rn^kw^^ 
 
 s. 
 
 f^i
 
 SPEECHES 
 
 ON 
 
 AEMY KEFOEM 
 
 DELIVEKED SINCE THE SESSION 
 
 BY 
 
 GEOKGE OTTO TREVELYAN 
 
 M.r. roR THE bordeu butigtis 
 
 LONDON 
 
 LONGMANS, GIIEEN, AND CO. 
 
 1870
 
 LONDON: PEINTIID BT 
 
 SrOTTISWOODE AND CO., NEW-STUEET SQUA.EE 
 
 AND PAKLIAMENT STEEEI
 
 SPEECHES 
 
 ON 
 
 AEMY REFORM. 
 
 3^^O0 
 
 These Speeches are publislied — not because tliere is any- 
 thing special in style or treatment to distinguish them from 
 other speeches made at public meetings by Members of Parlia- 
 ment who give their minds to what they say — but because 
 the subject therein discussed is one which is sure to be dealt 
 with next Session, and about which the constituencies (taken 
 somewhat unprepared by the rush of events) have not had 
 full time to inform themselves. We are now beginning to 
 appreciate the consequences of the habitual apathy with 
 which military matters have been regarded by the great 
 majority of those who take an active part in our political 
 movements. At a moment when an organic change is certain 
 to be effected in the constitution of our army — when the 
 direction which that change shall take is, whether we wish 
 it or not, by far the most important question of the day — 
 we discover at the eleventh hour that, owing mainly to the 
 chronic indifference of Liberal politicians, the condiict of our 
 army has passed from the hands of the nation into the hands 
 of a clique. A single example will suffice to show the plight 
 to which long misgovermnent has reduced us. Speaking of 
 the principles which should govern the promotion of officers, 
 General Trochu says : ' With regard to arms, food, dress, 
 equipment, we lavish on the administration a superfluity of 
 care, and of precautions against fraud or error. The number 
 of processes of audit and control, whose object is to check 
 expense, are infinite. Promotion, the cornerstone of the mili- 
 tary edifice, is not the subject of so much thought and 
 attention. And yet promotion is the great problem for the 
 authorities to solve 5 for the morale of armies depends directlj^ 
 
 A 2
 
 4 Speeches on Army Reform. 
 
 on the confidence wliicli they feel in the sj)irit which rules 
 the distribution of rewards.' How do our authorities solve 
 that problem ? The high officer of State, who is charged with 
 the discipline of our army and the appointment and advance- 
 ment of its officers, defends the system of promotion by 
 Purchase on the express ground that he is unequal to the 
 responsibility of selecting the commanders of our battalions ! 
 There are strong indications of a determination to resist 
 any essential change ; and no wonder, considering the enor- 
 mous interests involved in the maintenance of the status quo. 
 The Army Agents alone receive 40,000L a year from the 
 public, not one halfpenny of which should be paid after the 
 1st of April next. It is painful to think that such a job 
 should have outlasted the second year of a householder Par- 
 liament, led by a Liberal Government."^ But, when viewed 
 according to the ordinary rules of right and wrong, sense 
 and folly, the whole system appears so utterly indefensible 
 that, as far as I am aware, no first-class paper on either side 
 in politics has attempted to defend it since this controversy 
 began. I have, however, been told in private that I ought 
 to attack the Secretary of State for War, and not the Com- 
 mander-in-Chief, who is merely an executive officer. The 
 question is not one of attacking anybody. The duty of 
 public men at this crisis is, not to abuse the Minister, but to 
 point out to his notice, and to the notice of their country- 
 men, the obstacles which stand in the way of an effective 
 reform. One of those obstacles I believe to be the existence 
 in the most critical of all posts, with the patronage of the 
 army virtually in his hands, of an officer, powerful with the 
 prestige of long tenure of office and exalted social rank, who 
 makes no secret of holding reactionary opinions on the most 
 vital military questions. When we consider that this officer 
 advises the Secretary of War throughout the course of his 
 reforms, and will be charged with carrying those reforms 
 
 ^ That eminent public servant, Sir William Anderson, before the Army and 
 Ordnance Committee of 1850, throws a «lear light on the great cost to the nation 
 resulting from the complication of accounts, and the unnecessary increase of the 
 outstanding unproductive balances, resulting from the employment of the Army 
 Agents, His evidence, in fact, amoimts to this : that if the duties which these gentle- 
 men perform were withdrawn from them, and concentrated in our public depart- 
 ments, besides the great administrative advantages arising from the shortening of 
 oificial processes and the simplification of the public accounts, the country would 
 gain i^ccuniarily even thovc/k it continued to pay them 40,00()(?. a yceir for doing 
 nothing whatever. :-^'- ^^^ 
 
 Hi) 1^ ^ I
 
 Speeches on Army Refonii. 5 
 
 into practical execution, there is grave reason to fear that 
 the Government may take wrong measures, or half-measures, 
 (which in the affairs of war are the worst measures of all), 
 and that, after having wasted a Session and many millions, 
 we may find ourselves as far as ever from a rational and 
 durable military system. 
 
 There is nothing in these pages that can produce miscon- 
 ception, except in minds determined beforehand to mis- 
 conceive. While abolishing the sinecure colonelcies, I would 
 replace them with adequate pensions distributed by rule and 
 not by favour. For appointment by Purchase I would substi- 
 tute, — not systematic promotion from the ranks, (which Lord 
 Elcho, in his letter of November 28, appears to regard as 
 the sole alternative), — but the machinery which secures us 
 our own admirable Artillery and Engineer officers. And 
 in the place of advancement by Purchase I would adopt the 
 principle of Seniority, tempered by a large admixture of 
 Selection, which prevails in different forms and degrees in 
 the Prussian and French armies, and in our ISTavy, and Indian 
 and Home Civil Services. When told that the absence of 
 Purchase causes the block in the Ordnance Corps, I would 
 ask in what pigeon-hole the scheme of Eetirement recom- 
 mended by Mr. Childers' Committee, which gave such gene- 
 ral satisfaction to the officers of those corps, has been allowed 
 to lie for the past three years. Mr. Childers has carried the 
 principles of that scheme into effect in his own department ; 
 and the benefit which he has conferred on the sister service 
 should have shamed our military authorities into an act of 
 bare justice towards a body of officers who have borne 
 neglect, and the consciousness of a position and prospects 
 rapidly becoming intolerable, with a temper which shows 
 how little truth there is in the theory that public servants, 
 who have earned their position by open competition, must 
 be exceptionally self-seeking and obtrusive of their claims. 
 
 In conclusion, I am aware of having used some hard 
 words ; but I am consoled by noticing that, as one Member 
 of Parliament after another looks into the question, he ex- 
 13resses the result of his enquiries in very much the same 
 language. The last and worst among our administrative 
 abuses of the first ord^er will not fall before assailants who are 
 in the humour to pick pretty phrases. But the efforts af
 
 6 Speeches on Army Reform. 
 
 smaller men will be of little avail until some one who lias 
 already worked liis way into the Cabinet and the confidence 
 of the whole country can bring himself to lay aside all petty 
 considerations and stake his future upon the Reform of our 
 Army. 
 
 I, 
 
 EXTEACT FKOM A SPEECH AT SELKIRK, OCTOBER 11, 1870, 
 
 The first effect produced upon our country by the state of 
 things abroad has been to turn the attention of the press 
 and the public to our military condition. Everybody who 
 has ever been considered, or who has considered himself, to 
 be an authority on army matters, is coming to the front with 
 his scheme ; and it is no time for the advanced Liberal party 
 to be silent. Unfortunately that party has very little to say 
 upon army questions, and appears to imagine that those 
 questions are altogether out of its province. I remember 
 very well, on the eve of an army debate in which I was 
 personally concerned, asking a distinguished member of the 
 Liberal party to help us with a speech. He replied to the 
 effect that he wished our cause well, but that he was not 
 willing to take part in a discussion on military details. The 
 consequence of this abstention on the part of popular repre- 
 sentatives is, that up to this time the nation has had little or 
 nothing to say as to the concerns and interests of the 
 national army ; and, in the absence of the master's eye, (for, 
 however unpalatable that sentiment may be in influential 
 circles, I hold that the nation is the master of the army), 
 our military system has fallen into such a plight that it is 
 contemptible to all foreign observers, and lamentable and 
 hopeless to those among ourselves who know something of 
 its true condition. Hopeless it indeed is — absolutely hope- 
 less — unless the people of this country take into their own 
 hands the Military question, as they have taken successively 
 the reform of Parliament, the Corn Laws, and the question 
 of Religious Equality. If you continue to trust your army to 
 class mismanagemeni; — if you persist in regarding military 
 organisation and administration as distasteful subjects, un- 
 congenial to the mind of Liberal politicians — you will be 
 punished in two ways. First, you will spend every year
 
 speeches on Army Re/or 
 
 in. 
 
