OFFICERS AND JOURNALISTS.
THEbetter Officers of the Army, the men who besides being officers are educated gentlemen competent to write pamphlets or be Members of Parliament, have a curious grievance of their own. They say they never can get a hearing from the public. For some reason, to them unknown, the British journalist, they say, dislikes them, or rather has a prejudice against the caste to which, for reason i known only to himself, he conceives them to belong. An officer's appeal is always answered with sneers, an officer's argument with ridicule, an officer's statement with a kind of affectedly courteous disbelief more galling than flat denial. The literary class, they say, sets up an ideal of its own, the model officer, a being whose occupation is dress and his amusement seduction, who knows nothing of his trade except how to risk his life, and considers his men persons to be kept in their places by punishment, abuse, and social pressure. All officers are treated as if they came out of a mould, and that mould a bad one, as if, unlike the members of any other profession, they were all alike, and all men upon whom argument and thought and fact were alike wasted. No journalist, it is said, for example, will recognize that an officer may understand the political condition of his own country, may sympathize with it, may admire it, and see in it an instrument of victory even in the field. The possible existence of a truly liberal Colonel is implicitly denied. He is treated as one of a separate caste, as a man who must, if he let himself loose, be at once an absolutist and a fool, or, to put it in the mildest way, "anaan with ideas radically different from those of most of his countrymen. So deeply is this injustice felt, that military men of ability, unlike naval officers of ability, think it wiser not to touch pen and ink at all, to sit down as quietly as they can under unmerited censure, and rest content that, as they are indispensable, their merits will in time of action be acknowledged. They are not a caste, but as the public will not acknowledge that, they had better fall back upon the service, and so gradually become one.
Much of this complaint is undeniably just. Nothing can be more ridiculous or more injurious to the Army, than the determined way in which the Radical journalists for years persisted in ignoring the differences which exist among officers, in considering the opinions of each one as representing those of his caste, or coloured by those of his caste, till they were indistinguishable. Officers of the Army differ among themselves nearly or quite as much as the members of any other profession, differ in politics, in social views, in their judgments on professional etiquette, necessities, and disci- pline. There are as many men of high cultivation among them as there are at the Bar, as many Liberals, as many utterly independent or even crotchety judgments. The strongest Red we ever knew was an officer of high rank, the wildest dreamer a Major of twenty years' service, the most active, devoted, and money-giving philanthropist a General who has lived his life in camps. So far from being absolutists, officers of experience are apt to have a perfect horror of coercion and bloodshed, to have the feeling which the Duke himself expressed so strongly, that nothing, not even a great principle involving men's souls, could be worth a week of civil war. So far from delighting in war, except as all men must delight in the exercise of their special function, they are notoriously more peaceful than civilians, better aware of the horrors war involves, less inclined to expose quiet districts to miseries which they alone can rightly estimate. So far from being all uncultivated, the better kind of officer, and he is very common, is usually among the most accomplished of his class, understands many countries, is familiar with many literatures, has more than a tincture of science, knows his- tory with an accuracy few literary men rival, and has a singularly varied acquaintance with life and manners. A British officer of twenty years' standing has often lived in half-a-dozen countries and studied them all, knows their languages, is familiar with their different grades, has an ex- ceptionally minute knowledge of geography, and frequently adds, in the Artillery and Engineers almost always adds, an intimate acquaintance with two sciences. To group officers altogether as journalists did once, far more than they do now, is simply absurd, but it is not altogether journalists' fault. The profession as a profession, and apart from individual character, has some most annoying and apparently incurable faults, faults which of all others strike the literary class. Military men are of all professions in one respect the most narrowly professional. They never will believe that a civilian can know anything about an army. Three-fifths at least of the greater military questions are political rather than profes- sional, but they will summarily declare the ablest politician a fool if he does not know some unimportant or trivial detail. The question of flogging, for instance, is not a pro- fessional one in any but the most unimportant degree, yet if a civilian who happens to be intimately acquainted with village opinion says flogging stops recruiting, he is summarily snubbed, because some serjeant-major, probably a sharp Londoner, or some old officer, possibly a goose, happens to think otherwise. The civilian may be a man who has lived among armies all his life, who has been for twenty years the recognized exponent of every grievance and plan for reform in a great army, may have a knowledge of the organization of many armies which is almost scientific, but if he speaks by accident of a "troop" of infantry military men set him down as an ignoramus. He may be a thorough mountaineer or deer- stalker, but he must not have an opinion on the "pack." He may be an administrator by instinct and training, but he must not form a judgment on transport, or commissariat, or the most efficient form for the regimental hierarchy. He might as well write of the Navy without knowing the name of an important rope. Every baby midshipman would snigger, though the blunderer might be a man who, like Colbert, had organized navies without ever living on board a ship. The second mis- take is the one to which we recently alluded, the permanent belief of all officers that all civilians either want to cripple the Army, or are insensible to the necessity of strict discipline, —discipline to be supported, if needful, even by bloodshed. This idea seems absolutely irremovable, incurable even by the patent facts that every discipline