if not all, branches of our Supply departments are confessedly most weak; whilst our Cavalry, apart from the question of equipment, which has long seemed to us to require a careful reconsideration under the altered circumstances of modern war, is numerically so weak, that in the event of invasion it would be barely equal to the common details of outpost duty. It is true that for such purposes we ought to find a valuable support in our 14,000 Yeomanry; but they have been so long and systematically discouraged by successive Liberal Governments, that unless thoroughly reconstituted, they would be unable to render any real service. Our dependence would therefore be upon that regular cavalry which, only a few years since depreciated by the hasty opinion of the country, but now recognised as one of the characteristic features of Prussian manœuvres, is a plant of very slow growth; for officers of experience have never estimated the time within which a cavalry soldier can be fully formed at much less than three years. Into the further and serious question, whether when so formed he is equal to the work which a Prussian Uhlan is expected to perform, we will not here enter. The French system of outposts was acknowledged by the Emperor Napoleon in 1859 to be inferior to the Austrian; the Austrian in 1866 was very inferior to the Prussian; and it might perhaps be asked to which of these three-French Austrian, or Prussian-does our system most nearly approach?

Serious as these reflections are, they almost pale before the still graver doubt, whether the English soldier of the line is of the same substantial stuff as were his predecessors who on so many battle-fields, and generally against such long odds, won for us the not unmerited compliment, that it was well for the world that there was not a larger supply of British Infantry. Whatever may be now or hereafter the improvements of military science, the physical power and endurance of the men, whether on the march or in the close shock of battle, must remain essential and determining conditions of success. In 1866 the Austrian soldiers fought well; but it was remarked that man for man they were physically unequal in weight and height to the Prussians; and in the war of last year the same contrast between French and Germans was still more marked. Under the old long-service system the English soldier, though gathered to the standard without much regard to class or antecedents, was a man in the prime of his strength, with tough and tried sinews, capable of undergoing fatigue and exposure: under the new system, which professes a pedantic but not very real regard for ethical considerations, the English soldier is a weak puny boy from seventeen to nineteen years old, with his muscles unset, his constitution

stitution unformed, his health as unable to bear the strain of hunger, illness, or exposure, as his body is to resist the actual tug of war. It was a grave responsibility to reduce the standards of height, of breadth across the chest, and of range of vision, with no better excuse than the formation of a so-called Reserve, which up to this time has done little beyond draining away our best soldiers and non-commissioned officers. But to do this in the face of remonstrances from almost every officer of eminence, and in spite of the distinct warning from an authority so friendly to the present Government as Lord Sandhurst, that they were 'organising defeat,' is a procedure for which the utmost charity can hardly find an explanation. But whatever excuses the ingenuity of partisans may discover, we trust at least that no one will venture to suggest that in this we are copying the Prussian model. The Prussian system of a Reserve, with its localised regiments and its universally obligatory service is, as might easily be shown, the exact opposite of that which our Government has adopted. It is, in fact, optional to us to choose either a short-service system, with its large reserves and its localisation of regiments analogous to that of Prussia, so far as English habits and requirements permit-for every army should be organised in view of its national characteristics and conditions. -or the long-service system of former times, but accompanied by a considerable increase in numerical strength, and by a rate of wages that would enable us to compete fairly for men in the labour market. We will not now discuss the merits of these alternatives; it is enough to say that, under either, the defence at least of the country might be adequately secured; but, so far as Prussian organisation is concerned, we are for the present removed alike from its excellencies and its demerits.

In many Volunteer regiments very different and superior qualifications are to be found, and men are to be seen who in physical appearance would do no discredit to any army in the world. But except for the uniforms that they wear, the arms that they carry, much personal zeal, and a very moderate amount of drill, the Volunteers remain, after ten years' existence, much as they were when they first offered their services to the country. Unorganised in every sense of the word, unsupplied with equipments, with great coats, and till lately with proper weapons, the men have received as little encouragement from the Government as their officers have had instruction. The finest material in the world has been allowed to run to waste for lack of a little statesmanship.

But evil as the Government at last admit our condition to have been at the beginning of the year, it is now insinuated that a

silent but powerful improvement has been in progress. We wish that we could see grounds for the assertion. We fear that as it was then, so is it substantially now, and that it is only the thunder of national disaster, involving the guiltless and guilty in a common fate, that can waken our seven sleepers from their official repose. Athelstan the Unready' is still the true type of the English administrator. But there is cause for anxiety when we find an officer within the very precincts of the War Department with such ample knowledge and such confessed skill in the use of his pen as General Adye, acknowledging, in a recently published letter,* that our forces are a disjointed structure of armed men without cohesion, maintained at a vast expenditure and possessed of little real efficiency as an army, or arguing against the hypothesis of an invasion on political quite as much as on military grounds. In such an extremity we own to greater confidence in the ability of the officer than in the arguments of the apologist.

