fifteen weeks in 1870–1.35 For these witnesses, then, the threat of a working-class revolt inspired by a sharp rise in food prices was not acute. Rather, an outbreak of ‘panic’ among financiers and traders in the City of London represented a more substantive risk to national security. This perspective reflected the evolution of a Cobdenite analysis of the ‘panic’ phenomenon, wherein irrational fits of passion were a pathology of the metropolitan newspaper reading ‘public’, rather than of the nation as a whole. As F. W. Hirst, editor of the Economist, argued in 1913, ‘The fuss and fury of our yellow press, though it thrill smart society in London, though it may sway the minds and policy of Ministers, produces no proportionate effect on the individual citizen’.36 In this formulation ‘panic’ was thus located as a minority phenomenon, concentrated in a particular stratum of individuals who were not representative of broader, rational ‘public opinion’.37 The commissioners broadly accepted these arguments when they framed their report. The document took pains to stress that no particular section of the community was more susceptible to panic than any other, nor any less patriotic. It did, however, strongly reflect the stress Llewellyn Smith had placed upon ‘psychological’ factors determining how the nation responded to the outbreak of a maritime war. Yet whereas Llewellyn Smith had been optimistic that the use of statistical information offered a means to correct misapprehension in the insurance markets, the final report was more pessimistic. Drawing upon evidence from Alfred Thayer Mahan’s book on the Spanish-American war, it concluded that it is therefore neither unreasonable, nor unjust to our people, to apprehend that, with more reason, due to our dependence upon over-sea supplies, they will be likely to exercise pressure to the embarrassment of those responsible for the conduct of the war.38 This conclusion continued to be the viewpoint shared by senior admirals until the outbreak of war in 1914. The naval leadership consistently lobbied for the government to create a system of state insurance to mitigate the commercial panic caused by the outbreak of war, reasoning that ‘a few early captures would create a panic and that insurance rates would rise to prohibitive figures, out of all proportion to the real risks … If vessels were uninsurable they would not go to sea’.39 In this formulation, the most dangerous form of ‘panic’ was among the commercial classes of the City, whose actions would potentially have pronounced adverse consequences for the price of food. Yet a Treasury Committee under Austen Chamberlain was unable to recommend any scheme of insurance between 1907–8, and the government was again unable to agree a course of action in this direction in 1913–14.40 As Walter Runciman, president of the Board of Trade and a shipowner himself, argued, ‘The opportunities for plundering the Treasury under any system of National Insurance were immense … and no safeguards could be devised to prevent it’.41 Runciman cleaved to the view that the opportunity for profit would incentivize shipowners to return their vessels to service, and that international public opinion – increasingly manifest in laws of maritime warfare – would shield neutral commerce into the U.K. to a degree sufficient to maintain supplies of food. This debate hinged upon disagreements over the inherent rationality of markets, the limits of state intervention, and the stability of the price of food. Yet, whether as a rhetorical device or a genuine concern, the prospect of panicked crowds and the disintegration of social order consequent to an increase in the price of food were recurrent features of discussion.42 The irrational behaviour of crowds and their potential impact upon the conduct of government during wartime thus became a feature of a more long-running, deliberative discussion regarding what policy measures could or should be put in place to militate the problem. How to militate ‘panic’ thus became a subject that ‘public opinion’ wrestled with, to no definitive conclusion before 1914. It is worth noting that the relationship between food security, social order, and strategy had obvious and significant implications for the sorts of offensive action Britain itself might adopt in wartime. As one 1903 appreciation by the War Office noted, ‘The destruction of German commerce … is the only weapon with which we can hope to induce the enemy to sue for peace on terms advantageous to our interests’.43 While Germany was much less reliant upon seaborne imports of food than Britain, the Admiralty calculated that the mobilization of its army, combined with a stringent naval blockade by the Royal Navy, would make the transport of food into German industrial areas considerably more expensive. The result would be to ‘add enormously to the cost for the consumer’ and thereby to ‘reduce the German workman to a state which he feels to be intolerable’. ‘Once this latter is achieved’, the report concluded, ‘it is believed that no nation can continue the struggle for long’.44 There were thus strong linkages between British fears of their own vulnerability to economic dislocation and ideas of economic warfare.45 Indeed, some writers complained that Britain was apt to over-estimate the potency of restricting an enemy’s trade in wartime due to its own vulnerability to such measures.46 This tension was reflected in a fundamental conflict within British strategic and legal thought during the latter half of the nineteenth century: how to balance the belligerent rights necessary to adopt a coercive campaign of economic warfare in wartime with securing legal and diplomatic protections for British trade in the event of a conflict in which Britain remained neutral.47 Increasingly by the turn of the twentieth century this balance had shifted in favour of the latter consideration, demonstrating the crucial significance of domestic politics to contemporary strategic thought.48 * Targeting a civilian population in order to foment unrest and to put pressure upon an opposing government to make peace was far from the only way in which public opinion entered the realms of military thought. Concerns about ‘popular’ pressure influencing the government to adjust the disposition or use of naval and military forces were also common. As the Royal Commission of 1903 concluded, We therefore take it as most probable that on the outbreak of maritime war, and possible afterwards, our administration, and especially the Admiralty, might suffer some embarrassment; and the danger of deviation in some degree, in deference to popular demand, from principles of sound strategical distribution, is not one we can by any means ignore.49 In the context of the ‘khaki’ election of December 1900 and of Radical criticism of the government’s conduct of the war in South Africa this conclusion was, perhaps, unsurprising.50 Yet the commissioners were far from alone in drawing a link between ‘popular pressure’ and the conduct of strategy. Discussing the threat of an enemy raid on the British coastline, in 1907 the General Staff also came to the view that ‘a raid to create panic might cause alterations in the strategic distribution of our feels and land forces, or might distract attention to itself. An attack elsewhere might thereby be facilitated, or military operations abroad be seriously interfered with’.51 In the context of the Entente with France and the consequent potential for Britain to be drawn into a European war on the side of its nearest neighbour, such a raid might thus detain the dispatch of the army to the continent. Similar concerns were felt in naval circles, particularly regarding the dangers of the British public demanding the presence of the Royal Navy immediately off their shorelines as a visible sign of security – regardless of the strategic wisdom of such a disposition. Appearing before the Committee of Imperial Defence in the summer of 1911, the First Sea Lord Admiral Sir Arthur Wilson expressed his concern on ‘the effect upon public confidence in this country if the entire regular army were dispatched abroad immediately upon the outbreak