MR. CHAMBERLAIN ON MILITARY PREPARATION. T HERE was no need for
any explanation in regard to Mr. Chamberlain's recent speech at Birming- ham. The meaning of his words was quite clear. " We have been criticised," said Mr. Chamberlain, "sometimes, I think, justly—very often, I think, unfairly—but we have been criticised for not having been prepared for the emer- gency that arose. In my judgment, public opinion in this country never has submitted, and never will submit, to the expenditure which would be necessary if we were always to country never has submitted, and never will submit, to the expenditure which would be necessary if we were always to be fully prepared for such an exceptional emergency as that which we have just come through ; and accordingly it will always be necessary for us in similar circumstances to do what we did then, and to call upon the voluntary patriotism of a free people to supplement the necessary deficiencies in the Regular Service." This does not, of course, mean that Mr. Chamberlain glories in want of preparation per se, or in slackness and inefficiency. He merely means that the country will not consent to the strain of keeping up a standing army sufficiently large to meet automatically and without a new and special effort every emergency that will arise. Instead it will prefer to meet great emergencies when they arise by an appeal to the people and to voluntary effort, such as took place in the crisis of the Boer War. So far we entirely agree with Mr. Chamberlain. We hold, and have always held, that it is not possible, and that it would probably not be wise if it were possible, to raise, either compulsorily or by large payments, vast armies on the Continental model. The people of this country would not agree to such a bloated standing army ; and if they did, the army would soon lose its force and elasticity, and be strangled by red-tape and the bureaucratic mismanagement of peace conditions. We must, of course, have a navy always ready and large enough for every possible emergency, but in the case of the standing army we need only such numbers as will efficiently carry out the garrisoning and policing of India and the rest of the British Empire, pro- vide a moderate home guard, and produce enough men to meet any sudden demand for an expeditionary force such as those we have had to send to Egypt on three occasions in recent years. For the greater war emergencies, and for the needs of a protracted war, we must depend upon what Mr. Chamberlain rightly describes as "the voluntary patriotism of a free people."
As we have said, we go heartily with Mr. Chamberlain in his willingness to rely upon voluntary patriotism. But if Mr. Chamberlain's principle of national defence is adopted, there is surely another step to be taken. If we are to rely in great emergencies upon " the voluntary patriotism of a free people," we must do our best to make that voluntary patriotism effective. How can we do this ? The answer is plain,—By seeing to it that the people of this country afford material out of which troops of real value can be quickly improvised. At present our population does not, speaking generally, present such material. The enthusiasm, the warlike spirit, the willingness to volunteer. for the front, possess our people as strongly as ever, but the human material is not, as regards the majority of the population, fit for war on the physical side. That was plain during the late war. Thousands of men volunteered for the war who had never fired a rifle of any sort in their lives, and whose knowledge of riding and of horses was equally non-existent. They were good men and inspired with exactly the right spirit, but of the ground- work of soldiering—i.e., the use of the rifle—they knew absolutely nothing, and they had to begin their work as soldiers by learning in time of war and as enlisted soldier; what they could perfectly well have learned in peace and as civilians. Now surely Mr. Chamberlain must agree that this was a most undesirable state of things ; nay, a most perilous one if we are to rely, as he proposes, on an appeal to the people for military aid,—i.e., on the sudden improvi- sation of soldiers. Have we not, then, a right to ask from Mr. Chamberlain that he should use his best endeavours in the Government in which his voice is so potent to ensure that in the future the best means shall be taken to provide good and not bad human material out of which to miss sudden and popular levies. After all, it would be by no means difficult and in no sense burdensome on the taxpayer to endow the population with the groundwork of soldiering. If the Government were to encourage and extend the rifle club movement till it became practically universal—and this it could easily do by providing ranges and rifles and cheapen- ing the cost of ammunition—it would soon have a popula- tion the vast majority of whom would understand how to shoot. Next, if in a. sphere of activity where Govern- ment is supreme—i.e., in national elementary education— it decreed that physical education of a military kind, including the use of the rifle, should be as compulsory as elementary literary education, and that just as no boy may leave school till lie can read and write, so no boy should leave school till he knew the elements of drill and could shoot with a rifle or a carbine, a very great step would be achieved in the direction of producing a population fit to volunteer for active service in time of emergency. We should have, that is, a population whose young men when they volunteered would not have to be taught how to " form fours " or how to load, sight, and fire a rifle. If, in addition, the Government kept five or six Yeomanry remounts at various rural centres, and allowed certified members of rifle clubs to learn to ride without charge, it would enable a, considerable number of men to add riding to the elementary military education begun at the national school and kept up in the rifle club.
