THE MAGAZINES.

KNOWLES does good service by reprinting in the Nineteenth Century the article, "The `Confusion Worse Confounded' at the War Office," originally contributed by the late General Sir George Chesney to that review in August, 1891. To this Mr. Spenser Wilkinson has contributed an introduction formulating a scheme for the reconstruction of the War Office in accordance with the views of the late author of The Battle of Dorking. The great vices of our system, in the view of Sir George Chesney, were its over-centralisation and the diffusion of responsibility. He contended above all for a clear and distinct separation between the functions of command and supply, and for a reform of official procedure in the War Office by which the chain of authority should be clearly established and responsibility properly apportioned among all concerned. Then, when things go right or wrong, in every case of success or mistake, there will stand on record the fact by whose advice and by whose authority the thing has been done or left undone." Mr. Wilkinson, who cannot be accused of optimism, admits that very little change is required in the British system in order fully to meet the rational and necessary requirements for any modern army. But he makes it clear that much must depend on the personal equation and mutual relations of the heads of the command and the supply depart- ments. There must be unity of conception, which can only result from professional training and professional life, and that ex hypothesi has of late been conducted and developed on altogether wrong lines. We cannot go into the details of Mr. Wilkinson's very interesting scheme, but may quote a few of his more noteworthy axioms and observations If the British Army is to produce the kind of professional opinion which will guarantee reasonable harmony in the management of its different departments, there must be a reorganisation of military education upon a scientific basis, and the officer who expects to rise in his calling must be required to work as hard as the successful lawyer or the successful doctor." "The igno-auce prevalent among the officers of the British Army of the modern literature of their profession is without parallel in any first-rate Army and in any other temporal profession." Here, again, is a notable remark on conscription :—" The national recognition of the duty of every citizen to subject himself to a soldier's training would create such a universal interest in military administration as would be in itself a guarantee against administrative negligence. A House of Commons of which every Member, and a constituency of which every voter, had passed through the ranks would not accept a perfunctory discussion of the problems of national defence." Mr. Wilkinson might have added that conscription would deal the death-blow to Jingoism. We may note that his only two alternatives as regards the supreme direction of the War Office are (1) the responsible military adviser who stands or falls by the advice he gives, the inevitable sequel to a difference of opinion between the Cabinet and its naval or its military adviser being the resignation of the latter ; and (2) the inclusion of the Commander-in-Chief in the Cabinet. The latter alternative has, in Mr. Wilkinson's opinion, one inestimable advantage. "None but a strategist can fully appreciate the importance of time in the special preparations which must immediately precede a war. Yet none but a Cabinet Minister can have so intimate an acquaintance with the foreign policy of the Government as to be able to say at a given moment, 'Now or never your pre- parations must begin.' At least half the secret of success in war consists in being ready first."—Sir Herbert Maxwell, himself an old Militia officer, pleads vigorously and sensibly for a more generous recognition of the needs and claims of that force. In particular be calls for a removal of the injustice involved in the present system which, when mobilisation is ordered, provides that the pick of the Militia pass into the Line battalions for general service without their officers. As he argues, the whole case for the present system has been " given away" by the War Office in recently accepting several Militia battalions for active service under their own officers. He also gives some striking illustrations of the public spirit and personal sacrifice of the Militia, and advocates a change of title from " Militia " to "Reserve Battalions," as well as the enforcement of a higher standard of professional proficiency amongst the officers.—A third military article, by Oplonel Lonsdale Hale, subjects our

