TOPICS OF THE DAY.
TEE NEED OF STERNNESS IN PUBLIC LIFE.
IT is, we confess, with a sense almost of despair that we read the Report of the five Major-Generals upon the Remounts Department. It is so entirely devoid of any trace of the hardness necessary to the effective government of a great Empire. The inner meaning of that Report, though it is concealed with a literary skill which extorts an unwilling admiration, is that the War Office had organised the Department of Remounts for every con- tingency except war; that General Truman, the Inspector- General, though a worthy officer, was when war broke out entirely unequal to the new position ; and yet that the War Office neither removed him nor strengthened his hands by an adequate and practically overruling staff. If ever there was a dereliction of duty which entailed disastrous results, it was committed by the War Minister who did not compel General Truman to resign, and replace him by an officer, or a small Committee of officers, com- petent to manage the Department, and supply the army in South Africa with the mounts without which it could not be, and for months was not, efficient. Yet the Com- mittee of Major-Generals, though they perceive, and in a delicately literary way acknowledge, the inadequacy of the Department's equipment for so grave an emergency, never censure the War Minister who allowed so utterly in- adequate a Department to continue in existence, and quote the fact that after long delays and enormous waste of money horses of a sort were procured in sufficient numbers as if that were sufficient excuse alike for General Truman and for his official and solely responsible superior. The very idea that incompetence under such circum- stances is an injury to the nation seems never to have occurred to them, any morn than the idea that their own duty was not to produce a kindly or gentlemanly Report, but such a Report as would for two genera- tions to come make incompetent men afraid to continue holding in war time situations of vast responsibility. Both Committee and Minister, we shall be told, acted from the very best motives, and in the way they judged most suitable to the circumstances. We believe the excuse with our whole heart; but it is the one made by every bank manager who blunders as to a customer's resources, and is summarily dismissed for incompetence in not stoppinc, "further accommodation." And the public is just as fatuous as the Major-Generals. The Report of course is ridiculed as a mere ladling of whitewash, and things quite needlessly harsh are said of General Truman, who, poor man, did his best most industriously, and as well as he knew how ; but the real offender, the respon- sible Minister who so amiably bore with inefficiency when it was costing millions of money and thousands of lives, is never called upon to justify his conduct or quit his Majesty's service. Nothing happens to him, or will happen till future historians take him in hand, and before that he will be safe even from animadversion in a newspaper, which will, we greatly fear, then be discussing more recent disasters due to the inefficiency of our War Departments.
It is a most painful and disagreeable task to us to write in this way of a high-minded and entirely well-meaning states- man, but the public must learn that it is no use making scapegoats of mere subordinates. The War Minister who tolerated an utterly inefficient Department, one clearly and obviously organised for peace axid not for war, is responsible for the calamity of his neglect, and must be held responsible, and however unpleasant the task, a self-respecting newspaper must do its best to bring home that responsibility to the true offender. We want a War Minister's responsibility for his failure to put his house in order in peace, and before war came, to entail results so painful and so disagreeable that in future men will say : ' I must either refuse the War Office, or else determine that I will when there put matters on a really sound basis, and so avoid the fate of that unfor- tunate Minister who was four years in office before the Boer War came, and yet when it did come had to meet the natural and inevitable demand for horses with the Remount Department such as we see portrayed in the Report of the Royal Commission.' The truth is, a kind of soft lenity has become a con- stituent of the public mind, and produces almost precisely the effect of the old political evil of favouritism. The public makes no favourite, or if it does the favourite is immediately disliked by the dispensers of patronage ; but it fixes its regard on the fate of the individual, and not on the public good. Anything like severity, however necessary to the national service, is treated as an oppression, or at least a brutality. The offender's good qualities are ex- tolled ; the circumstances around him are recounted in the spirit of the five Major-Generals, who seem to think that efficiency and a hut are incompatible, and would have held the Khalif Omar blameworthy for filling his own water-juv; and it is declared that the accused, poor fellow, did weat he could, and any sharpness of condemnation is strongly resented. Unless the offender is charged with peculatimi, for which as