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 Čampaign,' 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

*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 manœuvres 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 manœuvres 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. 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

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 to disturb the calculations of her wellconsidered policy. Even the measurements of our ships, the armaments of our fortifications, the resources of our southern and eastern counties, are, doubtless, recorded with mathematical precision in the Berlin archives, readily available, should ever an emergency arise. It may-we trust it will-never be necessary; but they are wise in their generation, wiser far than we who, surrounded with everything that can tempt the ambition or greed of others, trade on the accidents of our good fortune and depend upon the forbearance of our rivals. Happier also, may be added, where the consciousness on the part of a nation that they are ready and able to hold their own against all comers begets a manhood and an elevation of feeling undreamt of in the philosophy of the mere political economist, and braces up the lax morality of a too self-indulgent generation.

it

But it is said, so long as our iron-clad fleet exists, and the silver streak' of sea separates us from the Continent, we need not disquiet ourselves with troublesome speculations, and still more troublesome preparations of defence. This is the poetry, not the severe practice of life. It is the flattering unction which weak men lay to their consciences when they seek for an excuse from some irksome duty. Are even our latest naval experiences such as to give us unlimited confidence in the construction of our ships and the organisation of our Admiralty? Do the misadventures of the 'Captain,' the 'Megara,' and the Agincourt' suggest no misgiving to the easy-going mind of the ordinary Englishman? modern science so slow and barren in its development, that we can conceive of no new projectile above or below water, no new application of chemical powers which may once again revolutionise the conditions of naval warfare, and at least neutralise the superiority to which we pretend? When we remember the surprises of which modern hostilities are made up; that the war of Secession in America was fought out with muzzle-loaders;

6

that

that the Southern cruisers had often no better armour than a few chains or plates hung round the ship; that the Danish war first witnessed the use of the needle-gun; that the Italian campaign first proved the superiority of the rifled field-artillery; and that the first ship sunk in 1859 was an Italian iron-clad, which foundered under the attack of an Austrian frigate of the old wooden type, we must acknowledge that the rapidity in the changes of the art of destruction is, at least, as remarkable as their magnitude. Once, however, assume that we are liable to any such surprise in our naval or military preparations, and there is room for anxiety in a matter where nothing should be left to chance.

But such unwelcome questionings on a vital matter of national existence are generally silenced-and that too by a people who are prudent in the ordinary transactions of business-either by the vague superstition, which has outlived many more valuable idiosyncrasies, that England will surmount any difficulties in which she may be involved, or by the still more mischievous conviction that, for some unknown reason, an invasion of English soil is impossible. We are not of those who think poorly of English capacity or courage. Though the race has undergone many changes, much yet remains of the old mastiff temper which, through the frequent struggles of mediæval warfare made the somewhat rugged islanders respected on numberless European battle-fields; and there is no finer page in English history than that which records the stern, unwavering spirit in which our countrymen in India faced an insurrection so sudden and ferocious as to have no parallel since the days of Mithridates. But no natural courage can be the equivalent of superior arms, or can compensate for a deficiency in all the scientific and professional appliances by the aid of which modern wars are decided. No national superstitions or traditions can guarantee an army, which, from the very hypothesis, must fight on the defensive with imperfectly trained troops and under the dispiriting influences of inferior numbers and equipments, from the liability to panic and failure. As the Prussians at Jena, the Austrians in the short campaign of 1866, the French in 1870, illustrated this undeniable proposition; so, if national pride allowed us, we might not only remember that there was a period in our annals when, though victorious by sea, we were not equally fortunate by land, but we might even recall scenes in the Crimea when English soldiers showed no immunity from the influences of a disastrous panic. There are, indeed, some who are accustomed to assume the existence of right and the protection of Providence in our public quarrels; but the practice is not confined to Englishmen, and the irreverent dictum

of