ON NATIONAL DEFENCE.
[ritom A CORRESPONDENT.] [The following is the substance of a letter written by a Captain of Militia to his Colonel, and afterwards handed to us for publication. It will be seen that many of the views have been advocated in our columns, and we are glad to find them confirmed on authority so good as that of the writer of the letter, who commands the very best sources of in- formation.] The defence of the country at present occupies the minds of all men interested in its welfare. I do not intend to discuss whether this move- ment is rational or not ; still less whether we ought to confide in Louis Napoleon's assurances ; but I propose to offer a few remarks upon the classification of those forces which the country possesses, or is about to possess, for its protection and safety, and to examine whether the present arrangement and organization of these forces be such as to give confi- dence that the greatest amount of advantage will be drawn from them in case of emergency, and whether they are calculated for our every-day wants and habits.
The forces at the disposal of Government may be divided into three classes :—
THE REGULAR ARMY. MILITIA.
VOLUNTEERS.
Public attention is now devoted to the Rifle Volunteers, and we see every day in the papers some new suggestion or proposition in favour of this or that provision in the regulations which will have to be made in that force. The social distinctions between man and roan have been in- voked by writers who are anxious that the corps of riflemen should be kept select; while the indisputable argument is urged by others, that it is to the strong arms and stout limbs of mechanics and working men that we must look if We wish the rifle movement to provide a force suffi- ciently numerous to repel an enemy. An ably written paper in the new arnhill Magazine recommends that members of corps should be exercised in real soldiers' duties, should go about to camps for exercise, and do ,many things which only rich men can afford to do without pay, and only working men are likely to do at all. Many of these suggestions are valuable in themselves, and tend to show that considerable thought and attention has been bestowed upon them; but they are often unpractical, from the writers not having con- sidered the whole question, and the separate duties which ought to be assigned to the abovementioned three classes of defensive force. For my part I believe that no movement which is exclusive in its arrangement will provide a sufficiently numerous force, and on the other hand that none can be strictly speaking a volunteer movement which demands pay and clothing for the volunteers—therefore while I am ready to admit the volunteer movement must be confined those who can afford their time and equipments, some plan of organization should be discovered which will include the working classes of the community. This plan is to be found in adapting the present Militia system as far as it remains local to the wants of the labouring classes in their different localities. This change would be in accordance with the opinions of some of our wisest legislators, and not less so with the constitutional habits of the country.
Look at the present Militia—thirty regiments are at present embodied. The duties of these regiments are, to all intents and purposes, the same as those of regiments of the Line.* It is true the colonels and Lord-Lieu- tenants appoint the officers, and E0 far the force is more constitutional than the Line. Many of them are probably almost as efficient as newly raised second battalions in the Line. But they are performing duties for which the Militia was not originally intended, and the men who com- pose them are the same class of men as in the Line, but somewhat in- ferior.
The regiments not embodied are receiving no pay, and many of them are not even taking recruits. They are, therefore, at present performing no part of the duty of training citizens for the defence of the country. Respectable men will not enlist because they do not wish to go into an inferior sort of regular army, in which at a moment's notice they may be forced to leave their counties and marched away to garrisons, where an hour's forgetfulness or intoxication may place them in the hands of those who would consign them to exile in Barbadoes or Hongkong before they could look round. The Militia interferes with the recruiting for the Line and by the ease with which bounties in different regiments are ob- tained increases the amount of general desertion in the Army, which has reached to such an alarming pitch. To speak generally, the Militia is now used partly as a local Militia and partly as a nursery for the Line. It performs neither of these func- tions satisfactorily. lhe sooner the system is considerably altered the better.
Having shown that an organization is wanted to suit the working classes in their own localities, and that the present Militia system is radically wrong, it would appear that the best mode of reconstructing the Militia and providing the wanted organization would be to alter so much of the present Militia Act as makes it general, and to use its local organization for the drill and equipment of volunteers of those classes which cannot afford to equip themselves,—in fact to return almost to the Militia Bill which Lord john Russell's Government brought in in 1852.
The Militia Bill of 1852 was opposed by Lord Palmerston, partly, I suppose, because he felt the necessity of getting a mobilised Militia at a time when he knew there US no army ; and partly for other reasons 'to which I need not allude. But whatever might have been the motives a Our correspondent might have added that some are as efficient as the best regiments of the Line.—En.
which prompted Lord Palmerston in 1852, they do not exist now. There is an army, and Lord Palmerston is at the head of the Government. It is more than probable that the House of Commons will insist upon a large army being kept up in England. The regiments coming home from India, the discharged men of the late Company's European forces, and those of the Militia regiments, which I hope to see disembodied, will provide an ample supply of men. There is, therefore, no reason why the question of the Militia should not now be considered on its own merits, and if so considered I believe that it would be found politic to make it a local force organized for local drills, and that the twenty-one days would be quite sufficient for battalion exercise, but ?hat the captains, sergeants, and others should have local drills in their districts, and that only such men should be admitted whose residence and respectability were known.
The difficulty of such a measure would arise from the want of confi- dence which is felt among the labouring classes throughout the country in the good faith of the Government towards the Militia. When the present force was set on foot the faith of Parliament was pledged to them that they should not be embodied except in case of invasion. A further Act of Parliament empowered Government to embody regiments. It is true that the men had to be reattested, but they naturally felt that a sort of moral compulsion was exercised over them. Subsequently, garrisons were wanted in the Mediterranean, and the measure of sending the Militia with a further reattestation was adopted. The effect of all this has been that no artisan, respectably married and settled, will go into the Militia. The change then must be effected with the full determina- tion to act up to the new arrangements, whatever they are. And every effort should be made to enlist the aid and services of resident gentry, clergy, and employers in the movement. We should then have a reform which would make the Militia practically useful, and create military in- stitutions in accordance with the general theories laid down in the evi- dence given by Lord Grey on the Militia Commission, to which I believe sufficient importance has not been attached, and a quotation from which will be my best conclusion. He says- " That whatever trained and permanently embodied force you keep ought to be connected with the Army, and not with the Militia or Volunteers ; and, on the other band, that the irregular force, which is only to be looked on as an auxiliary to the regular force, ought to be so formed as not to compete with the regular army, and not to withdraw the men of whom it is com- posed from their ordinary occupations in industry."
This opinion, originally given with reference to the Militia, is not in- applicable to the due solution of the question with which I started, namely, how to take advantage of the present feeling in the country by the organization both of paying volunteers and non-paying artisans.
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