 vast sums of money without getting your money's worth, and 
 at every periodical recurrence of panic, and every petty 
 colonial war, you will be called upon for an enormous addi- 
 tional outlay, the amount of which no man can name : for 
 under the present system our army is an abyss into which 
 hundreds of millions might be poured without producing any 
 permanent benefit. And, secondly, if ever we have a real 
 war to the knife with a first-class Power — a war which shall 
 tax our resources to the utmost — we shall infallibly be over- 
 taken by a calamity such as no one who loves his country 
 cares to contemplate, A few facts are worth more than any 
 quantity of generalities. We have at this moment some- 
 tJaing between seventy and eighty thousand regular troops in 
 the island. We have, it is true, some hundreds of thousands 
 of Militia and Volunteers ; but lio one, who knows what is 
 what, believes for a moment that in their present embryo 
 condition our Keserve forces could be relied on to serve in 
 the field for a month together against regular troops. I 
 know nothing more cruel than the manner in which our 
 citizen army has been left without organisation, without 
 staff, without responsible and trained officers, without equip- 
 ment, and without enforced discipline, and has then been 
 taken to task for deficiencies which are none of its making, 
 It has supplied all that it could be called on to bring — zeal, 
 intelligence, and patience — a military virtue which it certainly 
 possesses in a high degree* It was for its rulers to provide the 
 rest. Well, then, with seventy or eighty thousand regular 
 troops, scattered among a multitude of tiny battalions, and 
 unprovided with any copious or efficient reserve for instant 
 supply of trained soldiers, we could at the most put into line, 
 on a fortnight's notice, forty thousand men. One year with 
 another, the French army costs about as much as our own, 
 and the Prussian army infinitely less ; and it certainly is no 
 exaggeration to say that the French and the Prussian War 
 Departments, on a fortnight's notice, actually put into line 
 of battle a quarter of a million and half a million of men 
 respectively. I say nothing of the preparations which we 
 have at hand for feeding and conveying our troops, for sup- 
 plying them with ammunition in the field, and for taking 
 them off it when they are wounded or sick. As to tlie de- 
 tails of our administration, it were well to read Lord Elcho's
 
 8 Speeches oji Army Reform. 
 
 letters, whose account of our military abuses is masterly 
 and exact, though, from what he has said on certain occa- 
 sions in the House of Commons, it is to be feared that he is 
 not prepared to adopt the essential remedies. But the men 
 themselves must be provided before they are fed, conveyed, 
 or cured ; and a beggarly account of forty thousand fighting 
 men is all the home defence we get for our thirteen or 
 fifteen millions of pounds a year. 
 
 We have compared our army with the armies of our foreign 
 neighbours. Let us look at home, and compare it with our 
 own navy. Since this Government came in, up to the com- 
 mencement of the present war, the War Department and the 
 Admiralty have diminished their estimates, the former by 
 about two millions and a half, and the latter by about two 
 millions. It would not be an unfair assertion that they have 
 both made a saving of 22 per cent. How was the saving made 
 in each case ? The Admiralty economised by adapting our 
 naval force to the exigencies of modern warfare, and rigor- 
 ously cutting ofi:' every source of expense which the march of 
 time had rendered obsolete and superfluous ; by making a 
 radical alteration in their system of buying and selling, and 
 introducing sound commercial principles into official transac- 
 tions ; and by reducing useless ofBces and paring exuberant 
 salaries. The Admiralty office began to cost steadily 12,000Z. 
 less every year. In the dockyards, while the wages of the men 
 were reduced twenty-seven and a half per cent., the salaries of 
 the officers were reduced thirty-eight per cent. Mr. Childers 
 went upon this principle, that everyone who was nominally 
 a fighting man should be able to fight ; so, by pensioning off 
 crowds of superannuated ship-keepers, officers' servants, and 
 others who, in naval parlance, are called idlers, and by in- 
 sisting that every Coastguardsman should be physically fit for 
 service, he diminished largely our nominal effective and our 
 actual expenditure, without dangerously lowering our fighting 
 force. Meanwhile he cashiered the old wooden ships by the 
 dozen, which in peace cost millions to repair, and in war would 
 have merely served as floating charnel-houses for their crews ; 
 and, by the simple expeclient of substituting for the old wooden 
 coastguard vessels fine ironclads ready for service within 
 forty-eight hours, gave us, as it were, a reserve Channel fleet 
 without a farthing of expense. And not only did he makn
 
 Speeches on Army Reform, 9 
 
 his economies without diminishing our force of men, and 
 while largely increasing our force of ships, but the rigorous 
 reform which he imposed on the a^dministrative departments 
 increased their efficiency and the simplicity of their action, 
 at the same time that it lessened their cost. That is the 
 sure reward of bold and careful departmental reform. Mean- 
 while, the War Department was engaged in sending about 
 their business twenty odd thousand effective soldiers. No 
 alteration was made in the system of buying and selling — 
 that self-same system which Mr. Baxter was engaged in 
 reforming in the sister department, amidst the almost unani- 
 mous approbation of the House of Commons. There was no 
 docking of salaries in high quarters that was worth the 
 naming. The immediate entourage of the Commander-in- 
 Chief continued to absorb sums which, when added to mili- 
 tary pay, show very largely by the side of the modest 
 appointments enjoyed by the admirals and captains employed 
 in our central naval administration. In point of fact, the 
 reduction in the army estimates was mainly due to a rough 
 sweeping deduction from our fighting strength — a very 
 proper measure, if proportional economies had been made in 
 other quarters, and if a machinery had been set on foot by 
 which the gaps in our battalions might have been at once 
 supplied in time of need, and those battalions supplemented 
 by an effective second line of battle. In the navy, the reduc- 
 tions fell upon the upper classes and the commercial interests 
 — on the high-salaried officers as well as the artisans, and on 
 the privileged contractors. In the army, they fell upon the 
 private soldier. And, in consequence, as long as things went 
 quietly, the Admiralty came in for very hard words from 
 people who had suffered, and who were influential enough to 
 make their voices heard, while the War Department got 
 nothing but praise. But, when the war-clouds began to lower, 
 the tables were turned, and people showed their confidence 
 in our naval administration by the strongest of all testimony 
 • — that of ceasing to criticise ; while everybody who had a 
 tongue or a pen came forward as an army critic or reformer. 
 We must not be too ready to blame Mr. Cardwell. 'No one 
 can possibly have worked harder, or with a more earnest 
 desire for the public welfare. But he is hampered by the 
 f(3tters which have hindered the action of every War Minister
 
 10 Speeches on Army Reform, 
 
 wlio has preceded liim. This is no time to mince matters. 
 There exists at the Horse Guards a very powerful influence, 
 which is exerted in a reactionary sense. As long as the 
 officer commanding-in-chief is opposed by constitution and 
 training to innovation, so long the tendency in the army to 
 reform will be effectually kept in check. Those among our 
 officers who wish to see important changes carried through 
 dare not speak out. His Royal Highness has great knowledge 
 of military detail, and high public spirit, but his ideas are not 
 in accordance with the necessities of the hour. The most 
 necessary preliminary for an effective reorganisation is to 
 place at the head of our army a soldier who is an intelligent 
 and an uncompromising reformer. From the day that such 
 a soldier (and we have such) is at that post, all the intelli- 
 gence and enlightenment which is at present latent in our 
 service will come to the front. The army will, so to speak, 
 turn its better side uppermost, and, to a surprising extent, 
 will reform itself. I have now been behind the scenes ; and 
 I know very well how hopeless navy reform would have been 
 if the Eirst Naval Lord had been an admiral strongly op- 
 posed to searching radical reorganisation, virtually irrespon- 
 sible to Parliament, and virtually independent of the First 
 Lord. I know very well that we have been told in Parliament 
 that the Commander-in-Chief is subordinate to the Minister 
 at War. He may be so in name. In reality, you cannot 
 alter by an Order in Council the position which His Royal 
 Highness has held for so many years ; nor can you turn him 
 into an army reformer by a stroke of the pen. 
 
