M. CHILDERS ON THE ARMY.
WE wish we had more speeches of the type which Mr. Childers has just delivered at Pontefract, on his ad- ministration of the Army. There is nothing in it of an excit- ing party character, nothing, except the reference to the constitutional struggle between the War Office and the Horse Guards, and the calm assertion of the right of deciding with which his full responsibility necessarily invests the Minister responsible to Parliament for what is done, that can even be supposed to involve party feeling ; and we see with pleasure that even on that subject the Tory journals endorse Mr. Childers's view with even more emphasis than the Liberal. But, partly as a consequence of this complete absence of party issues, and the generous recognition which the speech contains of Colonel Stanley's reforming proposals, Mr. Childers's address is one of the most instructive which the country could have had ; for Conservatives and Liberals will alike gain from it some conception of the inner working of one of our great Depart- ments,—of the enormous number of subjects in which the exer- cise of a trained judgment in relation to a balance of intricate and difficult considerations is requisite,—and of the lucidity with which Mr. Childers balances these considerations, and the masculine sense with which he separates considerations which are temporary and subordinate, from considerations which are permanent and vital. There were above ninety im- portant administrative questions waiting for decision in the War Department, says Mr. Childers, at the time he took office ; but even in solving these ninety adminis- trative questions, Mr. Childers has made considerable progress ; and it is clear enough that on those points on which, after due and respectful consideration of the military advice sub- mitted to him, Mr. Childers has differed from the Commander- in-Chief, he has not scrupled to overrule the Commander-in- Chief, who is not responsible to Parliament for the British Army, as Mr. Childers is. As this has been so, it is all the more satisfactory to observe Mr. Childers's testimony to the cordial and energetic co-operation which he constantly receives from a Department whose chief he has, from time to time, been compelled to overrule.
Mr. Childers has the satisfaction of showing how great a progress has been made in the organisation of the Army within the last fifteen years —a progress due to the hearty co-operation of statesmen of both parties, to Colonel Stanley's sober and sound judgment, as well as to Lord Cardwell's, and due, no doubt, in the last instance, to his own indefatigable diligence in working out all the hints that his predecessors had given, no less than those which he has himself originated. The result has been, in the first place, that the difficulty of recruiting is completely a thing of the past, that young soldiers now appreciate the career which a soldier's life opens to them of becoming not only non-commissioned officers, whose position has been greatly improved, but Warrant officers, and in some cases of succeeding to a regular commission ; and further, where that is not the career they ultimately desire, of retiring into the Reserve, with qualifications that stand them in good stead in almost every calling of life. We have been able, says Mr. Childers, "to allow a number of men, after less than six years' service,. to volunteer into the Reserve, with a good round sum of de- ferred pay in their pockets, becoming thus, at five-and-twenty years of age, our best recruiting officers in the villages to which they return." Mr. Childers, too, showed trium- phantly that whatever were the causes of the disaster at Majuba Hill,—we should have said the cause was very simple, namely, inordinately rash generalship, in the face of a foe against whom rash generalship was certain to fail,—the cause popularly assigned, the shortcomings of the short-service system, is absolutely out of the question. The average age of the men on Majuba Hill was twenty-seven years, and their average service was seven years. Eleven-twelfths of them had been more than three years in the service, and were above twenty-two years of age. Indeed, one of the battalions had been a few months before in Sir Frederick Roberts's famous march from Cabul to Candahar. To ascribe the disaster of Majuba Hill, therefore, to the short-service system, is the utter recklessness of complete ignorance.
It is clear, too, that in working out Lord Cardwell's plan for connecting regiments more closely with the county and locality in which they are recruited, by giving them a per- manent territorial title, Mr. Childers has successfully deve- loped all the principles of his predecessors :—" Nothing struck me so much, when I visited recently the garrisons and depots in the South of England, and especially inspected the recruits, as the extent to which, during the last few months, they have come from the county from which their regiment draws its title. In illustration of this rising local sentiment, I was much impressed by a speech the other day, made by Colonel Jordan, the Colonel of the Berkshire District, from which what used to be the 49th and 66th Regiments now take the common name of the Berkshire Regiment. It was at a meet- ing ',for a memorial to the men of the 66th who fell at Maiwand, and I will read to you his words :---‘ The regiment lost in the battle of Maiwand fifty-two Berkshire men, some of whom I knew myself. At the time of the battle, there were 227 Berkshire men serving in the regiment. Immediately I heard of the loss, I knew that the regiment would want re- cruits, and that the other battalion,—they were now joined
in one,—would require men to go abroad. Within six weeks, I had 152 recruits come in voluntarily. I was quite sur- prised at the number, because it was a busy time in August and September. At the present time, there are 429 Berk- shire men serving in the 2nd Battalion, and in a very short time the whole of the 2nd Battalion will consist of Berkshire men.'" It would be difficult to illustrate more convincingly the success of the local principle. What we admire in Mr. Childers's speech, at least as much as the lucidity with which he explains the principles on which
difficult administrative questions have been decided, is the spirit in which at the close he speaks of the Army, and asks English- men to think of it "Nothing disgusts me more," he says," than the vulgar prejudice" against the character of the soldier " which still permits his uniform in some public Awes to be considered a reproach and not an honour. I cannot deny that there was once some justification for this, but there is none now ; and I should like to bring home this truth unmistakably to the public mind." And again, " Sir William Napier said of the British people that they most frequently got into trouble because they were warlike, and not military. I want to see the English people in the best sense military, but not warlike. It is one of the happiest results of the Short-service system and of the general spread of volunteering, that they produce in a large number of the Queen's subjects a military rather than a warlike spirit. By a military spirit I mean habits of discipline, respect for lawful command, and, at the same time, independence of char- acter, and that dislike of slovenliness, which, as a rule, marks the man who has served." That expression admirably characterises the feeling with which the Army ought to be regarded in Eng- land, and let us add to it, that the people who are most really military in spirit are least likely to be bellicose,—which is the sense in which Mr. Childers uses the word " warlike." For our own parts, we do not understand " warlike " as expressing the desire for war, but rather the temper which, if a people has it, makes the wars which they carry on serious and dangerous affairs. We should use the word " warlike " neither as a term of praise, nor as a term of blame, but as expressing the sort of qualities which make war formidable. A warlike people are a people who, when they do go to war, are not easily subdued ; but a warlike people might conceivably enough be either on the one hand too fond of war, or on the other too prudent to hazard it even when they ought. The Germans are clearly 'a warlike people, and we can easily imagine them becoming too fond of war, though as yet they have hardly betrayed that weakness. The Swiss are a warlike people, and yet they are certainly much more disposed to shrink from war than to court it. But " bellicoseness" is a term of dispraise, if ever there were one, and any people who are thoroughly military will gradually be cured of bellicoseness. They will appreciate, as none others can, the sufferings and hardships and self-denials of war ; they will know that war cannot safely be risked from any empty love of glory ; they will know that all effective war in-
volves heroism, and that no heroism can be quarrelsome. Still, though we somewhat demur to Mr. Childers's use of the term " warlike" to express the meaning of " bellicose," we heartily sympathise with his meaning, and think it one of the most weighty expressions of opinion with regard to the temper of the English people in relation to the Army, uttered by any statesman on this subject, for many a long day. It is by such statesmen as Mr. Childers that our Army will be
transformed into a formidable instrument of war—if war we must have—and into a still more efficient instrument for pro- moting that spirit of peaceful subordination and self-cl3nial, which, if we are to remain the great nation we have been, in comparison with other nations, we certainly must have.
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