MR. ARNOLD.FORSTER AND THE VOLUNTEER LECTURER.
ITs THZ EDITOR OF THE .SPECT.Orin SIE,—In your "News of the Week" of the 13th inst. you do me, unintentionally I am sure, an injustice. You say that in speaking of a lecturer who recently read a paper on the Swiss Army at the Royal United Service Institution I was without excuse in using the following words, viz. :—" That a British officer should be silly enough in the presence of the Secretary for War to praise and hold up for admiration the organisation of an Army because the people of that country were not cursed with a ' blue-water ' school was a strange departure from propriety—he would not say from sanity." The quota- tion as you give it is calculated to produce the impression in the mind of the reader that the offensive phrase was used by me. As a matter of fact, it was the lecturer who was solely responsible for the words "cursed with a 'blue-water' school." This fact, I venture to submit, should divert your censure from me to the true author of the phrase. If, as you suggest, there was an " insult " anywhere, it is not I who am charge- able with it. I have had the honour of serving with many distinguished naval officers, all of whom were avowed member' of the " blue-water " school, and some of whom are among its principal exponents. That a military officer should have thought it becoming at a meeting over which the Secretary of State presided, in an institution which is at least as much naval as military, and before an audience which included well- known naval officers, to speak of the convictions held by every sailor as being "a curse to the nation," does seem to me both foolish and improper. That it was so regarded, and that it was resented, I know for a fact. It is just this utter failure to comprehend the naval side of our great problem of defence, this want of sympathy with naval ideas, which makes some military criticism so sterile and so unprofitable—I am, Sir,
[It is strange that Mr. Arnold-Forster does not see the difference between a comparatively junior Volunteer officer using an unnecessarily strong expression about an abstract doctrine in a lecture, and an ex-Secretary for War—from whom courtesy, consideration, and restraint of language are to be expected in regard to the officers in the Service over which he once had the honour to preside—speaking of an individual as " silly " and guilty of a departure from "pro. priety " and "sanity."—ED. Spectator.]
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