 Mr. Cardwell has likewise to struggle against the insidious 
 but overwhehning strength of the Purchase system — a sys- 
 tem which does not allow of our withdrawing officers from 
 regiments where there are too many, or of transferring them 
 to our Militia and Volunteer regiments ; and which, therefore, 
 is an absolute bar to the amalgamation, in any degree, of our 
 various lines of defence. Conceive a state of things in which an 
 officer who, at the crisis of a war, was removed into a regi- 
 ment where his services were needed, lost upwards of thirteen 
 thousand pounds by' this token of the approbation of his 
 superiors ! Suppose the case of a threatened invasion. The 
 Militia would be crying out for trained officers ; but the Com- 
 mander-in-Chief could not transfer those officers from their
 
 speeches on Army Beforni. 11 
 
 regiments without inflicting on them fines of thousands of 
 pounds apiece. It is incredible that the people of this 
 country should endure a system which renders the army a 
 monopoly, and which in time of war places their own children 
 under the command of men who have purchased their way 
 to high responsibility. We have just now thrown open the 
 civil service to free competition. Our artillery and engineer 
 officers have long been appointed by free competition, and 
 those two corps are the admiration of Europe. I have heard 
 it said in the House of Commons, that the tone of our mess- 
 rooms would be lowered by throwing open the service to the 
 nation. If it is lowered to the tone of our artillery mess- 
 rooms, I for one should be very well satisfied. Our officers 
 should be appointed, as a general rule, from a military college, 
 to which they should enter by oi)en competition — as recom- 
 mended in the case of Sandhurst in the Report of the Com- 
 mission of Military Education — a Report which has met with 
 treatment which affords a painful indication hgw potent an 
 influence the worst military prejudices still exercise over the 
 action of our War Office. Till you abolish Purchase ; till yon 
 throw open as rewards to our private soldiers that immense 
 mass of minor civil appointments which at present are used 
 as an indirect method of corrupting our constituencies ; till 
 you make short service in the ranks the rule; till you do 
 away with the petty vexations and restrictions which marti- 
 nets love to inflict upon the soldier ; till you place at the 
 head of the discipline and promotion of the army a man who 
 has the new ideas at heart, you will never have a national 
 army ; and, what is more to the purpose at the present 
 moment, you will never have an efficient system of national 
 defence. You will go on spending your money like water, 
 and will get nothing in return but panic and humiliation. 
 You want men in authority who can act and dare ; who are 
 afraid of, or partial to, no classes or organisations or interests 
 whatsoever. Neither Volunteers, nor Militia, nor Yeomanry, 
 nor Pensioners should receive one farthing from the j)ublic 
 unless they are fit in all respects to meet an enemy in the field. 
 It is questionable whether payment by results to bodies in- 
 dependent of the public service is a success in the case of 
 National Education. I am sure that it is ruin in the case of 
 National Defence. Our army should be localised, not in name
 
 12 Speeches on Army Reform. 
 
 only, but in reality. Each regiment should be recruited from 
 a certain district, and quartered in that district while at home. 
 The Militia should be the second or third battalions of the 
 regiment of their own district, and there should be a free 
 circulation of officers throughout all the battalions of the 
 same regiment. When an officer in the Service battalion 
 wished to marry and settle, he should pass to the Militia 
 battalion, which would then be officered partly by professional 
 officers, and partly by young men of the neighbourhood, who 
 would have the obligation and the opportunity to make 
 themselves fully efficient. With our present army recon- 
 stituted on a local basis, and with 150,000 militiamen and men 
 of the Reserve organised under a permanent local Divisional 
 Staff, and amalgamated with the line, our country would be 
 absolutely safe from invasion ; and, before long, we should 
 find that the new system was as much cheaper as better than 
 the old. That the two main elements of the reform — the 
 abolition of Purchase and the shortening of the term of ser- 
 vice — will occasion certain and valuable economies, I am 
 bound to show to the Chamber of Commerce at Edinburgh 
 to-morrow week. 
 
 II. 
 
 ADDRESS TO A MEETING AT EDINBURGH, CALLED TO- 
 GETHER BY THE CHAMBER OF COMMERCE, ON OCTOBER 
 19, 1870. 
 
 I WILL preface what I have got to say by assuring anyone 
 who is at all nervous about what may be going to happen 
 that I am fully conscious that a Chamber of Commerce is 
 not a political assembly; and that I will take care that 
 no member of the Chamber, and no private citizen who 
 has come here under its auspices, shall be offended, even if 
 he should hold the most opposite party views from those 
 taken by myself. The* question of the army is not a party 
 question ; it is a national question. It is good that it is not 
 a party question, and it is also not good. Good, because, 
 owing to its not being an affair of party, we come to it
 
 Speeches on Army Reform. 13 
 
 as a res integra, without having hitherto got any prejudices 
 on the matter. Not good, because it has shared the fate 
 of all questions in this country which are not party ques- 
 tions — that is to say, it has met with pretty general in- 
 difference and inattention. It is most astonishing — I do not 
 hesitate to use a word that may seem impertinent and even 
 rude in an assembly of my countrymen — to notice the igno- 
 rance of the British public in regard to everything relating 
 to the army that is really essential to its organisation. There 
 is a great deal known about methods of drill, about the bores 
 for guns, about the glitter and cut of the uniforms, about 
 the pattern of rifles, and about the names and rank of the 
 officers ; but how much the army costs, and to what extent it 
 is efficient as compared with other armies, not much is known. 
 You may think, gentlemen, that administration is not a 
 proper subject for a Chamber of Commerce. But if adminis- 
 tration is not a proper subject, there is no doubt that finance 
 is ; and I will read you some remarks on the question of 
 finance, as connected with administration, which have been 
 made by one who has no superior in the capacity of a zealous 
 and acute administrator — Mr. Stansfeld, the Secretary of the 
 Treasury. Mr. Stansfeld, in the first Eeport of the Com- 
 mittee on War Office Administration, says : ' There are 
 two totally different conceptions of financial control between 
 which it appears to us necessary to choose. The first and 
 more or less traditionary one is that the administrative 
 departments are to be distrusted, watched, and checked, and 
 that the function of finance, from this point of view, is con- 
 fined to such watching, criticising, and checking their expen- 
 diture. The second and more modern notion of financial control 
 means the union of finance and administration, so that finan- 
 cial considerations may attend and determine administrative 
 policy from its inception, as well as control it in its progress.' 
 Finance as a mere check upon administration is the greatest 
 delusion among all the most dangerous delusions that have 
 ever beguiled the public. There is a limit to the notion of 
 having one department whose sole business it is to produce 
 efficiency, and spend whatever money it can screw out of an- 
 other department whose sole business it is to keep in check 
 the extravagance of its neighbour. You know well enough 
 what would happen if a private concern was managed on that
 
 14 Speeches on Army Eefor 
 
 m. 
 
 principle ; and it is exactly tliat which has happened in our 
 public offices. The real cause of the success of Mr. Childers 
 consists in his being a Minister who knows his own Esti- 
 mates ; and for the best of reasons, because his Estimates 
 were made to represent his administrative reforms, and not 
 his reforms to suit his Estimates. When he spoke to the 
 House of Commons — and I appeal to any of the members of 
 Parliament present on this point — it was evident that, while 
 he was using words, he was all the while thinking of the 
 things which those words represented. It is a fatal mark of 
 a bad administrator that he does not know the things with 
 which he has to do, but is familiar only with figures and 
 phrases. The proof that Mr. Childers and Mr. Baxter knew 
 what they were dealing with in substance, and not merely in 
 name, is that their economies are made proportionally 
 throughout every department of the Admiralty. You will 
 not find any particular item on which an enormous reduction 
 is shown ; but you will find honest saving upon almost every 
 item' throughout the whole expenditure, which fact repre- 
 sents the accurate knowledge that the administrators have 
 of the affairs they are administering. Therefore, I do not 
 hesitate to speak on administration to a Chamber of Com- 
 merce, because it is utterly idle to touch on finance unless 
 you deal with administration as a sister subject. Well, then, 
 what is the cost of our army ? In 1868-9 it stood us at 
 15,455,000?., or about fifteen millions and a half; in 1869-70 
 it cost 14,111,000L; in 1870-71 it cost within 25,000Z. of 
 thirteen millions ; that is to say, over these three years the 
 average cost has exceeded fourteen millions. The force of the 
 army in England at the present moment is — of field and 
 horse artillery, 180 guns, and 5,950 men to serve these guns 
 in the field. Several newspapers have made a calculation, 
 and discovered that these men are not sufficient to work the 
 guns in the field, and therefore they say, that instead of 180 
 guns, we ought to call them 120. Then we have 11,000 
 cavalry, and 57,274 infantry. The reserve of old soldiers of 
 any sort of efficiency is 8,000. These make up 82,000 men. 
 Of this number, 10,000 are scattered about the seventy- 
 eight depots, and are simply recruiting, and drilling, and 
 being drilled for regiments now in India. That leaves 
 us 72,000. We must then deduct ten per cent, for sick,
 
 speeches on Army Reform. 15 
 
 for recruits lately joined, for people employed as orderlies, 
 clerks, hospital servants, and other snch categories. The 
 entire force we have for fighting in England is thus 65,000, 
 of which it is certainly not too much to say that we should 
 require at least 80,000 men to secure Ireland, and to form 
 the nucleus of a garrison for those important fortresses, 
 where there are works and material of far greater military 
 value than in any foreign fortresses whatever — I mean the 
 works of Chatham, Plymouth, and Portsmouth. It is a very 
 small thing to say that we should require to take 30,000 men 
 for these purposes. That leaves us 35,000 men that we can 
 put in line for our fourteen millions a year ; exactly the size 
 of one strong Prussian corps at exactly twice the cost of the 
 entire Prussian army ! We talk about the maladministration 
 of Prance ; but in France — with all the unparalleled extra- 
 vagance — with all the certain waste and the suspected cor- 
 ruption — for an expenditure of fourteen millions a year the 
 Emperor put into the field a quarter of a million soldiers 
 ready to fight at the moment. Now, then, what Is the cause 
 of this state of things ? Eemember this, that war is a possi- 
 bility, and panics are a periodical certainty. If we had either 
 a panic or war we must put the country into a state of real 
 and not of seeming defence, and on our present system that 
 would cost us 'thirty millions a year: which in itself cuts 
 the ground from under the feet of those who maintain that 
 our system is tenable. 
 