yet, happily, there is no mercy, the public are always disposed towards acquittal, because if not acquitted he and his friends will be unhappy. We all saw this happen in the case of Sir Redvers Buller, who had actually advised the commander of twelve thousand British troops to make terms with the enemy, and its happening takes half the nerve out of the responsible Ministers. Every. body blows that there will be no reform of the War Office unless there is pursued a policy of sternness and in- difference to individual claims to indulgence ; but if Mr. Brodrick acted thus he would have to face a debate of three days on his own cruelty and injustice. His duty, of course, is to face that danger as he would any other; but the British Minister as a rule is afraid of the British public,—if a great aristocrat, often abjectly afraid, because he misunderstands. If Lord Lansdowne had removed the heads of the Remount De- partment, he would, we doubt not, have been railed at for weeks for his brutality ; but he would have done his duty to the country and the men who were dying on its behalf, and would, we are sure, have been supported by the majority, as Mr. Brodrick was in the Buller case when at last, much too late, he put his foot down. We say his " duty " because the first duty of a Minister—the real use of him—is to secure efficient agents and weed out of the Services the excellent if they happen to be also the incom- petent. There is no need for the guillotine, nor even'for the savage rebukes with which Frederick the Great broke unsuccessful agents' hearts ; but the men who, as the Major-Generals mildly put it, "do not do full justice to themselves" should be relegated at once, without too much correspondence, to private life. If the public wants to be "kindly," let it allow special pensions ; but it has no moral right whatever to let soldiers suffer or the nation decline in repute in order to make sure that worthy indi- viduals of the "just can't" kind should not be harshly treated.
The only argument worth discussing for this feeble lenity that we have ever heard is that it produces courage in the great servants of the State. If they, it is said, are held too strictly responsible when they make mistakes, they will always shelter themselves by risking little, and so avoiding responsibility. Moreover, the geniality, BA it may be termed, of our public life is one of its attractions to able men, who otherwise would decline to take up posts which can never be properly paid, often involve much ill. appreciated effort, and would, if the public were stern, sometimes involve the risk of unendurable opprobrium. There is a certain force in that argument, but there are many and complete answers to it. One is that the public is very fair-minded, and never pleads for injustice even to a guilty prisoner; another is that the sternness of the successful rulers has never in history made their advisers or their agents inefficient ; and the third is that governing is after all a business, and that the universal experience of successful men is that success in business cannot be secured without a measure of severity. If they leave the inefficient buyers and shopwalkers uncensured and in their posts, the business goes to pieces. The mass of experience on that side men implies, as it also does when applied to a Judge, a as applied by business is so great that the word " strong " ed certain amount of sternness, of indisposition to tolerate what it is for the employer's interest or the general interest should not be tolerated. Universal experience is rarely incorrect, and is certainly not proved to be incorrect by the history of British Departments. Lenity is an excellent habit in the mind, but there are degrees even. the virtues ; and in public life we may practise lenity au; it becomes a feebleness that produces anarchy. This, an pot harshness, is in all public affairs, and. especially in the management of preparations for war, the permanent and most injurious temptation of the British mind. It not only does not send. unsuccessful generals to the guillotine, but it refuses to dismiss irresolute Ministers from the service of the Crown, and will cheer generals who have not succeeded almost as heartily as generals who have. It detests studying dull evidence, and in its lazy good humour forgets that in war ill-success, even for a time, means slaughter without victory and expenditure without reward.
We have written as we have not because it is a pleasant task to speak harshly of generals or of Cabinet Ministers of the high character and attractive personality of Lord Lansdowne, and not because we thin); it, under normal circumstances, the proper business of a newspaper to do the painful work of censuring subordinates who have failed, but simply because, if the rulers of the nation will not show the requisite sternness, it becomes the duty of those who can claim at any rate the ear of the nation to remind them of the need for severity. Though it is not for the newspapers, but for the statesmen, to take the lead in these matters, the Press, when statesmen shirk, has no alternative but to do what it can to enforce their abandoned iuty.
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