Our chief complaint against Lord Haldane and the Govern- ment
as a whole, for here again the responsibility is theirs, is that they did not do what we so constantly urged them to do—keep always in store a million rifles beyond those required for our visible needs. If they had taken our advice seven years ago—advice which we tendered to them again and again and used all our endeavours, private and public, to further—how different would have been our position at the beginning of the war ! Happily the deficiency has now been made good. The matter, however, can better be discussed on a future occasion. None the lees, we cannot refrain from mentioning here that not one of the news- papers and magazines which are now attacking Lord Haldane so unfairly gave the Spectator the slightest help in its efforts to force the Government to keep an adequate reserve of rifles to be used in case of a great improvisation of troops, such as we are now seeing. They did not even mention our speoifie effort in this direction. If our contemporaries had helped us it might have been possible so to have organized public opinion as to have forced on the Cabinet a proposal which was not inconsistent with their policy, but, rather, consistent with it. One voice in the Press was, however. quite insufficient to do this, and the movement we tried to create died of inanition.
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