 There is no more striking proof of the want of interest 
 displayed by the nation in the management of its own 
 military affairs than the existence of a notion that the 
 purchase system, with all its faults, is a cheap system. So 
 far is this from being the case, that the abolition of it 
 (besides being an essential preliminary for doing anything 
 in the way of army reform) would be the cause of great 
 and immediate economies. A bad system cannot be a cheap 
 one, any more than a corrupt tree can bring forth good fruit. 
 In the first place, our army is greatly over-ofiicered in all 
 corps where purchase prevails. In these corps there are 
 something over 2,900 ofiicers to something over 58,000 rank 
 and file, or 1 ofiicer to 20 men. In the Prussian army there 
 is 1 ofiicer to 49 men ; in the Austrian, 1 to 40 ; in the 
 French, 1 to 33. If in our own service we compare the
 
 16 Speeches on Army Reform. 
 
 purchase with the non-purchase corps, we find that, while a 
 regiment of Life Guards requires 27 officers to 407 men, two 
 batteries of Horse Artillery, containing very nearly the 
 same number of men, are officered to the admiration of 
 Europe by 10 regimental officers. We may look for the 
 cause of this in the evidence of some outspoken soldiers 
 before the Purchase Commission of 1856-7. General Sir 
 Thomas Franks says : ' If a man knows that, with very 
 little attention, and a smattering of knowledge, and lots of 
 money, he is certain to get on, he is not likely to pay 
 proper attention to his duties. I conceive that as long as 
 men think that money and interest will forward them in the 
 service they will not devote themselves to their profession.' 
 In fact, when a man has spent so much on his commissions 
 that the pay is barely the interest on his capital, he is apt 
 to feel that he owes little or nothing to the public. He has 
 bought his position. May he not do what he likes with his 
 own ? To expect a Captain and Lieutenant-Colonel in the 
 Guards, who has paid 8,500L for his rank, to stick to his 
 work in time of peace like an engineer or an artilleryman who 
 earned his commission by open competition, is as sanguine 
 as to ask an M.P. who has bought a rotten borough to show as 
 often on the division-list as one who has been returned gratis 
 by a large constituency. The principal expense, however, 
 of the system lies in the enormous sums paid yearly, partly 
 to compensate officers for their losses by purchase, partly to 
 facilitate the transactions connected with purchase, and 
 partly to enable officers to be promoted who cannot afford to 
 purchase. To meet these objects, the Half-Pay List has been 
 diverted from its proper function of providing for officers 
 invalided or out of employment for temporary reasons, and 
 swollen to the amount of 365,000Z. a year. We pay, besides, 
 73,000?. a year to generals, irrespective of their being em- 
 ployed, and 162,000L a year to the holders of honorary sinecure 
 Colonelcies — a horrid scandal in a hardworking practical na- 
 tion, where no one should be p^id except in the shape of wages 
 for the work which he is doing, or an impartial and certain 
 pension for the work which he has done. We have been 
 told that these Colonelcies answer to Civil Service pensions. 
 But the essential conditions of a pension are, that it should 
 be calculated on a fixed proportion to amount of salary and
 
 Speeches on Army Reform. 17 
 
 time of service ; that it should go by right, and not by favour; 
 and that it should not be paid at the same time as salary. 
 None of these conditions do the Colonelcies fulfil. Of two 
 Generals of equal service and merit, but unequal social posi- 
 tion and interest, one will get a sinecure worth 1,350Z., 
 1,800Z., 2,200^., per annum, while another will have to con- 
 tent himself with 25s. a day. And, so far from these so-called 
 pensions not being held at the same time as salary, there is 
 hardly a single high military officer in the War Department 
 of London who does not sooner or later enjoy his Colonelcy 
 at the same time that he draws his salary."^ In the same 
 way, giving unattached promotion without duties is a vio- 
 lation of the first law of judicious administration, which 
 demands that rank should always imply service — a principle 
 which Mr. Childers has vindicated in his recent sweeping 
 changes in a manner which has nowhere given so much 
 satisfaction as in the navy itself. Till we fix a working 
 establishment of officers from generals downwards, and pro- 
 mote only within that establishment, there will be no end to 
 expenditure and facilities for jobbery. Imagine a general 
 list of unemployed judges or bishops, and a vast staff of 
 ' unattached ' school inspectors, and commissioners of bank- 
 ruptcy ! Then the 27,000?. a year for distinguished services, 
 and the 155,000L a year for widows' pensions, are to a great 
 extent given to compensate officers who have not been lucky 
 enough to get honorary Colonelcies, and the families of 
 deceased officers, for the sums which have been sunk in 
 buying commissions. The abolition of purchase would put 
 
 * The pay of colonels of regiments is nowhere separately shown in the army 
 estimates, as retired allowances ought to be. The last time that it was picked 
 out from the separate regimental schedules it amounted to 162,050^. The 
 manner in which the accounts of our army are shown imposes on outside army 
 reformers the necessity of making the most laborious and delicate calculations, 
 and is an effectual protection to a system which can only be defended in the dark. 
 If the sums paid to the military officers at the Horse Guards in salaries, pay or 
 half- pay, honorary colonelcies, and other sources, were gathered into a single page, 
 the public indignation would be extreme. It is deeply to be regretted that this 
 great abuse, the fruitful parent of other abuses, has not been materially remedied 
 in the scheme of reduction and re-organisation of the War Office departments laid 
 on the table of the House towards the close of last session. The clerks suffer. 
 The immediate clientele of the Commander-in-Chief retains almost all its emolu- 
 ments. It is a real injustice to hard-working, responsible officers, such as the 
 Adjutant-General will be under the new system, that they should be shown in the 
 same list as His Koyal Highness's Military Secretary, the standing abuse of our 
 public service. 
 
 B
 
 18 Speeches on Army Reform. 
 
 an end to mnlcting officers of the means of providing for 
 their families. A widow would live far more comfortably and 
 independently on the 5,000L or 10,000Z. which her husband 
 has sunk on his commission, than on a pension of 50?. or 
 100?. a year. If anyone doubts that all this outlay is 
 intended in a great measure as compensation for losses by 
 purchase, let him read the Duke of Wellington's evidence 
 in 1833 before the Select Committee on Army and Navy 
 Appointments, and notice the effect produced by it on the 
 report of the Committee, and he will doubt no longer. 
 And, after all, it was only money thrown away ; for, instead 
 of benefiting the officers as a class, it went to swell the prices 
 of the commission market. If a commodity is allowed to 
 be sold, it wiU go for exactly what it is worth ; and every 
 boon you bestow on the army, from a good-service pension to 
 a few halfpence a day for forage, will show itself before long 
 in the increased price of commissions. You cannot raise the 
 pay of officers till you extinguish purchase. But the greatest 
 abuse connected with purchase is the payment, one year with 
 another, of 40,000Z. to the Army Agents, through whose 
 hands passes the money paid in these transactions, whether 
 secret or public, legal or illicit; for every penny paid 
 above the regulation price belongs to the latter class. The 
 officers' pay should be handled by the paymasters. Their 
 private accounts any banker should be glad to keep. All 
 that these gentlemen perform in return for the 40,000?. 
 a year extracted from the pockets of an unconscious public, 
 in the shape of transactions connected with purchase, had 
 far better be left undone. It is deeply to be regretted 
 that the interests of a few wealthy and influential indi- 
 viduals should, year after year, outweigh in the minds of 
 our Ministers the interests of the nation. 
 
 Let us see then how the account stands. The Committee 
 appointed by the War Office in 1857 calculated that purchase 
 could be abolished for 2,355,288?. Adding one-third for the 
 extra regulation prices, the compensation required would 
 amount to 3,140,384?. This calculation is certainly not 
 understated, for it was a calculation made in opposition to a 
 lower figure put forward by the army reformers of the day. 
 Abolish the army agencies, and you at once save the interest 
 on one-third of the capital sum required to abolish purchase. 
 Of the reduction which might be made in the number of
 
 Speeches on Army Reform. 19 
 
 regimental officers you may judge of by this, that Mr. Card- 
 well this year, in moving the Estimates, asked for 609,000/. 
 in order to abolish the rank of Ensign, and make a partial 
 reduction of officers ; and he promised a consequent saving of 
 148,000Z. a year — no bad interest, as he observed, on such a 
 capital. He had, indeed, omitted to take the over-regula- 
 tion price into calculation ; but even with this modification 
 the sum is very promising to those who wish to get rid of 
 purchase without injuring the interests of officers. Those 
 interests we must consult. It is the very tenderness shown 
 by British reformers for existing interests which renders 
 British reforms so solid and so durable. And now, to pro- 
 ceed with our account. The reduction in the number of 
 officers, the abolition of the army agencies, and the substitu- 
 tion of adequate pensions for the honorary Colonelcies, are so 
 many downright savings. We have, besides, as a field to 
 operate upon, the half-pay list, the widows' pensions, and the 
 payments to general officers, and for distinguished services — 
 a total sum of nearly 700,000Z. a year — on which* immense 
 economies would in time be made. The only _per contra items 
 are — the full-pay retirement, now amounting to 127,000L 
 a year, which would be largely augmented as the 1-egitimate 
 method of compensating officers for their past services ; and 
 the increase which, after the abolition of purchase, we should 
 be justified in making to the pay of our subaltern officers. 
 Placing one item against another, the most ordinary good 
 management would give us an annual saving which would far 
 more than pay the interest on the capital sum required to 
 abolish purchase. But to this we must add the vast indirect 
 economies which would result from taking affairs out of the 
 hands of a privileged class, and entrusting the command and 
 administration of our army to men who have earned, and 
 not bought, their way to the top of the tree. The military 
 men, who are employed in the Commander-in-Chief's office 
 in London, are the successful men of the army, many of 
 whom have profited by the existing system, and are propor- 
 tionably unable to see the defects of it ; ^ and the same may 
 
 ^ These gentlemen touch 21,500^. a year in addition to their pay, half-pay, 
 honorary Colonelcies, distinguished-service money, or whatever else thoy enjoy in 
 the way of stipends : while the three naval officers who assist the First Lord of 
 the Admiralty in parallel capacities arc content with 2,865^. for their collective 
 civil services. 
 
