And or ever that evening ended a great gale blew,
And a wave like the wave that is raised by an earth-

quake grew,
Till it smote on their hulls and their sails and their

masts and their flags, And the whole sea plunged and fell on the shotshatter'd

navy

of Spain, And the little · Revenge' herself went down by the

island crags

To be lost evermore in the main.

ENGLAND AS A MILITARY POWER IN

1854 AND IN 1878.

WHEN a house in your neighbourhood is on fire, it is high time to look to your water-supply, and to ascertain the condition of your perhaps hitherto neglected fire-engine. If that is out of order, your only resource is to patch it up as best you can to meet the immediate emergency; but as soon as the danger is over, some trifling or unexpected accident having perchance saved your property from destruction—unless, indeed, you are a recklessly unthrifty and unbusinesslike householder—you will lose no time in taking precautions against any future recurrence of such a danger. The man who has had a warning of that nature and failed to benefit by it, meets with no sympathy when, a few years later, nothing of his house remains to him but some smoking ruins.

What holds good with individuals may be appropriately applied to nations also. England has had many warnings and several hairbreadth escapes from calamity, but we have learned experience from none. We can only be saved from the fire of war—the greatest of all scourges-—by our national fire-engines, the army and the navy. When danger approaches we realise this, but during a spell of profound peace we laugh at the dangers we have escaped, and we scoff at those which foreseeing men tell us may be in store for us. We take the advice of medical men upon sanitary subjects; we follow their recommendations to protect us from epidemics ; to guard ourselves, or those who are to come after us, against injury arising from ill-constructed wills, leases, or other legal documents, we employ the best lawyer we can afford to pay; and, lest our house should tumble about our heads, we build in accordance with the advice of an experienced architect. When danger is upon us, when an angry country insists upon our ministry vindicating its insulted honour by force of arms, the soldier is sent for and his opinion requested, but until then his views are decried as foolish, and the warnings he dares to utter are neglected with undisguised scorn. We never tire in advertising ourselves as an eminently practical people; as individuals or as commercial companies we insure our lives, our ships, our houses, &c., against various risks, but as a nation we take no trouble to insure our empire against disasters of the most serious nature. The Duke of Wellington in his day, with all the weight of his renown, was unable to convince the English people of the terrible dangers to which the country was then exposed, and all the best of our soldiers since his time have been equally unsuccessful. As a rule we have been content to patch up our fire-engine in a temporary and, I may add, in a most ineffective manner upon each occasion when our neighbour's property was in flames; but no sooner has the fire been put out, even although it had, we know, ruined our friend before it was got under, than we put back our engine into its former restingplace, taking no trouble to remedy the defects which a practical trial of it had brought to light. Lord Palmerston alone of all our recent ministers, it would seem, was alive to England's danger, and, thanks to him, the Thames and our principal dockyards are now safe against a coup-de-main. The heart of our empire may now be said to be tolerably safe, but how about our extremities? Our commerce, we boast, covers the globe, but to protect it in distant seas our ships of war must practically encircle our sphere also. Our fleet is now propelled by steam, so it cannot keep the sea unless we have coaling stations in every ocean. But unless these coaling places are fortified they can be of no use during war. Year after year the vital importance of erecting works to protect those stations has been urged by soldiers upon successive administrations, both officially and in the press, but still they remain at the mercy of the first enemy's ironclad that reaches them.

To illustrate our present unfortunate position I have only to tell the following story. When the Czar's army crossed the Pruth last year, his ironclad squadron, which happened to be in European waters, was despatched to America, evidently in the first instance to get it away from our fleet in the event of England's having declared

Let us consider what that insignificant squadron might have done against us. Being kept ready coaled and prepared for sea, as soon as the telegraph announced the declaration of war it would most probably have started for St. Helena, picking up some of our finest West India and South America steamers en route. Upon arrival at St. Helena it would most likely have found there one of the small English wooden war-vessels belonging to our West Coast of Africa squadron. Such a vessel would of course have fallen an easy prey to the Russians, who, filling up with coal, burning all they could not carry away, and, having taken from Jamestown as much money as it could pay to save it from destruction, would steam for Simon's Bay, where the same performance would be gone through. There we have a small dockyard establishment, and almost always one or two wooden war-vessels. · All would be destroyed as well as every coal store in Cape Town; every merchantman in Table Bay—and there is always a large quantity of shipping there—would be captured, and most probably burnt. This game would then be repeated at the Mauritius