of war’. Such an action, which the General Staff at the War Office were then contemplating, would, in Wilson’s view, run ‘a grave possibility of an outbreak of panic. This might result in the movements of the Fleet being circumscribed with serious effect upon our naval operations’.52 Given the heightened state of inter-service rivalry over British strategy in the event of a continental war, the distinct possibility of a ‘panic’ being talked up in order to serve the agenda of either service must be taken seriously. Yet whether they contained cynical motivations or not, these debates revealed that ‘the people’ were clearly a crucial element in the strategic calculus, even if evidence for their outlook and reactions remained strictly limited. Concerns of this nature contributed to a major debate about the control of information in wartime, and the extent to which information about the conduct of war should be allowed in the public domain. Sensitivities regarding the publication of information about the distribution and activities of the Army and Navy had been raised during the Fashoda Crisis of 1898, and continued to exercise the military authorities thereafter. As Major General Sir John Ardagh summed up in a proposal to reduce the legislative measures required to mobilize the army, ‘Such measures of preparation as may be deemed necessary … should be conducted with secrecy and celerity; and that everything tending to embarrass diplomatic action, to provoke hostility, or to produce panic or alarm, should be sedulously avoided’.53 Representations on the issue ultimately resulted in the appointment of a subcommittee on press and postal censorship, whose findings the government welcomed in 1913. During the proceedings of the subcommittee convened to discuss the legislation, Churchill made a telling intervention on the subject of the press and public opinion in wartime. Betraying his own experience as a war correspondent in India and South Africa, he recommended that ‘an officer of literary ability could supply the public press with accurate information, which would be both more ample and more readable than that contained in official dispatches. It would also be more reliable than the information now so frequently sent home by correspondents’. More importantly for our investigation, he argued for a distinction to be struck on the measures taken in the event of a crisis in Britain, or a discretionary overseas conflict. ‘It was important to differentiate between a war in our own country and one that was being conducted at a distance, say India’, he argued: If this were not done, there was a danger that members of the House of Commons would fear that the Government of the day might shelter themselves behind the Bill, and conceal information regarding operations to which the public might be considered to be entitled.54 In other words, the public might be ‘entitled’ to information about some wars, but not others. This statement confirmed both the importance of ‘public opinion’, and the potential necessity to ignore its influence in cases of military necessity. Quite who would make this judgement Churchill declined to mention. As can be surmised from the evidence cited here, the notion of public ‘panic’ in wartime was employed to serve a variety of agendas in Britain before 1914. It must therefore be considered in the context of fierce inter-service strategic rivalry and political acrimony. Yet consensus about the importance of popular will in war was evident. Popular opinion was widely viewed as having the potential to exert significant influence upon the government in wartime. Its affects were largely considered to be negative, and contrary to the maxims of effective military or naval strategy – which was predicated upon rationality. As a result, arguments emerged for the state to play a role to mitigate the passions of the people, whether through censorship, the provision of food or intervention in financial markets. Yet, as we shall see, this line of thought was not entirely pessimistic about the capacity of the public realm when it came to military affairs. The need for public education and debate on issues of war and peace was widely discussed in military and intellectual circles, and many remained optimistic that rational ‘public opinion’ could be shaped in a way that would increase imperial security, rather than threaten it. * Considerations of ‘the people’ as an element in war were part of a broader consensus that politics and the realm of military strategy could not be hermetically sealed from one another. If this was true in time of conflict, it was increasingly viewed as applicable in time of peace. In the context of mass conscript armies and the oft remarked upon rapidity of modern European warfare, preparations for war became an issue of pivotal strategic importance owing to the need to develop a nation’s maximum military potential with the utmost urgency. As one naval officer summed up, ‘preparation for war is very much a part of war’.55 Involvement in politics thus became the logical consequence of the development of military strategy. At the same time, the growth of military professionalization and the increasing technical complexity of many military issues served to shift the dynamics of British civil-military relations.56 This set the conditions for the military to exert considerable influence over the political life of the nation in the decades before 1914. Yet while these dynamics are well known, little attention has been paid to assessing how members of the armed forces and their supporters engaged in contemporary politics, and what this can tell us about how they understood the conduct of that art. Existing interpretations have tended to stress the relationship between members of the armed forces and radical pressure groups such as the Navy League, National Service League (N.S.L.), and Imperial Maritime League. Widely viewed as being associated with the political right, these organizations are often viewed through the prism of contemporary radical critiques of jingoism and the ‘yellow press’.57 There are important elements of truth to these depictions; however, as Matthew Johnson has shown, the British left was far more comfortable with militarist ideas than has often been allowed. Moreover, organizations such as the N.S.L. cannot simply be defined as representatives of the right, and in some respects had much in common with strands of contemporary socialist thought than might be imagined. Reconstructing the assumptions that underpinned how service members and their advocates interacted with contemporary politics adds an additional perspective to this debate, highlighting the strong connections made between liberal attitudes to the public sphere and the formation of strategy. Speaking at a memorial lecture to his friend and fellow historian Sir John Knox Laughton in the autumn of 1916, the historian Julian Corbett set to explain the role naval history had in the life of the British Empire. In doing so he identified two key audiences. Referencing plans for the creation of a Department of Naval History at King’s College London where Laughton had taught, he observed: ‘I believe it is one of the aims of the proposed Department to carry on the work of bringing home to the nation at large what it owes to the sea and the Navy’. Warming to his theme, he continued: There is no surer way to the heart of the nation than through the life-story of its heroes. For this purpose biographical history is probably even better adapted than the larger and more ambitious narratives. They appeal rather to the makers of public opinion than to public opinion itself. In this direction of nourishing a healthy national sentiment, much, of course, has already been done. We have seen the effect of it conspicuously in the past two years. If anyone would question the stimulating influence of Naval History, there is something to which we may point with confidence. The patience with which the country bore the apparent inactivity of the Fleet in the early days of the war was quite a new experience … [Yet] from the first day every publicist, with full understanding and complete