 B 2
 
 20 Sj'^eeches on Arniij Reform. 
 
 he said of tlie military members of the House of Commons 
 and tlie House of Peers, who, from the nature of their posi- 
 tion, are almost all men who have gained by a state of things 
 which favours the rich. Who can estimate the economy 
 that would result if every regiment and every military station 
 was superintended by an officer who had risen by merit, and 
 not by the length of his purse ? Of the increased military 
 security of the nation I do not speak, for we are now treating 
 of the cost of the present system, and not of its efficiency. 
 Happily, efficiency and economy are never at odds ; and in 
 insisting on the one, we shall invariably find that we are 
 promoting the other. 
 
 This holds in a remarkable degree with regard to the 
 manning of our army. Our habit of bribing soldiers to 
 return to the ranks at an age when they are just ceasing 
 to be useful as soldiers, and long after they have lost the 
 power of being useful as citizens, costs more money than 
 any other of our numerous administrative errors. General 
 Trochu, the first of living military authorities, forewarned 
 his countrymen that they were ruining their army by their 
 fondness for old soldiers — a fondness which is faint compared 
 with the passion for that class entertained by the Horse 
 Guards. None should be entitled to a pension except non- 
 commissioned officers who are kept for the instruction of 
 others, and men who have been disabled by wounds or disease 
 during their term of service. Beyond this, the whole sums 
 spent in pensions, second bounties for kits, extra pay on re- 
 engagement, goes to keep men in the ranks who had better 
 be out of them for their own sake, for the sake of the com- 
 munity, and for the sake of the army. This sum is startling 
 in amount. The charge for out-pensions for 1870-1 is 
 1,220,100Z. ; for in-pensions, 36,000/. ; and about 54,000L 
 more for the enrolment of pensioners under staff-officers : the 
 object of which is to get further work out of the old men, 
 and exercise a benevolent superintendence over them. Add 
 to this the kit-bounties and extra pay, and the share which 
 old soldiers have in the cost of martial law and hospital 
 treatment — a share ^very large, owing to the demoralisation 
 caused by long military service and military celibacy. 
 Martial law, and the expenses and pay of men in prison, 
 amount to the disgraceful figure of nearly 90,000Z. a year ;
 
 speeches on Army 'Reform. 21 
 
 wliile the hospital vote for 1870-1 is 247,500L, besides the 
 cost of the Contagious Diseases Acts, which would lose their 
 meaning when our army no longer contained a large admix- 
 ture of aimless elderly bachelors, but consisted entirely of 
 young men with their business to learn and no leisure for 
 dissipation — looking forward to returning to civil life by the 
 age at which a sensible man begins to think of marrying. 
 There can be no doubt that, if the Short Service Act was 
 vigorously worked by men who believed in it, the saving 
 would be three-quarters of a million a year. A soldier should 
 never be re-enlisted, except as a non-commissioned officer ; 
 and should pass in the reserve as many years at the end of 
 his time as the necessities of the service will permit. 
 Militiamen should be enlisted for twelve years, the first year 
 of which should be passed in the barracks. At the end of 
 the year the young man should have the option of continu- 
 ing in the militia — being called out for ten days or a fort- 
 night in the year — or of enlisting in the line. "Without the 
 preliminary year's drill you cannot make militiamen soldiers ; 
 and, when they have once been turned into soldiers by that 
 year's drill, the present period of annual training may be 
 very considerably shortened. To keep on foot a force of 
 150,000 militiamen, we should require an annual contingent 
 of something over 13,000 men. I have no fear that we 
 should get that number of young fellows to join a force 
 which they saw was a reality. I must earnestly protest 
 against the notion of adopting the ballot as a sort of poor- 
 law test to drive people into the volunteers. The last thing 
 the volunteer force stands in need of is increase of numbers ; 
 and to bring the volunteers into competition with the militia 
 is virtually to injure the latter force, which, after the regular 
 army, is the most trustworthy reliance of the country in time 
 of danger. To bear the terrible stress and hardship of a 
 campaign, men must be absolutely in the power of their 
 officers, and that no voluntary troops ever were or ever will 
 be. The militia should be officered partly by officers of the 
 line, taken from the first battalions of the regiment of which 
 theirs is the second or third battalion, and partly by local 
 officers who have patriotism enough to begin, like the men, 
 with a year's continuous service, of which, in my opinion, 
 six months should be spent in the ranks. The Prussian
 
 22 Speeches on Army Reform. 
 
 Landwehr is officered by officers of the regular army who 
 have left it while still fit for service, and by young men who 
 volunteer to serve one year in the ranks at their own ex- 
 pense, and have then obtained a certificate of fitness. We 
 must cease making our army a job and our reserves a toy. 
 The spectacle of officers holding commissions in two or three 
 corps at once, and going in for as much efficiency as will 
 earn 50s. according to the new scale of payment for military 
 results, is unique in the history of the world. The State 
 ought to ^^ the standard of efficiency, and insist that all its 
 servants should reach that standard. The force which I 
 have described is quite sufficient. With our fleet as a first 
 line-of-battle it is useless to multiply men beyond our powers 
 of organisation and administration, and beyond what is 
 sufficient for the defence of the country. We ought to gain 
 something by being the first naval Power in the world. In 
 order to utilise this amount of infantry. We should have at 
 lease fifty batteries of six guns able to take the field within a 
 fortnight. A wise Ministry of War will keep its scientific and 
 administrative services, and. to a great degree its cavalry, in 
 a far more matured condition than the mass of its infantry. 
 It is no time for delay. To set the new system going will 
 take years; but when once in full swing it will last for 
 centuries, and will every year go more smoothly and more 
 cheaply, because it is adapted to the wants of the present, 
 and not to the traditions of the past, and because it is 
 founded on our old national scheme of defence. To defer 
 taking out our policy of national insurance on the ground 
 that the immediate danger is past would be unwise if army 
 reform were a matter of a month. It is madness when it is 
 a matter of years. Again, the organisation must not only 
 begin at once, but it must be complete. Nothing conduced 
 so much to the ruin of the Emperor of France as his taking 
 one-half of a new system without having the determination 
 to accept it in all its parts. He relied on the Mobiles, but 
 did not venture to turn them into soldiers. And, in order 
 that the change should be prompt and complete, it should 
 be carried through ^by men who have their hearts in the 
 business. I tremble to think what would be the cost of 
 bit-by-bit reform proceeding under the auspices of the Horse 
 Guards. You cannot sew new cloth into that old garment.
 
 Speeches on Army Reform. 23 
 
 Do not comfort yourselves with the idea that a gradual and 
 quiet improvement is going forward. When army reform 
 begins in earnest you will hear it from one end of the king- 
 dom to the other. The first few months of administrative 
 reorganisation always make noise out of proportion to the 
 magnitude of the work. Experienced ears listen in vain for 
 the signs of that painful and difficult process. A Minister 
 who is to do anything should be surrounded by subordinates 
 who not only work with him, but are constantly urging him 
 to action in their own departments. If he is wise, he will 
 appoint such men, (especially among the officers who belong 
 to the profession with the administration of which he is 
 concerned,) that his function will be to regulate and restrain, 
 not to wring every successive reform from the very persons 
 who should initiate it. Such a band of administrators, 
 working around him with mutual sympathy and emulation, 
 will render his task, not light indeed, but possible, and will 
 encourage him to face cheerfully labour, criticism, and re- 
 sponsibility. • 
 
 III. 
 
 SPEECH AT A PUBLIC MEETING AT BRIGHTON, CALLED 
 BY THE LIBERAL ASSOCIATION, OCTOBER 23, 1870. 
 
