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 wea pons, 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

* Letter to 'Blackwood's Magazine.'

the 'Berkshire Campaign,' as it has been termed, our anxiety grows. To a 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 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 respon

* 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 manoeuvres of Continental armies; for it is thus that an insight into adminand men learn in time of peace some lessons in istrative defects is best acquired, and that officers 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 manoeuvres, so it is not an extravagant hope that these, in turn, may hereafter rise to the full proportions of a Berkshire Campaign.

sible for this particular case of mism.anagement; 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 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 wellmerited 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. But 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, exercises upon the relationship of nations. A friendly intercourse between Germany and England seems as natural as it is desirable; but history is read backwards, if consanguinity is accepted as a guarantee of good-will. Family quarrels are often the bitterest and the least reasonable; the world is still very far from the millennial serenity which the apostles of Free-trade and International Exhibitions once prophesied; and the cynical maxim that men should treat their present friends as their eventual enemies, and their enemies of to-day as their friends of to-morrow, is as true now as when it was written by the Greek philosopher more than two thousand years ago. Prussia at least acts on this principle. She has never allowed sentiment or present ease

.

for a definite end, and gigantic means concentrated in a single hand and directed by the highest intelligence, are absolutely neutralised by a few miles of sea and the happy accident that may give us a superior fleet of iron-clads at the critical juncture and on the precise theatre of action. To say this, is to forget what we and others have done in former times, our own disembarcation under fire in Egypt, and our equally fortunate landing in the Crimea; to ignore the passage of the Danube before Wagram, and the vast, and, but for the unexpected return of the English fleet from the West Indies, the perhaps successful preparations for the invasion of England from Boulogne; in fact, to shut out from consideration every triumph of military genius over physical obstacles from the days of Hannibal to those of Napoleon. It is, of course, easy to represent this as the doctrine of alarmists, but, the men of largest experience and highest professional knowledge at home have deliberately recorded their anxiety on the subject, and the ablest officers abroad have studied it as a curious problem in strategy. The Duke of Wellington, who, being long dead, yet from his unrivalled authority speaks even now in his famous letter of 1847 to his countrymen-Sir J. Burgoyne, who was the last survivor of a remarkable generation, and whose recent death we all deplore Lord Palmerston, whose long official life as divided between considerations of military and foreign policy, and who in and out of season repeated that the Channel was now bridged by steam,' and that England was not safe from a sudden and secretly organised attack-are at least a proof that such anxiety is not fanciful. Nor has anything occurred to invalidate their opinion, or materially to alter the conditions under which it was formed. Our ablest officers of the present day are not less alive to the risk; and the highest authority to which appeal can be made, because speaking with a full and professional knowledge of the subject-the Defence Commission of 1859-did not hesitate to say that, in their opinion, neither fleet, nor standing army, nor volunteers, nor even the three combined, could be relied on as sufficient in themselves for the security of the kingdom against foreign invasion.' Instamus tamen immemores;' we shut our ears to the Cassandra warnings of statesmen, of soldiers, of scientific men; we consign their reports to the waste-paper basket, or to the equally useful pigeon-holes of the War Office, and we refuse even to recognise so pregnant a fact as the concentration last year, in the northern ports of France alone, of a flotilla capable of transporting 40,000 men and 12,000 horses, before the declaration of war,

6

and in complete ignorance on the part of our own Government that such preparations had been made. What we therefore think chimerical does not so represent itself to the minds of the highly-trained and practical soldiers of other nations; and the following extract from a letter of the Times' correspondent with the German Army of the Loire is well worthy of consideration. Its value, of course, is not so much as indicating the quarter from which aggression may come, as the light in which this question is viewed by others, and the scientific feasibility of an attack, in their opinion:

'Here as at Versailles a rather favourite topic of conversation is the invasion of England, with its probabilities of success and its means of accomplishment. . . . It is considered that an army once across could live uncommonly needed, it is true, but there is no fortified place well by requisitions. Ammunition would be to stop the direct march upon London-exactly four days. How many field-guns could be brought to bear upon them? Prince Frederick Charles had more than 400 during the battle of Orleans. How many breech-loading rifles are there to put into the hands of the Militia and Volunteers? All these questions are being put and answered by officers in the German armies; for man has much of the tiger in him, and grows savage at the taste of blood.'-28th December, 1870.

But if ever we bring ourselves to contemplate the possibility, however remote, of an invasion, we flatter ourselves, with curious perversity, into the notion that we should meet the contingency under ordinary, and not wholly unfavourable, conditions; that our main resources by sea and land would be available, and that, at the several points of weakness along our extended line of empire, we should have no other serious strug gles to anticipate. But the exact reverse of this sanguine forecast would probably be nearer the truth; for, even if an unfavourable combination of external circumstances were not made the occasion of attack, serious danger to England would easily quicken into flame the disaffection of Ireland, and the latent, but always active, fanaticism of our Mahomedan subjects. To say nothing of the large and continuous supplies which would immediately become indispensable for Ireland and India, and of the equally heavy reinforcements in ships, stores, and men to our North American, West Indian, Australian, and China stations, the under-manned and inadequately provided fortresses of Halifax, Bermuda, Gibraltar, Malta-the bases of our maritime and military operations-would alone severely tax our resources as at present constituted. Meanwhile, it must not be