condition, has thread to teach what he learned from the revival of Naval History, and the nation listened with results of incalculable value to those who had to direct the war. Corbett’s second audience was more limited: ‘It is not only with public opinion that the Department may hope to be concerned. The highest aim of all – and I think we may call it so – will be to open more widely to the Royal Navy itself the treasures of its rich experience, to bring naval officers more intimately into touch with the ideas, the work and the policy of the men who formed their matchless tradition. The great chiefs of the past are the only masters from whom they can learn, and it is only the historian who can bring them together’.58 This address captured the essence of a second aspect of the relationship between public opinion and military affairs. Echoing Clausewitz, Corbett identified the strategic importance of aligning public opinion with the objective of a war. But he went further: for Corbett, the nation needed a sense of how wars should be fought, rather than just the necessity of fighting them. This was particularly important for Britain, whose tradition of maritime warfare was complex and unique, and which might require the patience of the population in order to pursue in future. Moreover, Corbett struck a distinction between the depth of understanding necessary for ‘a healthy national sentiment’ and the education of a nation’s community of strategic decision-makers. The latter required deeper understanding, argument and study. This depiction of the importance of ‘public’ and ‘national’ opinion to the formation of strategy reflected a widely held belief among a broad community of military intellectuals stretching back into the late nineteenth century. For them, the shaping of public opinion through deliberative debate and education was a task of vital importance and one that had direct consequences for the conduct of war. Their efforts focused largely on ‘the makers of public opinion’ and upon influential military and political figures, all of whom had a role to play in shaping preparations for war.59 The wide-ranging public discourse on matters of defence and security that flourished in late nineteenth- and early twentieth-century Britain is well known to historians.60 Venues such as R.U.S.I. provided a forum for military officers, politicians, journalists, intellectuals and the public to share ideas and to debate new developments. Many leading periodicals also devoted significant coverage to security matters, and the letter pages of the Times were a regular source of dialogue and argument. This is to say nothing of the voluminous regular newspaper columns provided by writers such as Spenser Wilkinson, Charles Repington, Archibald Hurd and James Thursfield, or a wealth of books and pamphlets on a wide range of military subjects. These sources are generally discussed in terms of their relationship to the politics of defence and their authors’ attempts to change government or military policy. This is an entirely appropriate focus, as we shall see. However it is also important to consider the more subtle appreciation Corbett outlined above, as it offers a revealing window into contemporary viewpoints on the strategic importance of public opinion and its impact upon the conduct of war. In order to examine these issues in detail, the remainder of this section will consider two examples of the ways in which the military engaged in political action: the so-called cult of navalism, and the debate over compulsory military service. In each instance, a significant proportion of officialdom remained wedded to ideas of a rational public sphere in which debate and argument remained important elements of the policy making process. * A succession of ‘scares’ over the condition of the Royal Navy occurred during the 1880s. These have often been viewed from the perspective of contemporary radical critics as examples of ‘scaremongering’, and lamented as evidence of jingo and the beginning of the end of the era of Liberal hegemony in British politics. Striking a distinction between ‘popular sentiment’ and ‘public opinion’ affords us the opportunity for fresh insight on this point. If ‘public opinion’ had to be weighed and was formed as the result of sustained pressure and considered debate, then the so-called ‘navalism’ of the 1880s takes on a significantly different light. The standard narrative of the period hinges around naval officers such as John Fisher and Charles Beresford conspiring with the services of sensationalist journals to mount public campaigns intended to overcome the lethargy that beset the government’s management of naval affairs. Perhaps the archetypal example of this is the 1884 ‘The Truth About the Navy’ scare, fermented with the aid of W. T. Stead. Stead himself certainly sought to depict his impact as having been crucial, describing to a friend how ‘It was the nation, not the experts, which, in 1884 on the publication of “The Truth About the Navy” decided upon the restoration of our naval supremacy and today it is the nation and not the experts which will decide what must be the standard of that supremacy’.61 Yet this account radically overstated both Stead’s influence and oversimplified manner in which extra-parliamentary pressure impacted the conduct of naval policy in the 1880s. In reality, the 1880s witnessed an incremental process by which government policy was shaped by a consistent process of rational public debate centred around the City of London’s shipping and insurance communities, and the officer corps of the Royal Navy. As the First Lord of the Admiralty, Lord Northbrook noted in a speech to the Lord Mayor’s Banquet in the City of London in 1884, ‘if public opinion calls for further protection for the commerce of the country and was full prepared to bear the charge which must be imposed for these burdens’, the government would take the necessary measures.62 The audience Northbrook had selected represented one of the vital constituencies involved in shaping government policy in this area: the commercial interests of the City of London, many of whom relied upon the navy to guarantee the safe passage of cargos and the security of overseas investments. By 1885–7 the City was supporting a public campaign for naval expansion, organizing and funding public meetings and reaching out for support from the colonies through events such as the Congress of Chambers of Commerce of the Empire.63 Yet these efforts were not the ill-informed interventions of business men in the realm of naval strategy. Rather, the City joined forces with aligned business and political interests across the empire, and a circle of independently-minded naval officers who were prepared to disagree in public with Admiralty policy.64 The titular head of this movement was the most famous sailor in late Victorian Britain, Admiral Geoffrey Phipps Hornby who had led a British squadron through the Dardanelles in 1878. Shielded by his reputation, a group of more junior reformers, some of them within the Admiralty itself, agitated for changes to official policy and for reforms to the processes through which the Admiralty made strategy. They did so via a combination of public meetings, lectures, articles and letters to prominent newspapers – particularly the Times. Public meetings played a particularly prominent part of the campaign, reflecting their consequence as a measure of the kind of deliberative discussion that characterized true, rational ‘public opinion’.65 As the Times reported after a particularly high-profile gathering in the London Chamber of Commerce in May 1888, ‘It would be difficult to exaggerate the importance of the meeting held yesterday in the City’. According to the paper, ‘the meeting may be regarded as the natural response of the mercantile community of London to the ill-omened statement of the First Lord of the Admiralty’ (who had admitted that the navy may not be able to guarantee the security of all British shipping during time of war). The report concluded that ‘it is impossible to regard Admiral Hornby as a mere chronic alarmist, nor can the organisers of yesterday’s