THE NEW CONSTITUTION OF THE ARMY.
THE country will, we feel satisfied, hear with great pleasure that the office of Commander-in-Chief, is to be abolished, and that the old system is to be dis- established in favour of an Army Council consisting of seven members—viz., the Secretary of State, four soldiers, and two civilians—each with his own sikcified and important duties. The British people have always desired of late years that the governing body of the Army should be reorganised on the scheme employed for the government of the Navy. They do not know much about the details of the subject, less, indeed, than a people so warlike and so constantly engaged in little wars might be expected to know ; but they think in a broad way, they see that the administration of the Navy is successful while that of the Army is not, and they wish therefore to govern the Army as the Navy is governed. As this is substan- tially the plan recommended by the "Reconstitution of the War Office Committee," and. accepted by the Ministry and the Crown, they will, if action follows close upon promise, be content, and will not grudge the heavy pensions which we foresee will be necessary to satisfy the personal claims of the great officers who are devoted to the old system, and cannot on that account be expected to work a new one. If the pensions are liberal, and personal ques- tions shunted out of the way, this part of the scheme will, we feel sure, attract support both in the country and the two Houses, and Mr. Arnold-Forster or his successor will only have to arrange the details, a task of great magnitude, no doubt, but one in which he will have the benefit of the long experience of the Admiralty. This, it will be observed, is the only portien of the Report of the Committee as yet accepted, and, reserving some details, we have nothing but congratulations to offer both to the Premier, Mr. Arnold-Forster, and the country. They have decided on a plan, instead of frittering themselves away on vague generalities or appointing a wilderness of Committees, and the plan is, as we have always contended, the right one. It secures for the future the predominance of the civil power, the Secretary of State being, of course, responsible to Parlia- ment and the country, and it secures to him, if he chooses the right men, a thoroughly efficient administrative machine, not too big, and with the needed elements in A of permanence and experience. The objection which will be raised in many quarters, that the Army will have no professional single head, is futile, for that head-even when it was the Duke of Wellington—never succeeded in making a satisfactory Army, and was so constantly over- ruled by the civil power' that he has not infrequently felt himself left with means totally inadequate even to the defence of the country from invasion. The supreme power over every branch of the State Organisation must in this country be entrusted to a civilian, who, as Lord Cromer shows in his admirable paper on the subject in this month's Nineteenth Century, has constantly proved himself the most efficient of military reformers. The chief merit of a Council is that a decision must come forth as the decision of the Council, and not of any single man. It is, there- fore, impossible for a Secretary of State to refuse to be guided by expert advisers, or expert advisers to refuse to accept the view of the Secretary of State. The decision must be unanimous, or there are resignations, on which the public can judge. The Navy finds itself able to be splendidly loyal to a Board, and why should not the Army be loyal to a Council, more especially if the Council so increases its efficiency and ameliorates its condition that the country will believe in the Army as it now believes in the Navy ? Its confidence in the hater is absolute, yet its knowledge of the technique of naval affairs is of necessity less than its knowledge, imperfect as that is, of the technique of military organisation. If there is in armies, as is so conkantly asserted, a necessity for loyalty to an individual, there is the King. Queen Victoria was a woman, and could not, except by a Constitutional fiction, be an ultimate Commander-in-Chief; but during her reign men died by the thousand with an acute feeling in their hearts that one 'at least of their motives for cheerfully giving their lives was loyalty to her.
It is essential to the success of this scheme that the Council, with the Secretary of State as its con- trolling and responsible member, should be supreme in all Army affairs. The new officer who is to be created, the Inspector-General, will be under, and responsible to, the Council, and will therefore not withdraw from that body any of the responsibility which rightly belongs to it. Some may view with suspicion the creation of a "Department of Defence," to exist as a permanent body, and instruct the Premier and the Defence Com- mittee. That the Premier should be virtually the Constable of the Realm, and responsible for its defence, we have always maintained. He is the alter ego of the King, and as such should exergise a supervising control over all Departments, including the Army and Navy ; but it may be asked what he wants with a special Depart- ment of officials under him. To secure continuity, it is answered, and also to make sure that he is com- petent by giving him a body of experts to advise him. He himself should be the link or nexus to keep the two branches of national defence in harmony. That is in times of emergency the most useful function of the Crown, which the Premier constitutionally represents. As the Department is at present sketched, it is simply an Information Bureau, against which nothing can be said. But it is possible that such a Department might develop substantive powers of its own under a weak or indolent Premier. No contingency could be more fatal, for it would mean the weakening of what is the pivot of the whole system, the position of the Committee of Defence, not as a static bureau, but as an integral part of each Government, capable of indefinite extension both in personnel and duties under the bands of a. strong Premier. We readily admit the value of an Information Department attached to the Committee ; but, lest we fall again into the old slough from which the new scheme is meant to save us, we would urge that the greatest care be exercised in defining its scope and constitution. There should be no difficulty about this, for its duties and position are perfectly clear. Some may object that there is already an Intelligence Department under the Army and Navy Boards. But army intelligence and naval intelligence are two separate things. We want a third form which shall deal with defensive problems on the broadest basis, a work which is impoisible for either of the specialist Departments. There is also the question of Indian defence, which no Intelligence Department is directly concerned with. The Information Bureau will, therefore, as we understand it, deal with the intelligence work of three offices—the Admiralty, the War Office, and the India Office—and correlate the special requirements of each so as to form complete problems of Imperial defence, which it is the work of the Defence Committee to deal with. There is a further reason for this bureau. The Premier is, as we have said, in the broadest sense our Defence Minister. In all other Departments of State there is a permanent staff to assist the head. But the Premier in this capacity has no such assistance, and it is the primary work of the bureau to provide him with a secretariat. If this is kept clearly before the mind of the Government in creating the office, we see no reason to fear any injurious development. A Premier should no more be able to put the blame upon this Department, if things went wrong, than upon his private secretary.
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