27 MARCH 1886, Page 10

THE CLAIMS OF THE VOLUNTEERS.

THE debate on the Volunteer Capitation Grant took an unfortunate turn on Monday. Mr. Howard Vincent did not manage matters cleverly. Indeed, had the object of the motion been what Mr. Gladstone supposed it to be, the castiga- tion it received from him would have been thoroughly de- served. The business of the country could not be carried on

if the consideration what money shall be spent, were divorced from the consideration how the money wanted shall be raised.

It is hard enough for the Chancellor of the Exchequer to have to honour the bills drawn on him by his colleagues at the head of the Spending Departments, but his position would

be intolerable if he had also to honour bills drawn on him by the House of Commons. There is no need, there- fore, to discuss the Constitutional question raised by Mr. Gladstone. If Mr. Howard Vincent had wished to force the hand of the Government, and saddle the Secretary of State for War with an item he had not intended to include in his Estimates for the year, he would have been lending him- self to a manoeuvre which Prime Ministers of all parties are equally bound to resist. The framing of the Estimates is the business of the Executive ; all that the House of Commons can do is to suggest to the Executive that such and such objects have a claim upon its consideration as and when cir- cumstances permit.

When we turn, however, to Mr. Campbell-Bannerman's speech, we find that there is another and more innocent inter- pretation of which Mr. Vincent's motion was susceptible. Though it was badly expressed and too peremptory in tone, it did not necessarily imply more than a desire to " call the attention of the House to the condition of the Volunteer Force," in the hope of getting an assurance from the Govern- ment that they would do something for its improvement. Viewed in this light, the motion becomes constitutionally harmless, and even the Secretary of State may feel that Mr. Vincent has " done very good service " in bringing it forward. We do not think that any one can read Mr. Vincent's speech without coming to the same conclusion as Mr. Campbell- Bannerman. If the Volunteer Force is worth keeping alive, some change must be effected in its financial position. Happily, this necessity has not arisen—at any rate, has not become imperative—until all doubts as to the value of the force have been set at rest. There was a time when this was not so, a time when, in the opinion of military experts, the Volun- teers were worth little or nothing. This low estimate of what they could do naturally reacted on the men them-. selves. Many of them treated Volunteering as merely a means of getting exercise, or as an excuse for an extra half-holiday. The Easter-Monday Reviews, for example, were regarded as an occasion for bringing together a crowd of men imperfectly trained and badly equipped, putting them through some meaningless manoeuvres, and then sending them back to London quite undisciplined and only half sober. When we compare this state of things with the Easter operations of to-day, with the days spent in camp, the carefully arranged route marches, the universal submission to discipline, and the general endurance of hardship, the contrast is startling. The fear originally felt or professed by the authorities, that if any further demands were made on the force it would dwindle away, turned out to be quite baseless. The more the War Office demanded, the more it got ; and the most popular thing the Secretary of State could do was to raise the standard of efficiency. One glaring fault after another has been quietly corrected. Better drill has been succeeded by better marksmanship, and the two have gone hand in hand with greater obedience to officers and increased attention to all the numberless details of a soldier's life. This change in the character of the force has naturally been accompanied by a corresponding change in the opinion which military men have of it. The Volunteers, according to Sir Edward Hamlev, now constitute two-thirds of the total force available for the defence

of the Kingdom, and they only want a little more encourage- ment to " become capable of meeting an equal force of Conti- nental troops, if such should be landed on our coasts." It is plain, therefore, that such a force as this deserves all the support and encouragement that the Government can give it. Rightly looked at, money laid out on it is not money spent, but money saved. For home service the Volunteers take the place of Regular troops,—not, of course, of an equal number of Regular troops, but of a number cal- culated according to the relative military value of the two forces. Let us say that the 218,000 Volunteers who were last year returned as efficient are equal for defensive purposes to 50,000 Regular troops, the difference between the cost of four Volunteers and the cost of one Regular soldier is so much left in the Exchequer. The present cost of four Volunteers is twelve guineas annually, 63s. apiece. What the present cost of one Regular soldier is, we recommend any one who is disposed to quarrel with the Volunteer figures to go and find out for himself. He will have changed his tone by the time he comes back.

Yet, according to those best qualified to judge, this useful and economical force is in danger, if not of extinction, at least of being very seriously crippled. The men are willing and eager to give their time, but, with rare exceptions, that is all they have to give. The Government recognises that it must find the money required to make the force efficient by granting to each corps an allowance of 30s. a year for each man who satisfies the War Office conditions, of £1 a year for each officer and non-commissioned officer who satisfies certain further con- ditions, and of 10s. a year for each officer—only 727 in all— who passes an examination in tactics. Out of these grants, taken together, the corps has to provide uniform and equipment for the men, to hire head-quarters and offices, to rent drill-places and shooting-ranges, to pay journeying expenses and the cost of bands and printing orders. Mr. Vincent takes at random 100 regiments, representing about 50,000 men, and reckons that their total obligatory expenditure last year exceeded the Government allowances by £32,000. In the early days of the force, subscriptions were much more common than they are now. Volunteering was then felt to be an experiment, and it was not fair to ask the State to bear the cost of it until it had been seen how it would turn out. Now that it has ceased to be an experiment, subscriptions have naturally and properly fallen off. A force so useful to the State, and one that costs the State so little, ought to have what little it does cost paid by the public, and not by individuals. As a matter of fact, however, the public do not pay it ; consequently, the alternative presented to each corps is either to die of inanition or to have necessaries found for it by its officers. Hitherto, this latter course has been the one taken, and but for the agricultural depression, it might have been taken for some time longer. But the sons of the country gentry, who hold the larger num- ber of Volunteer commissions in rural districts, have no longer any spare cash. If the demands they have met until now are to be made on them in the future, they will have no choice but to retire from the force, leaving to their command- ing officer the almost hopeless task of filling their places. Even if there had been no agricultural depression, and no lack of men willing to bear their share in the expenses in return for the pleasure of being an officer, the system would be a bad one, for the simple reason that it excludes two classes of men to whom a Volunteer commission ought certainly to be open. One is, men without private means who, by their conduct as non-commissioned officers, have shown themselves thoroughly worthy of promotion. The other is, officers forced to leave the Army and naturally anxious to take up the kindred labour of training Volunteers. It is most important, in order to tempt these two classes of men into becoming Volunteer officers, that every expense that is not really necessary should be dis- couraged, and that those that are necessary should be defrayed by the State. We gather from Mr. Campbell-Bannerman's speech that he, too, is of this opinion. It is quite reasonable that he should call for full returns of expenditure from every corps ; but when these have been arranged under the two heads of necessary and optional, no time ought to be lost in relieving the corps of the first.