meeting be dismissed as the tormentors of discreditable panics. There is, indeed, no occasion for panic’.66 By the middle of 1888, these efforts had contributed to a notable volte-face in government policy, which placed an increased emphasis upon intelligence gathering and strategy as determinants of naval policy, and which resulted in the passage of the Naval Defence Bill through Parliament soon thereafter. As one recent assessment has concluded, ‘public opinion’ played a vital part in this process by providing a forum and audience before which new ideas emanating from within the navy itself could have their ideas heard and weighed.67 The public thus enabled the reformers to overcome official parsimony and to pass a measure widely regarded as having ensured the Royal Navy’s predominance for the subsequent decade. Opponents of the increased expenditure decried this process as one of ‘panic’ and ‘alarmism’; however, these charges reflected their own frustration at being out of tune with the public mind on this issue. As one observer remarked, ‘pure reason, brought to bear in time of peace by a group of writers whose numbers rapidly increased, and the strong support of a great part of the press, accomplished this memorable revival of ancient traditions’.68 If ‘public opinion’ could act as an ally of sound military policy, misplaced ideas about naval strategy could also act as a threat to the service. During the late 1890s organizations such as the Navy League developed in order to educate public opinion as to the importance of the sea to British imperial life. Yet from the outset a tension existed between the most successful means of capturing the public imagination and the sober discussion of strategy. The tensions between the two were exposed by the central event in the Navy League’s calendar: the annual public commemoration and celebration of the Battle of Trafalgar. Beginning in 1896 the League sought to enshrine the day as a memorial to British naval mastery. Celebrating Britain’s greatest naval victory was, in many ways, entirely understandable. However, for more cerebral commentators such as Corbett, the potentially insidious impact upon how the public, politicians and armed forces understood the exercise of naval power became a growing concern. By venerating the idea of Trafalgar as a decisive battle in the Napoleonic Wars, the navalists risked overstating the immediate impact of maritime power, and of elevating the idea of ‘battle’ over that of command of the sea – the true strategical basis of British power. Corbett set out to correct this misapprehension in a series of public lectures, including to the army’s Staff College, and also in a book to mark the centenary of the Battle.69 His conclusion sounded a warning to those who depicted maritime warfare solely in terms of sea battles: ‘by universal assent Trafalgar is ranked as one of the most decisive battles of the world, and yet of all the great victories there is not one which to all appearance was so barren of immediate result’. ‘So incomprehensible was its apparent sterility’, he concluded, ‘that to fill the void a legend grew up that it saved England from invasion. That legend grew green till the present generation, unsupported as it was by the plain succession of events’.70 By correcting this misapprehension, Corbett sought to underline the importance of coherent combined strategy making in the twentieth century, and to underline the necessity for intimate inter-service co-operation, rather than a myopic focus upon naval battles. He was far from alone in expressing concerns at the potential implications of popular understandings of the navy. The construction of the eponymous H.M.S. Dreadnought had been the focus of a great deal of naval propaganda. The launch had been a capstone event and a classic example of the ‘theatre of navalism’ that defined the Edwardian age. Yet there was a significant minority within the navy who became concerned that the British people were coming to understand naval power primarily in terms of the number of ‘dreadnought’ battleships a nation possessed. This impression was given weight by the notorious ‘we want eight and we won’t wait’ agitation of 1908–9, when, fuelled by leaked intelligence revelations about the pace of German naval construction, elements of the nationalistic press and Unionist Party combined to pressure the government into increasing the pace of British naval shipbuilding. After an outcry in Parliament the Liberal cabinet ultimately committed to an expanded building programme for the following year, amounting to eight new capital warships. The First Sea Lord, Sir John Fisher, had worked tirelessly to convince the cabinet of the urgent necessity of committing to the additional programme of construction. Ever the political intriguer, he had used the full gamut of tactics to secure his aim: threats of resignation, cultivating a favourable press campaign, and dividing and conquering individual members of the cabinet. The results exceeded his expectations, as he admitted to Arnold White in March 1909: I am writing a line to say I feel sure that silence is patriotic. Don’t check this wave of public emotion that will give us the 8 Dreadnoughts a year! What a cold douche if I got up and said ‘Yes, the gradual, answering work of 4 years has now culminated in our having in Home Waters 2 Fleets, each of which in all its parts is incomparably superior to the whole German Fleet mobilised for war’… It would be magnificent to say this, but it would not be 8 Dreadnoughts!71 For Fisher, a public outcry was thus to be welcomed if it helped to secure a naval advantage. Some of his colleagues, however, were less sanguine. As Fisher was engaged in the politics of the naval crisis in the spring of 1909, Rear Admiral Edmond Slade was about to depart from the Admiralty for the Indian Ocean. For the past two years Slade had served as the director of naval intelligence, in which position he had been at the heart of the navy’s strategic planning process. Widely regarded as an intellectual and highly competent officer, Slade’s departure was speculated to have been the result of a falling out with Fisher. As he left, he hinted at his rationale in a letter to his friend Julian Corbett. ‘I had a long talk with McKenna (Reginald McKenna, the Liberal First Lord of the Admiralty) today’, he wrote, in which I tried to impress on him that Battleships & big fleets are not the only things to be considered, but that the claims of commerce & commerce protection are of primary importance, and that any serious blow struck at our Trade will provide such a crisis in this country as to upset any plans that may have been made at the Admiralty. He does not realise it in the least I am afraid as he only talks to Sir John and Admiral May who only think of war as an affair of big fleets.72 These doubts were shared more widely within the navy, but also by politicians such as Arthur Balfour, who added their weight to calls for an investigation into naval policy.73 The resultant enquiry, chaired by the prime minister, called upon Slade to provide written testimony as part of the proceedings. The departed admiral confided to Corbett about what he had written: I have endeavoured to show that while we are amply strong in Battleships the fault is that the flotilla has been neglected. It seems to me that the whole agitation is hopelessly misdirected. There is a sort of feeling that something is wrong, but the British public & the leading men [unreadable] do not know really where the fault is and so they are going on a rule of thumb which they think is easily understood & by which the whole case is expressed, without realising that they have unconsciously hit on the only strong point in the whole question.74 In Slade’s mind, the Admiralty’s indulgence in the simplification of naval strength into a simple question of relative numbers of battleships therefore risked distorting the balance of the empire’s naval priorities. His perspective was increasingly borne out over the course of the next several years. For much of Winston Churchill’s tenure as First Lord of the Admiralty after 1911, he battled to reconcile