now existing has been created, is now sanctioned, and has always been supported by civilians ; that the British Army, with its rigorous caste rigime, and, as we think, brutal scheme of punishment, and antiquated system of promotion, is maintained absolutely and entirely by civilian votes, renewed from year to year. And then mili- tary officers, of all men, use in public discussion the most vio- lent and truculent language. It is so in the House, in the Press, in correspondence. A notion that they are writ- ing for and to enemies seems to pervade them, as it pervades certain sections of the clergy, till they try to obtain a fair hearing by that vehemence of expression which is perhaps the one literary idiosyncrasy to which the literary class is unjust. Nothing can make a regularly experienced journalist believe that a man who expreues himself violently has a good case, that unrestrained writing is a mark of anything except ignorance and temper. The clergy lose half their influence in the Press by not attending to that rule, by saying indefinitely more than they mean, and so do officers of the Army. We published the other day an ex- tremely sensible and well written letter from an officer on the Liberal view of Army discipline. The cultivated gentleman in uniform who wrote it was probably as cool as the journalists he commented on, yet half the sound argument of his letter is spoilt by a professional air of irritation. He probably would not deny for one instant the right of writers in the Star to hold any view of discipline they pleased, but he could not expose their fallacies without an air of wanting to damn them heartily as slovenly soldiers. The discipline of an army is no more a sacred question than the claim of a priesthood, or the organization of a factory, or the best method of securing swift justice between landlord and tenant. It is a political question, to be argued out with due deference for the special knowledge of those who have worked the system, but without any defer- ence for their abstract theories, which may or may not be wiser than the journalists'.
And finally, all journalists have one grievance against British officers, which is radital, and which does, no doubt, make them often apparently unfair. It is the one to which our cones- pondent, "A Liberal Officer," alludes, and which he un- consciously justifies. The great majority of officers will have it that Liberal journalists take the part of the men against the officers. Why they should think so is almost unintelligible, the direct interest of every journal being exactly the other way. We may have, for aught we know, hundreds or thousands of subscribers among officers, we certainly have not, and never could have had, fifty among men. Yet even "A Liberal Officer" in his heart clearly accuses us of unfair bias, and mis- represents us accordingly. For an officer to consort with private soldiers is by law a military offence, and one, we may add, very frequently punished out of England, and we com- plained of the law as forbidding the entrance of good men into the ranks. He replies that he plays cricket and gets up theatricals with his company. Very likely and very proper, but dare he, under the existing law, play billiards with, them in the Strand ? He knows perfectly well he dares not, and pleads difference of grade as the apology. We admit it to the full. The officer who, as the system now exists, played billiards habitually with his men would, unless a man of singular crotchets, probably be no officer, and certainly no gentleman. He would be a man at best with an exceptional liking for low company. But then a liking for low company is in no other profession punishable by law, and while such a law exists there can be no free promotion from the ranks, which was all we said. John Smith, serjeant and plebeian to-day, is not an aristocrat to-morrow because he has received a commis- sion. Our whole argument was in favour of a system which would attract men into the ranks so good that they could become officers without social difficulty, and be associated with by officers without social stigma. Conscription would produce that state of things at once, and how long would that law survive a conscription ? We want a state of affairs in which one brother can be an officer and another a private, and neither care any more than if one were a Colonel and the other an Ensign, and we are accused of misrepresenting the officers. The truth is, journalists are compelled to state the case of the men a little too strongly, because they are treated so much as a separate caste. They are "the. Army" for political purposes, they are the people who win or lose battles ; but when an officer says "the Army will like or dislike that," he means the officers alone. We recognize to the full the kindliness which one class, at all events, of officers habitually display to their men, just as we recognize to the full the kindliness with which squires habitually treat labourers, but we want for private soldiers, as for labourers, something more, —free careers, social respect, the possibility of being officers themselves. In pleading that cause, it is likely enough we may seem to officers to be hostile to them, but the impression is created only by deficiencies of expression. What we want, and as we believe the whole journalist class want too, is to raise the men, not to lower the officers ; to make it honourable to be a " soldier " as well as to be an officer ; to realize in a degree Sir Charles Napier's splendid paradox, "every soldier is of necessity a gentleman." With the present system, which actually legalizes as well as admits social ine- qualities, till our correspondent could, as we said, be cashiered fnr habitually dining with his brother, if his brother were a private, no such change is possible, and it is for this, among other reasons, that the system will sooner or later, and, as we imagine, probably very soon, break down. We no more want every private to be his officer's equal than we want every artizan to be his master's equal, or every labourer to be the equal of the squire. There is no equality, and never will be, in society or service, any more than in nature, and if there were, it would be mischievous. All we ask, or the wildest Liberal asks, is that there should be no legal barrier, that everybody should be absolutely free to raise himself to equality if it is in him, that in this particular case' it should not be made by law a dishonourable thing to be a soldier, and for that we are accused of calumniating, by habitual depreciation of tone, the whole military class
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