 Since this subject was started, it is curious to observe how 
 few Members of Parliament have declared against the aboli- 
 tion of Purchase ; but among the criticisms which require 
 answer is a semi-official speech of Mr. Parker to his consti- 
 tuents at Perth. I call it semi-official, because that is the 
 only theory on which to account for a Liberal member speaking 
 at length on army matters, at a time like this, without 
 uttering one word of protest against the vast abuses which 
 disfigure our military system. No man has a right to com- 
 plain of having his figures and statements honourably 
 challenged ; and I would not object to anything which Mr. 
 Parker said about me, if he had only uttered on the same 
 occasion a syllable of sympathy for the cause. But, at a 
 time when we are fighting an uphill fight against a mass 
 of interests and susceptibilities in high places, it is very
 
 24 Speeches on Army Reform. 
 
 discouraging to be attacked in the rear by the representative 
 of a great Liberal constituency. And what does Mr. Parker 
 say ? He objects to my use of the expression ' tiny bat- 
 talions,' and wonders that anyone can cavil at our War Office 
 adopting the system of small battalions with a full staff of 
 officers, because the German army system consists of small 
 battalions and large reserves. But my complaint was that 
 we have taken only one half of the German system. We have 
 got the small battalions : but where are our large reserves ? 
 And Elcho answers ' where ? ' in his admirable letter to the 
 Times, which anyone who compares the War Office proceed- 
 ings of the last two years with the great Prussian re-organ- 
 isation of 1860 should be condemned to learn by heart. Mr. 
 Parker then goes in for showing that the reductions after all 
 were no reductions at all, because all that has been done is 
 to let the annual waste of the army go on without repairing 
 it by recruiting. To use his own expressions, 'Critics on 
 this point appear to have forgotten that the army, like the 
 human body, is undergoing a continual process of change — 
 wasting away, and repairing itself.' What we urge is, that 
 the British Army (which, by the bye, is very unlike the human 
 body in this respect — that it has two heads instead of one) 
 was wasting away and was not repairing itself either by 
 recruiting or by the far preferable method of strong reserves. 
 Mr. Parker complains that Lord Enfield accuses the War 
 Office of having got rid of 20,000 trained soldiers. ' No,' says 
 Mr. Parker (rather uncivilly), ' this is a total misstatement. 
 What we did was simply this : we stopped recruiting, and 
 by the natural process of reduction, our army decreased by 
 the numbers which were intended.' And this to a Scotch 
 audience ! Why, if we only stop recruiting for ten or 
 fifteen years, by the natural process of reduction we shall have 
 arrived at having no army at all ; and yet, as Mr. Parker 
 truly says, we should not have discharged a single efficient 
 soldier. Next, Mr. Parker is very severe on me for praising 
 the Admiralty for having reduced its own office at the rate of 
 12,000?. a year; while I take no notice of a ' scheme for the 
 future, towards which the War Office proposes working, which 
 will effect a saving of 60,000Z.' There lies the whole case. 
 We had rather have the 24,000?. which the Admiralty has saved 
 than the 60,000Z. which the War Office is going to save -, for
 
 speeches on Army Reform. 25 
 
 the War Office has too often shown an incapacity to take the 
 step which leads from intention to action. It is going to 
 reduce itself to the tune of 60,000?. per annum ! Eighteen 
 months ago it was going to insist on the efficiency of volun- 
 teer officers, ' whatever their social status.' It was going to 
 remodel Sandhurst on the principles of exclusive appoint- 
 ment by open competition. It was going to adopt at Chelsea 
 the scheme which Parliament so warmly approved of for 
 Greenwich, and the result of which has so far exceeded the 
 expectations of Parliament. There was a rumour that it 
 was going to discontinue paying 40,000?. a year of the 
 national money to the army agents to remunerate them for 
 being good enough to make their fortunes by banking. It 
 was going to do away with the rank of cornet and ensign. 
 Everything at the War Office is going, and nothing is gone, 
 except the Assistant Under-Secretary, who was a thorough- 
 going opponent of Purchase. A few hostile questions in the 
 House of Commons ; a few anonymous letters in the news- 
 papers ; a few days of active remonstrance or passive obstruc- 
 tion on the part of the Horse Guards ; — and the reform which 
 has been promised or foreshadowed is referred to a Commission 
 or a Departmental Committee, and question after question 
 which is ripe for practical solution goes back into the sphere 
 of endless and fruitless discussion. The fact stands that the 
 second year is drawing to a close, and that the War Office 
 has not yet begun putting a stop to a state of things under 
 which professional merit has to yield to money. As long as 
 Purchase exists it will be impossible to carry out the amal- 
 gamation of the militia and the line as battalions in the 
 same regiments — a plan which is warmly advocated by leading 
 journals, and which is sure to approve itself to Mr. Cardwell 
 as the only method of defending the country without in- 
 curring ruinous expense, and greatly exceeding our require- 
 ments in the number of men. For, in the first place, to obtain 
 this end we must have absolute free trade in officers between 
 the line and the militia ; and, in the next place, you cannot 
 possibly call on the nation for the sacrifice which the increase 
 and reorganisation of our militia would imply as long as the 
 command of our army is practically a class monopoly. When 
 I saw a Liberal Government letting year after year pass with- 
 out pronouncing against the Purchase system — when I saw a
 
 26 Speeches on Army Reform. 
 
 Ministry, which has thrown open the Civil Service to the elilQ 
 of the nation, keep the army as a close preserve for the 
 wealthy and influential, — then I expressed, what is still my 
 belief, that Mr. Cardwell is trammelled in his action by 
 Horse Guards influences; and when Mr. Parker denies to 
 the country the consolation of this belief, I do not think 
 he is doing good service to those whom he defends. 
 
 Before leaving this subject I must notice some remarks of 
 Colonel Anson, of whom I wish to speak in all respect, — first, 
 because he is a distinguished soldier, and next, because he 
 supported the abolition of flogging in the army. Colonel 
 Anson says, in a letter to the Times, that Mr. Trevelyan 
 ' roundly abuses a Royal Duke.' Now, these exjDressions do 
 not at all represent the manner in which I spoke of the Duke 
 of Cambridge. What I did say was that, with all his high 
 public spirit and great knowledge of military detail, the ideas 
 of His Royal Highness were not in accordance with the ne- 
 cessities of the hour. But even this much I could not have 
 said without a grave breach of private decorum, and without 
 forfeiting the right to be listened to when speaking on a public 
 topic, unless I had been prepared to make my words good. 
 Now, what is the first necessity of the hour ? What is the 
 paramount duty of the man who is charged with the for- 
 tunes and honour of the whole kingdom ? Surely to select 
 the officers who are to lead our soldiers in time of stress 
 and peril ! The Commander-in-Chief, giving evidence before 
 the Purchase Commission, is asked, 'Do you think this 
 principle of selection, which is applicable to colonels of 
 regiments, is applicable also to lieutenant- colonels ? ' He 
 answers, ' I think not. It is perfectly applicable to colonels.' 
 He is again asked, 'Will you explain to the Commission 
 why that which is applicable to colonels could not be ob- 
 served with regard to lieutenant-colonels ? ' He replies, 
 ' Because the colonel does not command a regiment. He is 
 merely the nominal head, and he is selected for services 
 performed in former days, and it is a reward for services. 
 Therefore it is a much easier thing than selecting a man to 
 be actively employed* at the head of a regiment.' And 
 therefore, because His Royal Highness cannot undertake 
 the responsibility of appointing officers to command our 
 battalions, these all-important duties are to be allotted
 
 Speeches on Army Reform. 27 
 
 according to the criterion of the longest pnrse. Why, the 
 Admiralty does not shrink from nominating commanders to 
 twice as many ships as there are lieutenant- colonels ! If the 
 country is ever invaded, where shall we be, when for a long 
 series of years those in authority have had recourse to 
 naming the richest men to the most critical of all commands, 
 because they cannot undertake the task of naming the best ? 
 And recollect that the generals who will be entrusted with 
 brigades and divisions, and the general who will have the 
 charge of the operations of the whole army, must be taken 
 from the list of lieutenant- colonels who owe their position 
 to money and not to merit. Then again, when Purchase is 
 abolished, and the officers compensated, it will be a necessity 
 of the hour to have at the head of the army a man who knows 
 how to keep the vicious system from reviving. Purchase 
 will be entirely illegal then, just as any payment from officer 
 to officer above the regulation price of commissions is illegal 
 now. His Royal Highness was asked whether he was aware 
 of the payment of the over-regulation prices. • He replies, 
 ' We never know anything about the excess on the regula- 
 tion price. It is done unknown to us. I am afraid it is done ; 
 but quite unofficially. I positively know nothing about it ; 
 but of course I have been long enough in the service to know 
 that such things are done, and I am sorry that they are done.' 
 Truly a nice school of honour in which to bring up our young 
 officers ! This, at any rate, if nothing else, we borrow from 
 the laws of Lycurgus, that we encourage our young Spartans 
 to engage in a questionable traffic if only they can escape 
 detection. Again, His Eoyal Highness, when asked by the 
 Commissioners on over-regulation prices whether any means 
 could be devised of checking this abuse, replies : * I should 
 be delighted, as far as I am concerned, and those connected 
 with me, if anybody could suggest any means by which it 
 could be put a stop to. I am sure that I should be the first to 
 jump at it. But I admit, at the same time, distinctly before 
 this Committee, that I am at a loss to know what rules or 
 regulations could be laid down to prevent a larger sum than 
 the regulated price being paid, because, where money is 
 concerned, it is between man and man, and it is impossible 
 for any authority to check it.' But compare with this what is 
 said by the late Sir Alexander TuUoch, who suggests that
 