the competing demands of financial restraint and the government’s public commitments to standards of naval strength expressed in terms of ‘dreadnought’ battleships. As he explained to the advocates of economy within cabinet, ‘I am sure – and I warn my colleagues – that the reduction of this programme … would cause a shock and a scandal throughout the British Empire’.75 Yet Churchill was increasingly aware that the navy was more in need of additional flotilla craft and light cruisers than it was of an ever-increasing superfluity of battleships. Thus, during the spring and summer of 1914 he engaged in discussions of ‘converting’ some of the money that Parliament had grudgingly approved for the purposes of dreadnought construction into funds for new submarines and other, smaller, warships.76 This so-called ‘substitution’ policy was the logical consequence of what Corbett and Slade had feared: as the public and some politicians came to understand naval strength primarily in terms of battleships, the actual requirements of the navy would not be fulfilled owing to a schism between strategic reality and popular politics. * The Boer War witnessed an outpouring of patriotic sentiment in Britain and across the empire. To many Radicals, this appeared to be jingoistic imperialism writ large, and a blow to ideas of political and social progress. Much of the political furore blew over in the months after the ‘khaki’ election of 1900, as the Liberal party in Parliament began to coalesce into a functioning opposition after a period of internal disarray. Yet one of the legacies of the conflict in South Africa was a campaign for compulsory military service that proceeded across the settler Dominions and the British Isles throughout the First World War.77 The most prominent and widely remarked upon grouping within this movement was the N.S.L. Beginning from some 550 members in 1903, by 1911 the League could boast 91,142 associates, including 177 M.P.s.78 The politics of the N.S.L. have often been defined as following ‘a classic theme of right and radical right parliamentary thinking: that the masses are patriotic, but parliamentary institutions are weak, selfish, and corrupt’. In this formulation, their essential approach was to appeal directly to the masses in order to change national policy.79 This viewpoint built upon earlier critiques of ‘professional agitators’ and ‘scaremongers’ made by commentators such as F. W. Hirst and George Dangerfield. In both of these instances, deception played an important part in the political machinations of those seeking to increase spending on defence and military armaments.80 This depiction contains important elements of truth. As the nationalist journalist H. A. Gywnne admitted, ‘I go rather beyond perhaps the extreme probabilities of the case’, he admitted, ‘because I want to rouse England to the fact that she is in danger’.81 For Gywnne ‘the people’ were incapable of the sort of clear sighted imperial attitudes that he felt himself to possess, and he therefore sought to circumvent the need to inform ‘public opinion’ by inducing the nation to panic. However, as Matthew Johnson has illustrated, the N.S.L. enjoyed considerably greater popularity among liberals and progressives – even socialists – than has been appreciated.82 Moreover, elements of the movement for national service retained a far greater faith in the importance of rationale debate in the public sphere than is allowed for in the ‘scaremongering’ critique. The N.S.L. was most certainly a mass movement containing many populists, yet its leadership displayed significant continuities with nineteenth-century attitudes to the public sphere. Field Marshal Frederick Roberts was one of the most famous and respected soldiers of the age. A hero of the Second Anglo-Afghan War and embodiment of Victorian heroic masculinity, he had a long track record of attempting to shape British military and imperial policy by influencing politicians and ‘the public’. After having commanded British forces in South Africa during the latter years of the Boer War, Roberts arrived in London to assume the position of Command in Chief. He did so determined in his view that significant reforms were required in order to make the army ready for the challenges of a future conflict. Very rapidly, however, he became frustrated at the government’s insistence on cuts to the military budget. This fiscally prudent agenda threatened to undermine attempts to arrive at a more efficient organization for the army, and, by stages, convinced Roberts that the existing system could no longer produce an army of the size and standard required to defend the empire. After his post as Command in Chief was abolished as part of a reorganization of the War Office in 1904, Roberts began making frequent public interventions on the issue of army reform, writing articles and delivering a speech at Mansion House in August 1905 in which he argued explicitly for compulsory military service.83 Later that year he made a final attempt to convince the government of the merits of his case. In a memorandum to the Committee of Imperial Defence (C.I.D.) he argued that ‘the only way by which … a remedy can be found for our present unpreparedness for war is by the adoption of some system of Universal Military Training, beginning with boys at school, and ending with several consecutive months drill and rifle practice’. To Roberts’ mind, such a system ‘in addition to being physically and morally advantageous, would, I firmly believe, have the effect of inculcating a spirit of patriotism throughout the nation’.84 This proposal was radically out of step with the government’s priorities, and many of the cabinet were occupied preparing to fight the forthcoming general election. This was reflected in the reply that Prime Minister Balfour sent to the field marshal. He gently pointed that Robert’s proposals amounted to little short of a ‘social revolution’,85 which he politely declined to endorse. In reaction, Roberts resigned before the end of his allotted term as a member of the C.I.D. in order to free him to bring the government’s unwillingness to meet the dangers Britain faced to the attention of the public, and to seek their sanction for a scheme of compulsory military service of the sort he had advocated to Balfour. As he told Balfour, ‘I am so profoundly impressed with the necessity for our possessing a potential reserve of adequate strength … that I feel it my duty to bring the current state of affairs to the notice of my fellow-countrymen’.86 The resulting campaign revealed sharply conflicting views of ‘public opinion’ and its influence upon politics. In a campaign focused firmly upon Britain and framed in terms of an imminent threat to the nation, rather than the empire, Roberts aimed to convince the public of the urgency of his case. In the foreword to his 1907 book A Nation in Arms, he expressed his hope that the public would ‘realise the urgent necessity for military reforms’. He and his supporters in the N.S.L. clearly recognized that the public were not currently in favour of their programme, but retained a fundamentally optimistic view of the potential for rational public debate. ‘We appeal to the nation to support the principle of universal military training’, one letter to the press ran, ‘[and to] help to form that great basis of public opinion which must necessarily exist before so vital a reform can be carried out’.87 Yet others within the movement for compulsory service were decidedly less optimistic in their assessments of the power of public argument. As Roberts confidante, Charles Repington, plotted at around the same time: ‘We cannot get all we want at once and must proceed by stages, gradually giving the public education and such food as their weak digestion can stand as they mature’.88 In some respects Repington remained attached of the importance of ‘educating’ the public, revealing a strand of liberal thought that clashed with some of his other political affiliations.89 However, when a cause appeared sufficiently important, he was prepared to adopt deliberately disingenuous tactics in order to speed the pace at which the public