present system of peace training for war to a good deal of damaging criticism.—From Sir Wemyss Reid's diary of the month we quote the following a propos of the " Hawksley dossier" :— "If these are all the 'revelations' to be given to us, it must be confessed that they do not amount to very much. Everybody knew, for example, that Mr. Fairfield, the head of the South African department at the Colonial Office, was on friendly terms with Mr. Hawksley. He was on equally friendly terms with Mr. Kruger, and would have written to that eminent man in precisely the same strain of playful sarcasm as that in which he addressed Mr. Hawksley. Everybody besides knew that Mr. Hawksley was of opinion that if all the facts were made known about the Raid, Mr. Chamberlain would not like the revelation. Yet there is little or nothing in the documents published that carries us beyond these two points. The documents themselves are of so miscellaneous a character that it almost looks as if they had been obtained by a surreptitious descent upon somebody's waste- paper basket. It will need more serious evidence than this to establish the truth with regard to a disastrous and discreditable episode in our history. The belief that it was the hushing-up of the Parliamentary inquiry into the Jameson Raid that gave Mr. Kruger his long-sought opportunity of winning the more moderate Transvaalers and the people of the Orange Free State to his side, prevails widely among politicians of all parties. It is a matter of public importance that this episode in the history of the House of Commons should be cleared up."

The central idea of the interesting article on the "Lessons of the War," by "Miles," which stands first in the Contemporary, is that the successful tactics of the Boers have been consciously modelled on those of Stonewall Jackson, General Joubert having served in the Confederate Army during the American Civil War. Incidentally the writer exempts General Hildyard and Sir Francis Clery from his strictures on our generals, on

the ground that they have both adopted Jackson's maxim that it was right to study the past history of war previous to engaging in it. Apropos of the value of mounted infantry, " Miles" sensi- bly points out that it entirely depends on the quality and train- ing of the man on horseback. It is no good to "erect a fetish out of some fancied advantage that the Boers have over us." —It is impossible not to admire the sincerity of Mr. Auberon Herbert, but his proposal that we should at once • send out the " most sane-minded and level-headed man" in the country to arrange an armistice on terms of perfect equality, go back to the position of last August, and resume the negotiations "exactly at the point at which they left the hands of Mr. Smuts and Mr. Conyngham Greene," is a counsel of perfec-

tion which does more credit to his heart than to his head. Even if President Kruger acquiesced, has Mr. Auberon Herbert any conception of the effect of the adoption of such a policy on Canada and Australia, not to mention Cape Colony and Natal P—Chimerical and Utopian though the suggestion is, we prefer the tone of Mr. Herbert's article to the extravagant pessimism of Mr. Massingham'e paper, "A Cry for Capacity," of which the theme is that "nothing has emerged more clearly from the present crisis than the essential deficiency, on the intellectual side, of a nation strong, indeed, and wholesome in character, but poorly represented in almost every department of mental activity,—in a word, a nation of muddlers." Mr. Mas- singham bases his indictment not merely on the mistakes of our generals in the field, but on the

poverty of our art, literature, and invention,—on the circulation of Miss Corelli's books, the popularity of Mr. Kipling, the scanty heed that is paid to the two great Northern lights—Ibsen and Tolstoi—the worship of athletics at the Universities and public schools (he says nothing of the worship of professional football by the masses), and the lack

of a great English musical composer. " In pure science no one now looks to England for work that will retain for us

the position of pioneers which Darwin and Spencer have won for us." Has Mr. Massingham ever heard of Kelvin, or Lodge, or Marconi (half British by birth, altogether English in training), or Parsons, whose turbine engine bids fair to revolutionise marine propulsion; of Dewar, Ramsay, and Rayleigh ; of Lister and Treves F The temper of the article may best be illustrated by a single extract : " When the fine flower of Oxford scholarship can produce no better fruit than the administration and diplomacy of Sir Alfred Milner, it is indeed time to consider what is wrong with the Republic."

Note also that Mr. Massingham alludes to the " absurd notion" that the attitude of the foreign Press has been the result of a corrupt propaganda on the part of Dr. Leyds.— We must content ourselves with a bare reference to Miss Cobbe's very interesting reminiscences of Dr. Martineau, and the striking but pessimistic article by Mr. P. A. Bruce, a citizen of Virginia, on "The American Negro of To-day."

