On Friday, March 22 ad, Lord Brassey raised in the
House of Lords the question of the manning of the Navy,—the most important of all -the problems connected with national defence. His proposals are briefly these :—To raise the Naval Reserve to 50,000 men,-20,000 in the first-class, 20,000 in the second, and 10,000 firemen ; the first class men to be entered as boys, passing after five years in the Navy into the Reserve ; the second-class to be recruited as at present, but to serve one or two years in the Navy; all seamen in the Reserve to go through an annual course of drill, as at present. If war arose, and we had to man all our ships, we should want, said Lord Brassey, 100,000 men. To meet this demand, we should have from the regular service and the Reserve about 106,000 men,—a very sanguine estimate, in our opinion. This was quite too small a margin to meet the rapid wastage of war. Un- questionably. It would take less than six weeks of actual war to use up the odd six thousand. The mere invaliding would very nearly do it.
Previous page
