Mr. Brodrick drew attention to the number of wars in
China, in South Africa, in Ashanti, and in Somaliland which we have been fighting all at once, and said "there surely never was an Army which had to fight so much and talked so little about it as the British Army." Mr. Chamberlain, who made the speech of the evening, fully acknowledged that also, but was inclined to draw from it the deduction that we must rely upon dark auxiliaries, it might be in tens of thousands. If we attempted to be ready every- where we should make the British Empire impossible. What made that wonderful structure possible was prestige. That is, we fear, a dangerous doctrine, for prestige, unless based upon solid force, is apt to prove a bubble that can burst. Was our prestige ever greater than in 1857 ? but the Sepoys knew that the white garrison of India had sunk to twenty thousand men, and they endeavoured to slaughter them out. There is another way to make the Empire possible, and that is to keep its expansion within such reasonable limits that when the hour of supreme trial comes the islanders can do their own work,— not only without the aid of their dark battalions, but against
them. There can be-no permanent provision against a mutiny of auxiliaries except the power of crushing it.
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