The one article of absolutely first-rate topical importance

in the new Fortnightly, that by Mr. W. A. Baillie-Grohman on " British and Foreign Rifle Shooting," is placed eleventh in

a list of sixteen items, the place of honour being assigned to

Mr. Thomas Barclay's genial and well-intentioned, but singu- larly unconvincing attempt—so far as the arguments go—to promote a kinder feeling between France and England. With a great deal of what Mr. Barclay says of the great qualities of the French—their artistic gifts and their astonishing re- cuperative powers—we entirely concur. Bat his treatment of the Dreyfus affair is not adequate, nor is it fair to say that " while true patriots in France were almost heartbroken at the long duration of the sickening affair, they received not one word of sympathy from England." Because sensational journals cried out Delend-a est Lutetia, Mr. Barclay must not forget the splendid services rendered to the really patriotic minority by such publicists as Mr. Masse.—Mr. Baillie-Grohman's short paper, which is crammed fall of significant facts, compares the three systems or schools of rifle-practice obtaining among civilians—the British, American, and Continental—and pronounces strongly in favour of more shoulder-shooting, of short ranges, and a light trigger-pull. Mr. Baillie-Groliman, who writes from an almost unrivalled combined experience as a game and target shot, avoids all intemperateness of expression, but we believe that he is entirely justified in his complaint that "in no country in the world is so little attention paid, either by the military or by the civilian shots, to what other countries are doing in the shooting world."—The Rev. William Greswell's paper on " The Dutch Church and the Boers" is a valuable historical analysis of the motives which render the Dutch pastors so hostile to our Colonial Empire. The main causes, in Mr. Greswell's opinion, are that (1) the Dutch "predikant " cannot quite forget that he is the lineal successor of those who for a great number of years represented a privileged State Church at the Cape; and that (2) he has never cordially adopted the spirit of the Slave Emancipation Act of 1834. In the matter of the baptism of the children of natives, the Dutch pastors have declined from the enlightened standpoint adopted by the Ecclesiastical Courts of Amsterdam and Batavia. On religious as well as political grounds Mr. Greswell holds that the predominance of Dutch Afrikander- dom is deeply to be deprecated, whereas under the auspices of a British Hegemony, no race, no religion, no class will suffer. —Major Arthur Griffiths's account of the evolution of the War Office, as we know it now, from its chaotic condition on the eve of the Crimean War, is clearly put and well worth reading, but while we agree with him in his exposure of the weaknesses of the present system—which renders it impossible to fix responsibility on any individual—we dissent from his conclusion that the only remedy is to be found in the autocracy of the chief military expert.—Judge O'Connor Morris is admittedly one of the greatest authorities on Wellington, and his cordial tribute to the merits of Sir Herbert Maxwell's new Life is testimony of real value. The only point on which he seriously differs from the new biographer is in his estimate of Welling- ton's strategy, and his criticisms on the Waterloo campaign only emphasise the extraordinary way in which the very stars in their courses fought for the allies. Judge O'Connor Morris vigorously denounces the extravagances of " the Wellingtonian legend," but be holds the great Duke to have been "great as a general, great even as a statesman, but throughout his career greatest as a man."

There is force and shrewdness in much of the criticism embodied in the article on " The Causes of Reverse" which appears in the new National, but we cannot endorse the writer's wholesale condemnation of aged Ministers, officials, and generals as the root cause of our recent failures. At every turn he is confronted with exceptions,—Bismarck, Moltke, to say nothing of Joubert, Cronje, and President Kruger himself. At the same time, we entirely agree with his contention that what we want for the civil administration of the Army and Navy is in each case a man of the Roosevelt type, and applaud his appeal to all classes to lead a more earnest and strenuous life, if our race is to keep its noble place in the world. " ` Are the gentlemen of England all fox- hunting?' asked Mr. Churchill, fresh from contemplating the intense devotion of the Boer in an unjust cause. ` Are our Universities and public-schools engrossed in athletics, our middle and lower classes in loafing on the football field, where hired professionals kick balls to and fro, that they cannot learn while it is yet time to drill and shoot?' is our spasst:on." That is a sensible view of the situation.— A " German Lady " endeavours to exp'ain the anim' city of Germany towards England, but does not get beyond

acquitting all "right-thinking Germans" of that Schaden- frewle which the editor in his "Episodes of the Month" holds to be the distinctive mark of the German wherever he is.—As regards America, Mr. Moreton C. Bradley ascribes the outburst of anti-English sentiment chiefly to the Demo.

