22 JULY 1905, Page 3

It should be noted that no Return is made for

some twenty batteries and engineer companies, and also that fifteen battalions of infantry are not included. If infor- mation had been obtained from them, we do not doubt that it would have been shown that at least seventy- five thousand men volunteered, and that thirty thousand actually served. Yet Mr. Arnold-Forster only this spring, in his zeal to belittle the Volunteers, and to prove £hat they cannot be depended on as a reservoir from which to draw men for oversea service, declared that they bad given only "a meagre response" to the appeal made to them during the war. He even went so far as to assert that those who, because they could not go out in the service com- panies, went out in the Imperial Yeomanry, did so for the sake of getting 5s. a day.—As a matter of fact, the first body of Imperial Yeomanry, in which so many Volunteers served, did not get 5s. a day, but only the pay of the Regular soldier.— It is characteristic of the War Office that the Return, the results of which we have given, should have been compiled, not by the military authorities, but after great trouble and labour by voluntary effort.