Perhaps Mr. Chamberlain is so much immersed in the overwhelming mass of his work at the Colonial Office that he imagines that the Government is already doing all it can to produce a population of the kind out of which soldiers with a real fighting value can be quickly improvised. If such is his belief, and if he thinks that the people are being practised in the elements of military training under the care of a fostering Government, he is very much mistaken. Let us take first the case of the rifle clubs. What has the Government done for them? Practically nothing,—unless the fact that, while threatening to punish, the public Departments concerned actually refrain from punishing men who break the law in regard to carrying rifles without a license can be called doing something. At present a man who shoots at his own affiliated rifle club range with a club rifle is exempted from the gun license, but if he shoots at another club's range in a friendly competition or shoots at his own club range with his own rifle he is, we understand, liable to be prosecuted, though such prosecution is not actually carried out. It is true that the Government handed over the supervision of rifle clubs to the National Rifle Association. It is also true that this excellent semi-private body has done all in its power to help rifle clubs, and that a private individual, Mr. Astor, has given it £10,000 with which to help on the movement. The Government has, however, we repeat, itself done practically nothing. It has not provided, or helped to provide, a single range for civilians. It has not provided rifles, though it has allowed the National Rifle. Association to sell rifles to the dabs at about the same price as they can be obtained from the trade. Again, it has given no ammunition for practice, and has not even allowed the rifle clubs to get ammu- nition at real cost price, though it has not insisted on the highest scale of price in case of purchases. In a word, we say without fear of contradiction that though the rifle clubs owe a great deal to the sympathy and good management of the National Rifle Association and to Mr. Astor's generosity, it will be impossible to find any rifle club that will say that it was founded owing to Government help or kept going through Government encouragement. The notion that it was the duty of the Government to help to teach the people to shoot has clearly never entered the head of any one connected with the Government.—We except the Commander-in-Chief and many of our Generals and junior officers, who have shown real interest and keenness in the matter of the rifle club movement, and evidently recognise the value of a wide- spread national education in the matter of shooting. Governmental indifference in regard to the supplement- ing of our elementary literary education with a system of elementary physical training of a military nature is equally well marked. It is true that the vigilant eye of the Secretary for Scotland has noticed the need, and has ap- pointed a Royal Commission to inquire into the question for Scotland, but this purely local investigation has ap- parently awakened no echo in the Government in general. In other words, the notion that it might be of as much advantage to the State to give its boys physical instruc- tion of a military kind as to teach them the "three R's" has not been entertained, or rather has been rejected, for so we read the correspondence between Mr. Brodrick and Lord Meath. But while the Government in refusing to trouble its head about rifle clubs or rifle ranges, or about the physical instruction of boys in elementary schools, is taking up an attitude of negative hostility to the notion of preparing the population for sudden calls of a military nature, it is in another direction positively reducing the number of men instructed in the use of arms. The Volunteers supply a great school of arms for the nation,'and that of the best possible kind. The large number of men who pass through the Volunteers receive a sound military education. They are the secondary schools of military education. But the new Government policy of attempting to turn the Volunteers into imitation Regulars has had the result of reducing that force by some thirty thousand men, and this means a most serious ultimate reduction in the numbers of men who get what we have called a secondary military education. If the reduction is permanent, in three or four years there will be some hundred thousand less men in the country who present first-class material out of which to improvise soldiers.
Speaking generally, we are very glad that Mr. Chamber- lain should in his speech have raised the matter of which we have been treating, for it puts a clear issue and its con- sequences before the country. The time has come when our people must choose whether they will adopt the Con- tinental military system once and for all, or whether they will rely upon Mr. Chamberlain's system. But if they adopt Mr. Chamberlain's system, as we trust they will and believe they will, then he and the rest of the Government must see to it that we do everything possible to endow the nation with those qualities which produce a population from which soldiers can be improvised. In a word, Mr. Chamberlain by his bold, and as we contend wise, speech has laid upon himself the duty—a duty from which we can- not believe that he will flinch—of insisting that the nation as a whole—boys and men—shall be given that instruc- tion in the elements of military defence which alone can make them trustworthy material out of which efficient soldiers can be created at short notice.
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