But when, passing from the field of abstract argument, we test the vague assurances, of which we have had so many during the past Session, by the practical evidences of the 'Berkshire Campaign,' as it has been termed, our anxiety grows. То а country which spends upon its army fifteen to sixteen millions per annum it might seem a comparatively easy task to move, and for a few days to manœuvre, some thirty thousand men only, of all arms, thirty miles away from their base of supplies, in a southern county intersected with railways and good roads, covered with a network of villages and substantial farmhouses, and abounding in all the necessities of life during the pleasantest month of a pleasant English autumn-tide. But, trifling in itself as such an enterprise is, it would at least have so far tested the sufficiency of our military arrangements, and if it did not justify the War Minister, it might have convicted of slander and misrepresentation the critics who in both Houses of Parliament had declared that our military administration was unsound. Though the scale of operations was very small, and though all the surrounding conditions were unusually favourable, it was the touchstone of Ministerial assertion and competency. Unhappily for them, though perhaps not so unhappily for the country if it serves to open their eyes to the true state of affairs, the bubble has burst, the 'campaign' has collapsed amidst a multitude of absurd and contradictory excuses, which have not even the semblance of plausibility; and this moderate task has proved to be of too Herculean a character for the collective strength of our War Office and a Cabinet who wield at will the resources of the

* Letter to Blackwood's Magazine.'

British

British Empire. It is a spectacle of open humiliation and a painful admission either of administrative unsoundness or of individual timidity.*

It is, however, impossible not to draw a further moral from such pitiable exhibitions of administrative weakness, though it is one which touches the general question of government, rather than the department responsible for this particular case of mismanagement; and it is this. These failures do not end here. They have an almost contagious tendency to multiply themselves, and, as they spread, they discredit all government, and shake the visible symbols of authority. In such an age as this, when destruction is easy, preservation difficult, and construction almost impossible, each fresh loss of public confidence in the governing powers of the State is a heavy deduction from the cause of Law and Society; but it has been reserved to the present Ministers of the Crown, with greater resources and a larger Parliamentary majority than have been at the command of any Administration since the beginning of the century, to inflict the severest blows on the principles of English Government. Their apologists, it is true, may excuse the shortcomings of the Cabinet by accumulating the blame upon the shoulders of a Chief, who, during the entire Session, has shown a singular infelicity of management in his conduct of the House of Commons; who has driven his followers into the acceptance of doctrines which till now have been uniformly denounced by successive generations of Liberal politicians; and who, when influence and tact failed, knew of no other resource than the enforcement of silence upon his reluctant party. But such excuses can hardly be admitted when, for some inexplicable reason, each department of State is haunted by signal failure. From Pall Mall to Downing Street, from the Admiralty to the Thames Embankment, from the Phoenix Park to Trafalgar Square, from the Black Sea Conferences to the Berkshire Downs, misadventure, of all possible shades and degrees, is written. We seem, under the spell of some political Prospero, to be dragged through mire and mud, and, as in a bad dream, to

*Whilst these pages are passing through the press, the manoeuvres in Hampshire, which have been made the substitute for the Berkshire Campaign, have been brought to a conclusion. Unsatisfactory as was that substitution, and comparatively humble as was the ultimate scale of operations, it is no small gain that some approach has at length been made to the camps of instruction and the autumn manœuvres of Continental armies; for it is thus that an insight into administrative defects is best acquired, and that officers and men learn in time of peace some lessons in the art of campaigning. Nothing in these manoeuvres affects our criticism on military administration, and we heartily welcome a step so emphatically in the right direction. As Chobham led to Aldershot, and Aldershot has led to the Hampshire manœuvres, so it is not an extravagant hope that these, in turn, may hereafter rise to the full proportions of a Berkshire Campaign.

be

be ever ringing the changes upon troops that cannot march, and ships that cannot swim.'

Those who observe with any attention the course of public opinion must be aware how irregular and apparently capricious its action of recent years has been; but, after every allowance has been made for this normal uncertainty, it seems hardly credible that the country should have tamely acquiesced in so serious an amount of military mismanagement but for a general disbelief in the possibility of foreign invasion. Did the great body of Englishmen, whatever their class or their property, seriously conceive it possible that the miseries which have befallen France might be inflicted on this country, they would scarcely manifest such singular, though characteristic, indifference. The little book which stands at the head of this article, which has passed through many reprints, and has been read far and wide with well-merited appreciation, whilst it hit off with a delicacy of touch almost worthy of Defoe the public sense of our military helplessness, failed to stir up men to the practical remedy for our shortcomings.. Yet where such vast interests are at stake, it would be well if Englishmen could bring themselves to consider on what foundation this vague disbelief of any possible invasion rests, and whether it is so far removed from the sphere of practical contingencies as to justify us alone of all European nations in treating it as a speculation unworthy the thought of sober men of business.

We certainly shall not reproduce here the impolitic, and not very generous, arguments with which at one period of the war the discomfiture of the French army was made, even by some Ministerial speakers, a matter of congratulation to England. Nor do we contend that we are in any immediate danger of such a war as would render the attempt at an invasion either probable or possible. We are content to assume that France is for the moment crippled; that America is yearly growing more friendly as the jealousies and misunderstandings of former times fade into the distance of history; that Russia, alone and unaided, could do little; and that Prussia has neither the desire nor the material inducements to bring her into collision with us. though all this may be readily granted, it is very far from exhausting the endless and incalculable chapter of political combinations, and it furnishes no guarantee against the ambitions, the secret intrigues, the anti-social conspiracies which honeycomb the soil of Europe, and which may, from that seething hot-bed of impurity, give sudden birth to new wars and perhaps equally new forms of war. Nor do we undervalue that silent influence which community of race, in ordinary circumstances,

But

exercises