cratic Press politicians. The Republicans as a whole, or, at any rate, the respectable and representative Republicans, are in sympathy with England. Mr. Bradley reminds ns that, severe as our losses have been, they are trivial compared to those incurred in the American Civil War :—

" That war is said to have cost the North some 300,000 lives ; scarcely a great battle was fought in which the losses were not from 12 to 20 per cent. Tugela and Modder River show no such figures. When Grant, in May, 1864, after three years of war, commenced his final march to Richmond, he cros"ed the Rapidan with an army 116,000 strong. In two months 40,000 were gone, but the North sent her loyal sons to take their places. Lee, when first besieged, had 80,000, but Grant's remorseless hammering so reduced his army, that when at last he capitulated at Appomattox only 28,000 men laid down their arms. There may be other reverses in store for Britain before the sword is sheathed, but Americans with the blood of the Motherland in their veins feel that no matter how severe the losses or great the price to be paid, there will be no halt until the end is reached. The calm of England impresses those Americans who realise how volatile their own people are. Commenting on the stoicism now governing all classes in England, a prominent newspaper asks what would have

happened in this country had Dewey been forced to call for rein- forcements, had some of Cervera's ships escaped, had Sampson been repulsed. And answering these supposititious questions, this paper says : It must be admitted that the English are carrying themselves well in an hour of discouragement. Their pride is wounded, but they are showing no rancour. There is no

howl at home, nor any pleading of the baby act from the field. The commanders who lose, manfully shoulder the full respon- si bility, and even compliment the enemy in their despatches. T his is the spirit of real men, and it is good to feel that they are of the Anglo-Saxon strain.'" Readers who are weary of war and politics will tarn to Professor Gregory's informing article on "Mars as a World," or to Miss Catherine Dodd's entertaining paper on "School Children's Ideals."

Of the topical articles in .Blackwood the best is an admir- able account of the nature, character, properties, and evolu-

tion of the projectiles used at the present day, in which the " controlling facts are easily and clearly brought within

the comprehension of the average layman.—The author of "A Word to Conservatives" sums up his advice in the reminder that even righteous retribution may be bought too dear.—The place of " The Looker-on " is taken by the writer of a set of "Musings without Method," who reads some salutary lessons to journalists in general, and war correspondents in particular, distinguishes the patriot from the

patriotard," and pays a handsome and well-merited tribute to the brilliant talents of Mr. Steevens, who, it seems, was a frequent contributor to Blackwood, and wrote the remark- able tour de force, "From the New Gibbon, " in "Maga's " thousandth number.

The Anglo-Saxon Review is as readable as ever, and also as magnificent in the way of print, paper, and binding. Mr.

Stephen Crane's "War Memories" is fall of striking things, and so, in another way, is the article " Sikhs and Boers : a Parallel." The best war article in the number, however, is neither historical nor descriptive. It is Mr. Spenser Wilkinson's "On the Art of Going to War," and shows the absolute

necessity for forethought in regard to military operations. In war the man who knows exactly what he means to do

when war breaks out has won half the battle already. " The Merciful Soul," by Laurence Alma-Tadema is a very striking little drama in one act. It is, of coarse, like all attempts at serious prose drama in the present day, a little too much influenced by Mmterlinck, but in spite of that the play has real dramatic power and is also extremely readable. The language in which the "wraith" speaks is very cleverly managed. It is not easy to make a ghost talk appropriately, but Miss Tadema has done it almost as well as it is done in oar ballad literature. Another very striking feature is Mr.

Mallock's rendering of Lucretius into quatrains of the Omar Khayyam type. Mr. Mallock has made a real contribution to

the literature of translation. We cannot find more space for the Anglo-Saxon Review, but no one who takes up the present number is likely to lay it down till at least half its contents have been scanned.