came to share what he viewed as the correct opinions. On these grounds he came to play a leading part in the ‘invasion’ controversy of 1907–8, wherein supporters of the N.S.L. sought deliberately to induce the government to support compulsory service on the grounds that it would help safeguard the country from foreign attack. Yet, while members of the N.S.L. would doubtless have been content to achieve their objectives regardless of rationality of the means used to reach them, in many respects the ‘invasion controversy’ was an instance not of irrational passions overcoming reasoned deliberation, but of a failure of the N.S.L. to shift the prevailing public and official consensus on compulsory service.90 The very act of seeking an official enquiry and overturning the conclusions the government had reached upon the issue in 1903 and 1905 through the presentation of meticulously collected new evidence illustrated that, fundamentally, Repington, Roberts, and their co-agitators subscribed to an inherently rational mode of debate, and lacked faith in the ability of ‘scaremongering’ to shape official decision-making. Much as proponents of naval strategy had expressed concern about contemporary ‘navalism’, Britain’s military leadership adopted an extremely cool attitude towards the arguments the N.S.L. deployed – even if many ultimately supported its objective of stronger national defences. Senior figures within the General Staff were deeply sceptical as to the strategic reality of the invasion threat Roberts and his comrades championed, and saw it clearly as a pretext through which to achieve military reforms intended to increase Britain’s ability to send an army to fight overseas. As Major General Spencer Ewart, the director of military operations and a member of the government’s invasion enquiry, noted, ‘Lord Roberts’ ‘bolt from the blue’ theories altogether overstep the mark and spoil his case’. For him, any army raised on the grounds Roberts advocated could be ‘used only on the assumption that the Germans have defeated our Navy and gained a footing in this country. It is the overseas expeditionary soldier we want … Home defence is the most poisonous strategical fallacy ever propounded by man’.91 General Sir Ian Hamilton, an acolyte of Roberts in previous years, summed up the General Staff’s concerns in a quasi-official publication in 1910–11: The patriotic men who are the driving force behind the appeal for compulsory service see this clearly enough, and they hope, by emphasising the danger of invasion, to secure from the people authority which may be used to forge a weapon for attack, whenever the moment to defend ourselves arises. Unfortunately, a shield is not easily convertible into a spear; still less into a projectile. Better, then, be quite frank with the people. So we may get half a loaf out of them, in the shape of a force created for over-sea purposes, instead of a stone in the shape of a great defensive army, of no earthly use except to hang round our necks whilst we struggle in the slough of insolvency.92 These observations assumed an increasingly critical tone after the outbreak of the war in 1914, when the realities of the schism between British diplomacy and its military preparations had been rendered clear. In Ordeal by Battle, published in 1915, the conservative commentator Frederick Scott Oliver charged that no pre-war politician ‘had ever taken the country into his confidence, either as to the extent of the danger or as to the nature of the remedy’.93 Perhaps more revealing than the book itself, were the private comments Oliver solicited on drafts of his work prior to publication. These cut to the heart of the dissonance between public and official utterances on strategy, and on the role the narrative of invasion had played in distorting the latter. One reviewer lamented how: I do not know whether in writing the last pages you had in mind Roberts’ programme. But to my mind they explain where and why his scheme failed. He knew that we had got to fight in France and Belgium if we fought at all, but then he turned politician and said to himself: ‘Politicians know this, but daren’t say it, because the people won’t stand it. I too must be as cautious as they. I will propose a scheme for home defence – not because it is the right scheme nor because home defence is the real problem nor indeed any defence at all, but because the people won’t stand the truth and must be ridden in blinkers … But this concession was doubly fatal: 1st, it laid his scheme open to attack on sound military lines; 2nd, it deceived no one as to his ultimate object and therefore in no way mitigated political hostility. It only concealed from them the true grounds for proposing compulsory service and the need which existed for it.94 These critiques invoked ideas of ‘honesty’ and ‘truth’ to a higher imperial calling, above the vicissitudes of party politics. Staunch Unionist though Oliver was, his political convictions were clearly not incompatible with an enduring faith in the ability of ‘public opinion’ to overcome parliamentary reluctance to measures he viewed as imperative for the defence of the empire. * The outbreak of war in 1914 radically re-shaped the public sphere in Britain for the subsequent four years. Censorship of the press and the control of information about the war sparked widespread comment and criticism. As H. G. Wells bemoaned in a letter to the Times, ‘the trained mind does insist upon treating all unenlisted civilians as panic-stricken imbeciles’.95 Yet these changes were not permanent, or irreversible, and concepts of ‘public opinion’ that bore considerable resemblance to their nineteenth-century ancestors survived well into the interwar years and beyond. As James Thompson has argued, the history of a rational, deliberative ‘public opinion’ differs significantly from the essentially pessimistic accounts of the decline of rationality in public discourse from the 1870s onwards.96 This article has explored the role that ‘public opinion’ played in debates about strategy in Britain in the decades before the First World War. Most accounts of the relationship between political thought and conflict in this period have focused upon key events such as the jingoist outbursts that accompanied the Boer War, or the relationship between ‘public opinion’ and foreign policy in cases such as the Bulgarian Crisis of 1877–8 – reflecting the ongoing association of ‘public opinion’ with liberal thought. Yet, as I have argued, this understates the complexity of strategic thought and the prominent place that concepts of democracy and social order played within it. Particularly for Britain, whose reliance upon imported food was widely appreciated from the 1860s onwards, the impact of conflict upon its national existence was widely discussed and debated in both military and political circles. Issues of rationality were at the crux of this discourse, and were heavily shaped by contemporary psychology and ideas of crowd behaviour. For some, the inherent rationality of the market would ensure that any disruption to trade would be overcome relatively quickly. Others, particularly in the upper echelons of the Royal Navy, remained deeply concerned that shipowners would place the security of their vessels ahead of the national interest, and thereby sow the seeds of higher food prices and domestic discontent. These arguments were not based upon strong evidence about the condition of the working classes, but the spectre of social disorder driven by high prices remained a persistent feature of the rhetoric employed within the debate. The debate over public panic in wartime highlights a broader point, which underpinned debates over strategic thought before 1914. Strategy was discussed overwhelmingly in rational terms. Accepting the importance of ‘public opinion’ to the shaping of sound defence policy, and its influence over government action in wartime, competing schools of strategic thought therefore placed the utmost importance in a process of deliberative debate intended to influence the public understanding of war. The activities of popular groups such as the N.S.L. and Navy League have