 28 Speeches on Army Eeform. 
 
 vacant steiDS, arising from the sale of a commission, should 
 be filled, not by succession in the regiment, but by some of 
 the officers who are seniors for purchase in the general list 
 of the army. ' The immediate results of such an arrange- 
 ment would be that the retiring officer, not knowing who 
 was likely to be his successor, could make no bargain for any 
 sum above the regulation price.' If this had been judiciously 
 done from time to time, without preliminary warning, by a 
 Commander-in-Chief who was determined to know, officially 
 or unofficially, whether over-regulation prices were paid or 
 not, the system would long ere this have died away. When 
 Mr. Cardwell has abolished Purchase, I am afraid he must 
 get some one who disbelieves in the Purchase system, and 
 knows how to deal with it, or we shall have it back again 
 before many years are out. Again, the essential preliminary 
 to efficient reorganisation is to get the whole War Office 
 under one roof. The first step in Admiralty Reform was to 
 bring as much as possible of the Somerset House staff into 
 the closest possible proximity with the Whitehall branches, 
 at the cost of considerable inconvenience to the gentlemen 
 concerned, who bore that inconvenience in a manner which 
 does great credit to their public spirit. When examined 
 on this topic His Royal Highness said : ' I can say I never 
 found the slightest inconvenience arising from the circum- 
 stances that the War Office was in Pall Mall, and the Horse 
 Guards at Whitehall. I do not know how any inconveni- 
 ence can arise. The duties in the War Office and our duties 
 in the Horse Guards are so distinct that there is no ne- 
 cessity for our being under the same roof, that I can see. 
 Not the slightest.' And again, when asked, ' Do you think 
 there would be any advantage in bringing the War Office 
 nearer the Horse Guards ? ' he replies, ' Not the slightest. 
 I see no disadvantage in our remaining just as we are ; and 
 I never could see any objection to it.' Read, side by side 
 with these expressions, the able Reports of Lord North- 
 brook, Mr. Stansfeld, Sir Edward Lugard of the War Office, 
 and Sir William Anderson of the Treasury. These gentle- 
 men say : ' Although 'the double offices which were once 
 concerned with the administration of the army are now 
 placed under one responsible Minister, the tradition remains ; 
 and both within the walls of the War Office itself, and 
 more especially between the War Office and the Horse
 
 Speeches on Army Reform. 29 
 
 Guards, the liabit is still to prefer a system of unnecessary 
 clieclv, double labour, and divided responsibility, to one of 
 well-defined responsibility, simplicity, and reasonable con- 
 fidence.' It is evident that at the bottom of their hearts 
 Mr. Stansfeld and Lord Northbrook are pretty much of my 
 mind as to the value of the Order in Council declarino^ the 
 War Minister to be sole master. Of course you cannot by 
 a mere i])SG dixit alter the relation to others which a person 
 of His Eoyal Highness's rank has maintained through a 
 long course of years. Again, if we desire to have a truly 
 national army, we must make it our endeavour to elevate 
 the moral being of the soldier, and cause him to respect 
 himself, and so win for his calling the respect of the mass 
 of his countrymen. Among all the measures which during 
 the few last years have been proposed or adopted for im- 
 proving the condition of the British private, nothing has 
 contributed so much to remove the distaste with which the 
 working classes once regarded a soldier's career as the aboli- 
 tion of flogging. That degrading punishment was forbidden 
 in peace by a majority of the House of Commons during the 
 year 1868, and from the nature of the case it was virtually 
 impossible for the House of Lords to reverse that decision. 
 But, though it could not be reversed, it was discussed and 
 criticised ; and Hansard reports a speech in which His Royal 
 Highness expresses the strongest regret and dissatisfaction at 
 the course taken in the Lower House ; and remarks that, 
 ' Since garotting had been visited with flogging they had fewer 
 cases of that crime than before.' Now these utterances are im- 
 portant in themselves, and doubly so as manifestations and 
 outward symptoms of the spirit which governs the every-day 
 administration of the Horse Guards. It is no abuse of His 
 Royal Highness to say he is wedded to the old system ; and 
 no Minister, unless he is prepared to see his policy hopelessly 
 wrecked, will commit to those who are wedded to the old sys- 
 tem the charge of introducing and working the new. It is not 
 in human nature it should be otherwise. 
 
 Colonel Anson objects to my quoting General Sir Thomas 
 Franks against the Purchase system. It was not from lack 
 of distinguished authority. Sir de Lacy Evans and Lord 
 Clyde were no drawing-room soldiers ; and Sir de Lacy was 
 the leading assailant of the Purchase system in Parliament ; 
 while Lord Clyde stated in evidence before the Purchase
 
 30 Speeches on Army Reform. 
 
 Commission that he would confine appointments in the army 
 to the successful competitors in an open examination. And 
 Sir William Mansfield, who served as Lord Clyde's chief of 
 the staff in the Indian campaign ; who lately commanded in 
 chief in India, and who now holds the same office in Ireland ; 
 who has proved himself a master both in the field and in the 
 bureau, — Sir "William Mansfield says straight out that he 
 would ' democratise the army, by inviting the people to the 
 army according to broad principles of utility, and the motives 
 by which men of all classes are induced to choose their 
 lines of life. I am sure,' he says, ' that, until this is effected 
 by some means or other, we shall go on patching at our old, 
 worn-out, and, in a certain sense, discreditable institutions, 
 without getting at the heart of the nation for military 
 purposes.' Colonel Anson objects to my computation of the 
 expense of abolishing Purchase as far too low ; and his 
 objection is endorsed by some ardent reformers who appear 
 to like to rate as high as possible the sacrifice they would 
 face in order to get rid of a bad system. But Colonel 
 Anson must know that the computation was not mine, 
 but that of a War Office Committee including Sir Henry 
 Storks ; and that it was not put forward as an inducement 
 to abolish Purchase, but was an official counter-calculation to 
 a much lower calculation put forward by an opponent of 
 Purchase. Colonel Anson makes the usual mistake of ima- 
 gining that we should have to pay every farthing sunk in 
 commissions. This could not happen unless the army was 
 disbanded at once. Sir H. Storks and the War Office Com- 
 mittee, having, as responsible men, to prepare a computation 
 which, in case of the abolition of Purchase, would either be 
 confirmed or discredited, took into account all the chances of 
 death or promotion ; and by their computation I shall abide 
 till provided with a better. To judge by the tone of public 
 meetings and the press of the United Kingdom, the country 
 is prepared to pay the necessary price, whatever that price 
 may be ; and no wonder. If the Imperial correspondence 
 which has been so mercilessly overhauled at Paris by the 
 Provisional Government brought to life even five or six such 
 pecuniary transactions as occur by hundreds every year in 
 our army, all the newspapers of Europe would say that such 
 revelations fully accounted for the disasters of the French 
 arms. And yet Colonel Anson thinks that ' the question of
 
 Speeches on Army Reform . 31 
 
 Purchase in the army might well be left for discussion in the 
 House of Commons.' It has been left so far too long. How 
 can the House of Commons take an unprejudiced view of this 
 subject when all the military men in that House belong to 
 the classes which profit by Purchase ? Hitherto army re- 
 formers have always been met, in that House, by wholesale 
 charges of ignorance of military detail. Last session a member 
 who had spoken forcibly and justly against a job at the 
 Horse Guards, was considered to be sufficiently answered by a 
 remark that he had used the words ' Commander-in-Chief 
 instead of ^ Field-Marshal Commanding-in-Chief.' It is not 
 by such paltry jeers that the nation, in the person of its re- 
 presentatives, will be deterred from taking a far different 
 interest from what it hitherto has done in its own army. 
 There are unmistakeable signs that a national interest in 
 the question is rapidly awakening. All the truest liberalism 
 in the House of Commons is fast declaring itself against the 
 existing system. The Liberal Associations of Leeds, Birmin g- 
 ham, and Liverpool are only waiting till they hate arranged 
 the important business connected with the election of school- 
 boards to hold meetings on army reform at those great 
 political and commercial centres ; and the National Reform 
 Union will hold a meeting at Manchester at the beginning of 
 next month. And when the nation has once opened its eyes, 
 there will be a speedy end of a system in which efficiency is 
 sacrificed to idle show, and worth and capacity are nothing 
 without a large balance at their bankers'. To enable Parlia- 
 ment to pronounce itself for or against a truly national 
 system, I shall lay before it, probably on two different occa- 
 sions, the following resolutions : — 
 
 1. That, as an essential condition of any effective re- 
 
 organisation of the army, the Sale and Purchase of 
 Commissions should be extinguished. 
 