Aden, Bombay, Point de Galle, Singapore, and Hongkong, whence the Russian squadron would make its way to Petropolovski, where it would be comparatively safe from our fleet. Now this is no fanciful chimera ; it is a practical and feasible scheme, and I have no doubt in my own mind that had we 'declared war it would have been attempted. Not only should we have thus lost millions of pounds' worth of property and several small ships flying Her Majesty's pennant, but the destruction of the coal stores at those several ports would have completely paralysed the action of our warvessels in those seas, and would therefore have secured the Russians against all danger of pursuit. It would have brought our trade almost to a stand-still, for merchantmen depend now nearly as much upon coal as our navy does. ? To all thinking men in both services the dangers we should be exposed to in the event of war are familiar, and many, even the bravest among us, turn pale as they count them over. Should war find the nation unprepared, it is we who shall have to pay the penalty with our lives; and yet we are daily taunted publicly with wishing for it, and with desiring for our own selfish ends to force on a conflict for which we, above all others, know we are never ready, Past history teaches us how little mercy we may expect at the hands of whatever party happens to be in power. British ministries have never failed to shift the blame of failure from themselves to the commanders, no matter how hard may have been their struggle for victory, and notwithstanding the ministers' responsibility for their selection. .: The English general has not hitherto occupied an enviable position in the field; he has always been pitted against an enemy his superior in numbers, and he has often had to aot with jealous allies, whose touchy susceptibilities it has been no easy matter to avoid offending.. The small army placed under his orders is generally composed of raw, disjointed units, tunaccustomed to work together, with a faulty inexperienced administration suddenly called into existence for the occasion, and generally with a totally inadequate supply of transport. It is a poor scratch pack which he has to whip into shape if he is given time to do so. This he is seldom allowed, for an impatient people at: home call aloud for immediate active operations, and few ministries have ever had the firmness to resist such a cry. To add to his difficulties, his unwillingness to act until he is ready lays him open to be misunderstood and even misrepresented by his subordinates, who find themselves called upon to take part in an organisation with the working of which they are wholly unfamiliar. Of all the many difficulties with which the Duke of Wellington had to contend in the Peninsula, none was greater than the distrust of his best planned schemes which was excited in England by letters from officers serving under his orders. The same evil was rampant in the Crimea. It will be aggravated in future campaigns by the almost

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irresistible temptation presented to even the best intentioned newspaper correspondents to court popularity with the officers and men they are thrown amongst, by retailing for home readers every grumble they hear which sounds like effective military criticism. In reality these grumbles represent only the sense of annoyance felt by men called upon to work out ideas they do not comprehend-ideas which as a whole are unknown to them, and their special share of which they regard as absurd, because they do not understand how it fits in with some other part that supplements and completes it.

How different all this is from what takes place in the German army, where every man during war is called upon merely to help in the working of a machine that all have been accustomed to in peace. In this respect the German commander has a great advantage over the English general, for the German subordinate officers during peace-training have acquired confidence in their military system and in their superiors entrusted with its working. They are less prone to criticise the acts of those above them, because they understand the machinery employed, and have learned to appreciate grumblers at their true value. In the English army, unfortunately, our peace system, clearly indicated as it is by regulations, is not based upon the requirements for war; a new system has therefore to be inaugurated by the general in the field, when his time and thoughts are already severely strained by the responsibilities of his position.

The history of the Crimean war is still fresh in the memory of those who took part in it. Never was any expedition planned by a home government with more reckless ignorance of war and its requirements than that which landed at Eupatoria. At the beginning of the campaign our Treasury was as parsimonious as it was subsequently lavish in expenditure. About 24,000 British soldiers-10 finer body of men have ever worn Her Majesty's uniform-were hurled ashore without the means of carrying their wounded, and even without sufficient tools to bury their dead. British discipline in two or three hard fought battles won for England a brilliant but a short-lived success; and when, through the military ignorance of those in Downing Street who planned the campaign, that devoted little army dwindled down almost to a handful of half-starved scarecrows, those who had starved us through their ignorant parsimony sent out commissioners, whose avowed business it was to select a victim from amongst our generals on whom to cast the blame. They selected the ablest of them as their scapegoat, and held him up to public opprobrium because he had not made a road from Balaclava to the camp, although they knew full well he had neither the tools nor the labour at his disposal for such an undertaking.

At the present time, when war may be forced upon us at any moment, we see the same spirit of ignorance upon war's requirements rife in the country. Owing to this ignorance many, who are as