BOOKS.
TO-DAY AND TO-MORROW.*
THE position of Lord Esher is, we suspect, rather a puzzle to a good many ordinary people who are accustomed to see high offices reached by a visible and regular scaling of the ladder of Under-Secretaryships and Secretaryships of State. Most of the upward movements of Lord Esher have been withheld from the public eye, and all that is widely known is that at a certain time he appeared like a comet among the planets, and has since been flaming in that system. As the late Duke of Devonshire's private secretary, and as Secretary of the Office of Works, he naturally gave the public no earnest of the prominent part he was to play later in the reconstitu- tion of the War Office. Even when he was a Member of Parliament the rashest prophet would not have marked him down as the man destined to lead a charge which would end in the abolition of the historic office of the Commandership- in-Chief of the British Army. Yet so it has come to pass. Lord Esher began what painters might call his second manner when he became a member of the Commission of Inquiry after the South African War. The note he added to the Report of the Commission suggested almost bodily the principles which were afterwards adopted in the reconstitution of the War Office. No doubt his second manner was latent in his first, for all through his life of publics service he had occupied himself with problems of administration ; but, so far as the average reader of a newspaper was concerned, he burst forth from comparative obscurity when, having recommended that the Army should be ruled by a Board or Council, like the Admiralty, he was appointed to preside over the Committee of three which gave effect to that principle. Next he was made a permanent member of the Defence Committee. Thus by a series of extraordinary circumstances it has come about that no man has impressed his own convictions more clearly on the Army of to-day than Lord Esher. Finally, he was entrusted with the preparation of Queen Victoria's letters for publication. It need not be insisted that he is an important person. Yet less is known about him by the public than about any man who has helped to produce a similar revolution in a great Department of State.
The value of the collected papers which lie before us—they were written in the course of several years—is that they admirably illustrate Lord Esher's character and his methods of thought. We do not invariably accept his conclusions, but we should say at once that there is not a page in this book which does not breathe a fine spirit of devotion to the interests of the nation. It is never dogmatic, and certainly never priggish, but we think that the effect on any young man who read it would be that of the rare sermon which leaves an impression,—it would make him ask himself whether he was doing anything for his country, and cause him a con- siderable humiliation if he had to confess that he was not. Probably Lord Esher desires nothing better for his essays than that they should perform this function, and it may be some satisfaction to him to know that at least one reader believes that they have every prospect of doing so.
Under the title of " To-day and To-morrow " Lord Esher deals chiefly with the relation of democracy and naval supre- macy. Captain Mahan doubted at one time whether a demo- cracy could be fully convinced of the value of sea power when that conviction meant putting one's hand deeper into one's pocket. Lord Esher rightly says that the democracy shows no sign of hesitating. Governments may palter with the question because they want to placate a wing of their party, but the people ardently desire the Navy to retain the command of the seas, and will always respect a Government who prove that they too are of that mind. In " The Dynamic Quality of a Territorial Force " Lord Esher has not, to our thinking, balanced the alternatives of voluntaryism and compulsion very clearly. He was one of the members of the War Commission who agreed with Sir George Goldie that boys of seventeen ought to be given -a compulsory military training of six, eight, or ten months. He says of Mr. Haldane's Army scheme :— " It is surely the lag trial likely to be made of the purely voluntary system---a system, nevertheless, so interwoven with our.
Today and Talnarre, and ather. Essays, By Viscount Esher, G.C.B.,
G.C.V.O. London: John Murray. t7s. 6d. net.] • . •
national ideas and habits, that Oven Its total breakdown would certainly not be followed by `compulsion' in its most effective form. It is a real but not recognised danger, that if Kr. Holdane's plan fails we may get in its place a system of compulsion which from its half-and-half character is bound gravely to affect the number and quality of the personnel of the Navy and Regular Army, and may thus leave us worse off in armed strength than we are now."
We cannot quite follow this. Of course no contradiction of what Lord Esher had said elsewhere is intended; but we wish that he could have avoided these rather nebulous phrases, and pointed out—what is certainly true—that compulsory military training is an absolutely different thing from what is known as conscription; that it would only be compulsory for home defence ; that its yoke would be so easy as to be almost a pleasure (to judge from the Swiss experience) ; and that Englishmen would be as free as they are now to volunteer or not as they pleased for foreign service in case of need. But there would be this vast difference : that if all the manhood of the nation received a military training their services would be worth having in an emergency instead of being like those of the second draft of Yeomanry which volunteered for the South African War. As to the possibility of the adoption of the Swiss Militia principle gravely affecting the personnel of the Regulars, we simply cannot believe that it would. The experience with the Spectator Company has taught us other- wise; after six months' training thirty-three per cent. of the men enlisted in the Army. It is safe to say that they would not have dreamed of doing so but for the pleasant taste they had had of the soldier's life. When the Company was formed only one recruit expressed his desire to enter the Army if he found he liked soldiering.
Other essays deal with the life of the soldier regarded as a serious profession, national strategy, the study of modern history from the military point of view, Queen Victoria's Journals, General Gordon, and so on. We give a final quota- tion from the paper on "The Study of Modern History," originally delivered as a lecture at Aldershot at Sir John
French's request :—
"It is interesting to find that the Duke of Wellington told General Sir James Kennedy that even before he went to India, and throughout his life, he made it a rule to study by himself some hours every day, and, in describing his daily life, said that he rose at six and used to write till nine, when he had breakfast; that his business hours then lasted till three, when he would ride' till six, return to dinner, and write again from nine till midnight. What I wish to draw attention to, is that the Duke does not use the word read,' but he states that he wrote,' during these hours of private study. And that is the first point which any soldier, desirous of studying modern history, should bear in mind, that a few written pages, of analysis or reflection, upon one chapter of a book, are worth more than reading volumes in what I have called the ordinary way. Perhaps the beet example of the most profitable method of reading history can be gathered from 'Napoleon's Précis of the Wars of Turenne and Frederick the Great.' He was in the habit of marking paragraphs and some- times whole chapters in a volume, after which ho would comment on them most carefully, illustrating his comments by references to past examples, which he had obviously carefully looked up, or to future possibilities, upon which he had evidently long reflected."
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