(TO THE EDITOR OP THE "SPECTATOR."]
SIa,—Your appreciative notice of the reprints from the East Anglian Daily News of the letters on the Victoria League and rifle-shooting in the Spectator of May 19this very grateful to me. But much more important is the attention and support given by the Spectator to this pressing question of national defence. I would desire to guard against it being supposed that the Swiss system of rifle clubs can be accepted en bloc, and applied to meet our present requirements. Excellent as it is, the Swiss system is, as you have remarked, a part of the military system; and it rests on conditions which do not exist, and are practically impossible, in the United Kingdom. For all that, much can be learnt by us from the Swiss, and it would be well if our peoples could be interested in rifle-shooting, and could be induced to accord to it even a portion of the countenance and support which a Swiss rifle club never fails to secure from all classes in the neighbourhood. The subject is too long for your corre- spondence columns, but it will be found noticed in some detail in a paper on Swiss rifle clubs contributed by me to the Nineteenth Century for June. If any of your readers should care to have copies of the reprints noticed above, the set of five will be supplied by the East Anglian Daily News, Ipswich, for 6d., including postage, and all sums so received will be made over to the Town Clerk for the Suffolk War Fund.—I
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