At the annual dinner of the United Club on Friday,
November 27th, Mr. Balfour made a speech from which the fiscal controversy was entirely banished. Instead, Mr. Balfour dealt with the problem of Army reform. The main point of the speech was that the Government had nothing to apologise for, and that their withers were entirely unwrung by the Report of the War Commission. The military problem pre- sented by the British Empire was unique. No War Minister except the British is liable to be called on to send troops to fight in every quarter of the globe, in every possible kind of climate, and against every possible enemy. This, of course, sounds very alarming in a speech; but, as Mr. Balfour himself pointed out, it comes down in practice to the fact that since Britain is an insular Power and the Navy protects her from invasion, and since India is our only great possession with a land frontier abutting on the frontier of a Great Power, we have to think first and foremost of India when we begin to think of military defence. In reality the fact that India is the chief spot in the Empire open to attack leads to concentration rather than to confusion, because India is also the place where, for internal reasons, we are obliged to keep a great military force. Shortly, the military problem of the Empire, now that the South African War is over, is the provision of (1) a garrison for India, (2) a mobile field force at home capable of pro- viding an oversea expedition, (3) a great reservoir of non-pro- fessional and civilian soldiers—Reserves, Militia, Yeomanry, and Volunteers—out of which fighting units can be rapidly improvised either for oversea wars or for home defence. These are the foundations of military power which we have always advocated, and we are naturally glad to see that Mr. Balfour has gone a good way towards accepting them, even though he makes out the problem to be much more obscure than it really is.
Previous page
