The Report of the Royal Commission on the War was
issued on Tuesday, and is a most formidable indictment
of our whole system of national defence on the military side. The first part of the Report deals with the military preparations for the war, and while exonerating the Intelli- gence Department, establishes the fact that though the possibilities of a collision with the Transvaal were clearly foreseen, no extra expenditure was authorised till the very eve of the war. The Commission indicates that the responsi- bility for this procrastination must be shared between the Government, who were actuated by political reasons in limiting the reinforcement of the South African garrison, and their military advisers—excepting the Intelligence Depart- ment—whose specific recommendations were inadequate. But no impartial outsider is likely to gainsay the opinion of Lord Esher conveyed in his Note appended to the Report that for our perilous unpreparedness in 1899 the Secretary of State for War was responsible, either through neglect or ignorance of the facts. We had been forewarned—by the Intelligence Department, by Mr. Chamberlain in 1897 and 1898, but not, strangely enough, in 1899, and to some degree by Lord Wolseley and General Butler—but we were not fore- armed, and Lord Lansdowne, in acquiescing in and support- ing the deliberate postponement of the needful preparations, must be regarded as primarily responsible for a situation which, but for "an extraordinary combination of fortunate circum- stances," might have cost us the Empire. We were reluctantly driven to express this view in these columns in January, 1900, and it is largely endorsed by the findings of the War Commission.
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