often been associated with jingoism and the radical right. Elements of this interpretation are accurate, but the military logic underpinning their activities was not necessarily easily defined in political terms. Prominent military figures did cultivate press campaigns in support of particular agendas, but numerous others were much more reluctant to engage in ‘scaremongering’ and remained attached to the importance of a fundamentally rational view of ‘public opinion’.97 For those military officers, politicians and intellectuals engaged in discussions of conflict, shaping ‘public’ opinion was a matter of strategic necessity. In some circumstances, the populist activities of the ‘Leagues’ threatened to undermine this agenda, and attracted criticism from many closely associated with the formation of strategy before 1914. This account underlines the endurance of an inherently rational view of ‘public opinion’ in Britain well into the twentieth century, and also shows that key aspects of the military – a group often associated with Unionism, the yellow press, and ‘scaremongering’ – remained firmly committed to this conception of the public sphere. Broadening our understanding of civil-military relations in this way illustrates the complexity of the relationship between the armed forces and society in contemporary Britain, which defies simplistic characterization.98 It also underlines the intimate relationship between democracy and strategic thought, a dialogue that requires a great deal more attention if we are to fully appreciate the linkages between military and political thought in this period. Footnotes * Research for this article was supported by a Caird Fellowship at the National Maritime Museum, and a Scouloudi Historical Award from the Institute of Historical Research. I would like to thank Anna Brinkman, Aimée Fox, Louis Halewood, Matthew Seligmann, and the anonymous reviewers for their comments on this article. 1 J. Isaac, ‘Strategy as intellectual history’, Modern Intellectual History, xvi (2019), pp. 1007–21 at p. 1007. 2 On discipline, see D. Bell, ‘Writing the world: disciplinary history and beyond’, International Affairs, lxxxv (2009), 3–22 at p. 14; and K. Wagner, ‘Seeing like a soldier: the Amritsar massacre and the politics of military history’, in Decolonization and Conflict: Colonial Comparisons and Legacies, ed. M. Thomas and G. Curless (London, 2017), pp. 23–38 at pp. 23–8. On the epistemology of military history, see T. Barkawi and S. Brighton, ‘Powers of war: fighting, knowledge, and critique’, International Political Sociology, v (2011), 126–43. 3 See, e.g., A. Gat, A History of Military Thought: From the Enlightenment to the Cold War (Oxford, 2001); and J. Bartelson, War in International Thought (Cambridge, 2018). 4 M. Hampton, Visions of the Press in Britain, 1850–1950 (Chicago, 2004). 5 On the relations between the army and society, see D. French, Military Identities: the Regimental System, the British Army, and the British People, c.1870–2000 (Oxford, 2004), pp. 232–58. For the composition of the army’s officer corps, see E. M. Spiers, The Army and Society, 1815–1914 (London, 1980), pp. 1–34. 6 T. Hippler, ‘Democracy and war in the strategic thought of Giulio Douhet’, in The Changing Character of War, ed. H. Strachan and S. Schiepers (Oxford, 2011), pp. 167–83; H. Strachan, The Direction of War: Contemporary Strategy in Historical Perspective (Cambridge, 2013), p. 147; and S. Garon, ‘On the transnational destruction of cities: what Japan and the United States learned from the bombing of Britain and Germany in the Second World War’, Past & Present, ccxlvii (2020), 235–71 at pp. 236–7, 239–40. 7 On public engagement, see J. Rüger, ‘Nation, empire and navy: identity politics in the United Kingdom, 1887–1914’, Past & Present, clxxxv (2004), 159–87; and French, Military Identities, pp. 232–58. On the broadening of civil-military relations, see Keeling, ‘The armed forces and parliamentary elections in the United Kingdom, 1885–1914’, English Historical Review, cxxxiv (2019), 881–913. 8 W. S. Hamer, The British Army: Civil-Military Relations, 1885–1905 (Oxford, 1970); H. Strachan, The Politics of the British Army (Oxford, 1997); and M. Johnson, Militarism and the British Left, 1902–1914 (Basingstoke, 2013). 9 M. Johnson, ‘Leading from the front: the “service members” in Parliament, the armed forces, and British politics during the Great War’, English Historical Review, cxxx (2015), 613–45. 10 J. A. W. Gunn, ‘Public opinion’, in Political Innovation and Conceptual Change, ed. T. Ball, J. Farr and R. Hanson (Cambridge, 1989), pp. 247–65. 11 J. Thompson, British Political Culture and the Idea of ‘Public Opinion’, 1867–1914 (Cambridge, 2013). See also A. Hawkins, Victorian Political Culture: ‘Habits of Heart and Mind’ (Oxford, 2015), pp. 342–65, 370–87. 12 M. Conway, The Crowd in Peace and War (New York, 1915), p. 4. 13 M. Hampton, ‘The press, patriotism, and public discussion: C.P. Scott, the Manchester Guardian, and the Boer War, 1899–1902’, The Historical Journal, xliv (2001), 177–97. 14 J. A. Hobson, The Psychology of Jingoism (London, 1901), p. 98. 15 Quoted in H. C. G. Matthew, Gladstone, 1809–1898 (Oxford, 1997), p. 601. 16 The crucial work being J. Habermas, The Structural Transformation of the Public Sphere: an Inquiry Into a Category of Bourgeois Society (Darmstadt, 1962). For a critique, see Thompson, ‘Public Opinion’, pp. 7–10. 17 The classic treatment of this issue is A. J. A. Morris, The Scaremongers: the Advocacy of War and Rearmament, 1896–1914 (London, 1984); and Johnson, Militarism and the British Left, passim. 18 D. Edgerton, ‘Liberal militarism and the British state’, New Left Review, clxxxv (1991), 138–69; and M. Johnson, ‘Peace and retrenchment? The Edwardian Liberal Party, the limits of pacifism, and the politics of national defence’, in Bid for World Power? New Research on the Outbreak of the First World War, ed. A. Gestrich and H. Pogge van Strandmann (Oxford, 2017), pp. 201–20. 19 C. von Clausewitz, On War, ed. M. Howard and P. Paret (Princeton, 1976), p. 479. 20 P. Vennesson, ‘War without the people’, in Strachan and Schiepers, The Changing Character of War, pp. 241–58 at pp. 243–6. 21 R. Foley, German Strategy and the Path to Verdun: Erich von Falkenhayen and the Development of Attrition, 1870–1916 (Cambridge, 2005), pp. 14–37. 22 Vennesson, ‘War without the people’, p. 246. 23 A point made in Hippler, ‘Democracy and war’, p. 169. 24 A. Offer, The First World War: an Agrarian Interpretation (Oxford, 1989), p. 219. 25 Naval Historical Branch, T86957: Milne, ‘Position of cruising ships for protection of trade’, December 1874; and J. Beeler, British Naval Policy in the Gladstone-Disraeli Era, 1868–1880 (Stanford, 1997), pp. 210–36. 26 ‘Parliament: House of Lords, Monday, June 19’, The Times, 20 June 1893, p. 6. 27 Colomb to the editor, 14 Nov. 1893, re-printed in The Times, 17 Nov. 1893, p. 8. 28 The Times, 17 Nov. 1893, p. 9. 29 I. S. Bloch, Is War Now Impossible? Being an Abridgement of ‘The War of the Future in Its Technical, Economic and Political Relations’ (London, 1899), p. 294. 30 M. Welch, ‘The centenary of the British publication of Jean de Bloch’s Is War Now Impossible (1899–1999)’, War in History, vii (2000), 273–94 at pp. 280–4. 31 G. R Searle, The Quest for National Efficiency: a Study in British Politics and Political Thought, 1899–1914 (Berkeley, 1971), pp. 1–33; and B. Porter, The Absent-Minded Imperialists: Empire, Society, and Culture in Britain (Oxford, 2004), pp. 222–6. 32 Report of the Royal Commission on Supply of Food and Raw Material in Time of War (Parl. Papers 1905 [Cd. 2643], i), pp. 35, 37. 33 Report of the Royal Commission on Supply of Food and Raw Material in Time of War (Parl. Papers 1905 [Cd. 2644], ii), pp. 244–5, Qs 6985, 6987. 34 R. Davidson, ‘Llewellyn Smith, the Labour Department, and government growth 1886–1909’, in Studies in the Growth of Nineteenth Century Government, ed. G. Sutherland (London, 1972), pp. 227–62 at pp. 239–43. 35 Parl. Papers 1905 [Cd. 2644], p. 209, Q6197. 36 F. W. Hirst, Six Panics and Other Essays (London, 1913), pp. 2–3. 37 Thompson, ‘Public Opinion’, pp. 145–6. 38 Parl. Papers 1905 [Cd. 2643], pp. 43–4. 39 The National Archives of the U.K., CAB 2/3, ‘Committee of Imperial Defence: minutes of the 122nd meeting’, 6 Feb. 1913, fo. 30. 40 D. French, British Economic and Strategic Planning, 1905–1915 (London, 1982), pp. 7–22; and M. S. Seligmann, The Royal Navy and the German Threat, 1904–1914 (Oxford, 2012), passim. 41 ‘Committee of Imperial Defence: minutes of the 122nd meeting’, fo. 31. 42 See, e.g., S. Murray, ‘The internal condition of Great Britain during a Great War’, RUSI Journal, lvii (1913), 1561–5. 43 T.N.A., WO 106/46, Altham, ‘Memorandum of the Military Policy to be adopted in a War with Germany’, 10 Feb 1903. 44 T.N.A., ADM 137/2872, H. Campbell, ‘German Trade in Time of War’, 1908. 45 G. Aston, Sea, Land, and Air Strategy: a Comparison (London, 1914), pp. 81–3; and H. Richmond, British Strategy, Military & Economic: a Historical Review and its Contemporary Lessons (Cambridge, 1941), p. 117. 46 C. Callwell, Military Operations and Maritime Preponderance: their Relations and Interdependence (London, 1905), pp. 168–9. 47 I. Hull, A Scrap of Paper: Breaking and Making International Law During the Great War (Ithaca, 2014), pp. 141–80. 48 J. Ferris, ‘Doing the necessary: the Declaration of London and British strategy, 1905–1915’, in The Civilianization of War: the Changing Civil-Military Divide, 1914–2014, ed. A. Barros and M. Thomas (Cambridge, 2018), pp. 23–46. 49 Parl. Papers 1905 [Cd. 2643], pp. 43–4. 50 P. Readman, ‘The Conservative Party, patriotism, and British politics: the case of the general election of 1900’, Journal of British Studies, xl (2001), 107–45. See also T. G. Otte, ‘“The swing of the pendulum at home”: by-elections and foreign policy, 1865–1914’, in By-Elections in British Politics, 1832–1914, ed. T. G. Otte and P. Readman (Woodbridge, 2013), pp. 121–50. 51 T.N.A., WO 32/9091, General Staff, ‘Memorandum of the principles of defence of the United Kingdom, and on the general measures to be taken in accordance with such principles’, 1 Aug. 1907, p. 3. 52 T.N.A., CAB 2/2, Minutes of the 114th meeting of the Committee of Imperial Defence, 23 Aug. 1911, fo. 130. 53 T.N.A., PRO 30/40/14, Ardagh to Wolseley, 28 Dec. 1898, fo. 129. 54 T.N.A., CAB 38/23/6, Churchill evidence, 16 June 1910. 55 National Maritime Museum (hereafter N.M.M.), CBT/13/2, Slade to Corbett, 28 May 1906, p. 2. 56 Strachan, Politics of the British Army, pp. 20–43; and Johnson, Militarism and the British Left, pp. 45–65. 57 N. C Fleming, ‘The Imperial Maritime League: British navalism, conflict, and the radical Right, c.1907–1920’, War in History, xxiii (2016), 296–322. 58 J. S. Corbett, ‘The revival of naval history’, Contemporary Review, 1916, pp. 738–9. 59 It is worth noting that a similar logic underpinned attempts to gather ‘public opinion’ behind attempts to limit war through international law. See, e.g., N. Angell, The Great Illusion: a Study in the Relation of Military Power to National Advantage (London, 1913), p. 294. 60 J. Luvaas, The Education of an Army: British Military Thought, 1815–1940 (London, 1965); and D. Schurman, The Education of a Navy: the Development of British Naval Strategic Thought, 1867–1914 (Chicago, 1965). 61 N.M.M., NOE/53/25, W. T. Stead to Noel, July 1909. 62 S. Smith, ‘Public opinion, the navy and the City of London: the drive for British naval expansion in the late nineteenth century’, War & Society, ix (1991), 29–50 at p. 32. 63 Smith, ‘Public opinion’, p. 32. 64 On the imperial aspect of contemporary navalism, see J. Mitcham, Race and Imperial Defence in the British World, 1870–1914 (Cambridge, 2016). 65 Thompson, ‘Public Opinion’, pp. 116–28. 66 The Times, 29 May 1888, p. 9. 67 R. E. Mullins, The Transformation of British and American Naval Policy in the Pre-Dreadnought Era: Ideas, Culture and Strategy, ed. J. Beeler (Basingstoke, 2016), pp. 121–76. For an international comparison, see D. Bönker, Militarism in a Global Age: Naval Ambitions in Germany and the United States Before World War I (Ithaca, 2012), pp. 200–23. 68 G. S. Clarke, Imperial Defence (London, 1987), p. 181. 69 A. Lambert, ‘The magic of Trafalgar: the nineteenth-century legacy’, in Trafalgar in History: a Battle and Its Afterlife, ed. D. Cannadine (Basingstoke, 2006), pp. 155–74 at pp. 170–1. 70 J. S. Corbett, The Campaign of Trafalgar (London, 1910), p. 410. 71 Fisher to Arnold White, 21 March 1909, in Fear God Dread Nought: the Correspondence of Admiral of the Fleet Lord Fisher of Kilverstone, ed. A. J. Marder (3 vols., London, 1952–9), ii. 234. 72 N.M.M., CBT/13/2, Slade to Corbett, 2 March 1909. 73 Bodleian Library, Sandars Papers, MS 758, Balfour to Beresford, 16 Apr. 1909. 74 N.M.M., CBT/13/2, Slade to Corbett, 30 May 1909. 75 T.N.A., ADM 116/3152, Churchill, ‘Naval estimates, 1914–1915’, 10 Jan. 1914, p. 3. 76 C. M. Bell, ‘Sir John Fisher’s naval revolution reconsidered: Winston Churchill at the Admiralty, 1911–1914’, War in History, xiii (2011), 333–56. 77 On the imperial aspects of conscription, see J. Tumblin, The Quest for Security: Sovereignty, Race, and the Defense of the British Empire, 1989-1931 (Cambridge, 2019), pp. 191–230. 78 Admiralty Library, P345, ‘The National Service League, Ninth Annual Report’, 31 March 1911, pp. 6, 10. 79 A. Summers, ‘The character of Edwardian nationalism: three popular leagues’, in Nationalist and Racialist Movements in Britain and Germany Before 1914, ed. P. Kennedy and A. Nicholls (London, 1981), pp. 68–87, at pp. 77, 81. 80 G. Dangerfield, The Strange Death of Liberal England, ed. P. Bew (London, 2012), p. 108; and Morris, Scaremongers, pp. 1–12. 81 British Library, Kitchener-Marker Papers, Additional MS. 55277, fo. 166, Gywnne to Marker 16 May 1905. 82 Johnson, Militarism and the British Left, pp. 90–132. 83 H. Streets, ‘Military influence in late Victorian and Edwardian popular media: the case of Frederick Roberts’, Journal of Victorian Culture, viii (2003), 231–56 at p. 248. 84 T.N.A., CAB 3/1/33, Roberts, ‘On the necessity for adopting a system of universal training’, 2 Nov. 1905, fo. 138. 85 T.N.A., CAB 2/1/81, Balfour to Roberts, 20 Nov. 1905, fo. 160. 86 T.N.A., CAB 2/1/81, Roberts to Balfour, 9 Nov. 1905, fo. 158. 87 T.N.A., WO 105/45, Apr. 1907, draft letter to the editor. 88 The Letters of Lieutenant-Colonel Charles à Court Repington CMG, Military Correspondent of the Times, 1903–1918, ed. A. J. A. Morris (Stroud, 1999), p. 117. 89 Morris, Scaremongers, p. 378. 90 For the significance of cross-party agreement on defence issues, see R. Williams, Defending the Empire: the Conservative Party and British Defence Policy, 1899–1915 (New Haven, Conn., 1991). 91 National Records of Scotland, Ewart Diary, GD 527/1/1/1350/10, entries for 17 July 1908 and 18 July 1909. 92 I. Hamilton, Compulsory Service: a Study of the Question in Light of Experience (London, 1911), pp. 142–3. 93 F. S. Oliver, Ordeal by Battle (London, 1915), pp. 313–14. 94 National Library of Scotland, F. S. Oliver Papers, MS 24985, fos. 3–4, ‘C’ to Oliver, 24 Apr. 1915 (emphasis in original). 95 ‘Mr. Wells on invasion: the civilians’ place in home warfare’, The Times, 31 Oct. 1914, p. 9. 96 Thompson, ‘Public Opinion’, pp. 247–51. 97 On links between the military and the press, see Morris, Scaremongers, passim. 98 Keeling, ‘Armed forces and parliamentary elections’, pp. 912–13. © The Author(s) 2021. Published by Oxford University Press on behalf of Institute of Historical Research. This is an Open Access article distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution License (http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/), which permits unrestricted reuse, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided the original work is properly cited. © The Author(s) 2021. Published by Oxford University Press on behalf of Institute of Historical Research.
TI - Strategy, rationality, and the idea of public opinion in Britain, 1870–1914
JO - Historical Research
DO - 10.1093/hisres/htab004
DA - 2021-05-19
UR - https://www.deepdyve.com/lp/oxford-university-press/strategy-rationality-and-the-idea-of-public-opinion-in-britain-1870-2arMQsT30d
SP - 397
EP - 418
VL - 94
IS - 264
DP - DeepDyve
ER -