 2. That the tenure of the Command-in- Chief should be so 
 
 arranged that the Minister can freely avail himself of 
 the best administrative talent from time to time 
 existing in the British Army. 
 
 3. That the battalions of the line and the militia should 
 
 forthwith be brought together into regiments, and 
 that those regiments should be united in brigades, 
 divisions, and corps, on the basis of local organisa- 
 tion ; and, as far as possible, of local recruitment.
 
 32 Speeches on Army Reform. 
 
 4. Tliat the militia battalions should be officered by officers 
 
 of the line, and partly by militia officers who have 
 passed through a course of professional training at 
 the head-quarters of the regiment resembling that 
 obtaining in the Prussian army in the case of the 
 one-3^ear volunteers. 
 
 5. That the men of the militia should be enlisted for not 
 
 more than twelve years ; of which the first year should 
 be passed in continuous service at the head-quarters 
 of the regiment. 
 
 G. That as long as our navy is in an efficient condition, it 
 will not be necessary to increase the number of the 
 militia beyond what would raise each of our existing 
 line regiments to the strength of three battalions. 
 
 7. That the military, social, and financial interests of the 
 country demand that short service in the line should 
 eventually be the rule of our army. 
 
 lY. 
 
 ADDRESS TO THE NATIONAL REFORM UNION AT 
 MANCHESTER, DELIVERED ON DECEMBER 6, 1870. 
 
 The profound impression produced by the successes of the 
 -German armies will do us a great deal more harm than good 
 if we draw from them the wrong deductions, and apply the 
 lessons to be learned from those successes to the gratification 
 of our national vanity. There are two ideas now prevalent 
 which we must learn to correct as soon as possible, or we 
 shall only plunge still deeper into the bad courses in which 
 we are now moving. The first, and most fatal, of these 
 notions prevails widely throughout all ranks — the notion 
 that the Prussian army is ' a citizen army,' ' a national 
 army,' in which quantity goes for more than quality ; that 
 every Prussian citizen is a soldier ; and that the best thing 
 we can do is to set to work and subject every man in the 
 United Kingdom to a certain amount of drill. So far is this 
 from being the true solution of our difficulties, that we have 
 actually at this momejit many more men in the receipt of a 
 certain amount of drill than we could brigade, victual, and 
 equip with artillery in such a fashion as to make them
 
 Speeches on Army Reform, 33 
 
 formidable in tlie field. When an enemy is already in 
 triumphant possession of a part of the national territory, a 
 brave and patriotic citizen force, however badly organised to 
 begin with, soon becomes formidable enough to be of service. 
 For the purpose of repelling an invader so promptly and 
 effectually that the country shall not be overrun, the trade 
 ruined, the finance bankrupt, and the social machinery 
 brought to a standstill, every soldier in the country should 
 be a man carefully drilled, bound to military service during 
 a definite period in peace and war, absolutely in the hands of 
 ofiicers who have received a thorough professional training, 
 and in their turn are absolutely in the hands of the superior 
 military authorities. The State should not contribute to the 
 support of any soldier or officer who does not fulfil these 
 conditions. Eighteen months ago we were promised, in the 
 speech introducing the army estimates, that every officer in 
 our reserve forces should be made efficient, ' whatever his 
 social status.' And yet to this day many of our volunteer 
 companies are officered by overworked members of Parlia- 
 ment or men of business who can never spare a dS.y to learn 
 their duties ; while it is no uncommon thing for gentlemen 
 to hold commissions at the same time in the militia, the 
 yeomanry, and the volunteers, or in some two out of 
 the three. It is simply inconceivable that the State 
 does not announce its intention of fixing a minimum of 
 military knowledge, and insisting on every officer coming up 
 to that minimum, even if he were the most influential con- 
 stituent of the warmest supporter of the Government. Some 
 journals have remonstrated with me for not including the 
 volunteers in the resolutions I propose to lay before the 
 House. My answer is that there must be some limit to the 
 extent of a scheme brought forward by a private member, 
 and that there are others far more qualified than myself to 
 suggest the machinery by which our volunteer army should 
 be organised and administered. On one point we must clearly 
 insist : that a standard of efficiency, physical and professional, 
 shall be set up, to which all volunteers must conform, whether 
 officers or men ; and that the State shall not pay a halfpenny 
 for any man unless the State itself had approved him as a 
 soldier, and unless he was prepared to give the State an 
 effectual claim on his services, whether in peace or war. 
 
 c
 
 o 
 
 4 Speeches on Army Reform. 
 
 Unless I am miicli mistaken in the volunteers, sncli a claim 
 they are prepared to give. They are tired of playing at 
 soldiers, and are everywhere asking to he weeded, armed, 
 equipped, instructed, brought under stricter discipline and 
 more defined responsibilities, and given their fixed and 
 recognised place in a working organisation. The truth is 
 that in Prussia the War Office, conscious as it must he of its 
 extraordinary powers of administration, is far too sensible to 
 dream of making every citizen into a soldier. No adminis- 
 trative system, however perfect, could prevent an army so 
 constituted from turning into a helpless mass. The Prussian 
 conscription takes only as many young men as will keep the 
 regular army at a figure well within the resources of the 
 country to support and of the Government to organise. 
 After three years' service these same young men go for four 
 years into the reserves, and then into the Landwehr. The 
 young men who are not called on to serve in the regular army 
 are liable, indeed, to be drafted in as recruits in case of a 
 long war ; and in the event of a great national agony, a 
 levee en masse might be ordered through the medium of the 
 Landsturm. Still it should never be forgotten, speaking 
 roughly but correctly, that the Prussian army is not a 
 citizen army, but an enormously large short-service army, 
 and that the Prussian militia is composed of men still in the 
 prime of life, who have served in the regular army. We 
 should not aim at a slavish introduction of an exotic system, 
 but, keeping to our old methods of national defence, we should 
 imitate the Prussians in this, that we should have no more men 
 than we want, and have those well in hand. With our powerful 
 fleet, which renders it impossible for an enemy to throw 
 more than a couple or so of army-corps on our coast, except 
 under circumstances which would give us ample time for 
 preparation, we should content ourselves with having our 
 militia really efficient and well officered. Such a militia, 
 150,000 strong, might be maintained at the cost of a yearly 
 draft of 13,500 militiamen, every one of whom should begin 
 with a year's continuous drill. The country will submit to 
 these sacrifices only on conditions. The wretched mis- 
 government of oui» army must cease, and, above all, the 
 command of that army must be taken from the hands of a 
 class and restored to the nation at large. Do not imagine
 
 Speeches on Arniy Reform. 35 
 
 Englishmen will allow their sons to be taken for compulsory 
 military service as long as the brokers and the jobbers are to 
 arrange between them who are to lead our battalions. 
 
 I have told you of one incorrect notion of the Prussian 
 system, which prevails in the workshop and the counting 
 house. There is another which holds good in the backstairs 
 and ante-chamber of the Horse Guards, and that is, that the 
 Prussian victories are due to the army being officered on 
 strictly aristocratic principles. But we ought to adopt the 
 merits and not the defects of our neighbours, and there is 
 nothing which is so deeply regretted by enlightened and 
 liberal Germans as the gulf which separates the nobility 
 from the people. This distinction of classes, shown in a 
 thousand forms most vexatious and puerile, forms the only 
 real ground for the taunt of barbarism which France is so 
 fond of levelling against Germany. In marriage, in social 
 gatherings, in admittance to Court, the spirit of privilege 
 rules the German world; and the same spirit naturally 
 prevails in the army, though not to the same extent which 
 its English admirers and would-be imitators would have us 
 believe. But there is quite enough of it to justify the 
 words used at Bristol lately by Mr. Kirkman Hodgson, 
 when he said that ' never in the history of the world was 
 there such an instrument of Tory policy as the German 
 army. It was officered in such a manner as to make it the 
 most terrible and most lasting instrument any despot could 
 desire.' The author of the article ' Germany, France, 
 and England,' in the ' Edinburgh Review,' says : ' Prussia 
 is a country rigidly aristocratic, and we trust that the 
 adjustment which has led there to such admirable results 
 may be found to be, either in its earlier or later form, 
 applicable to our wants.' Does this mean that no plain 
 citizen is to hold a commission until all men of title and 
 family have been first served? Or is the real meaning 
 one worthy of a great statesman ; approved of by Lord 
 Clyde, Sir de Lacy Evans, Sir W. Mansfield, and the fighting 
 and working leaders of our army ; consistent with the policy 
 carried out by the present Government in the departments of 
 our civil service ? Does it mean that appointments are to 
 go to the aristocracy of education, and promotion to the 
 aristocracy of professional merit, and that wealth is to be 
 
 c 2
 
 36 Speeches on Army Reform.. 
 
 allowed to tell in so far only as it can provide the candidate 
 with a more thorough training for a competition open to the 
 entire nation ? And before we discuss whether we ought to 
 borrow the Prussian aristocratic system we must be sure 
 that we can borrow it. The German aristocrat is poor and 
 laborious, and, in obedience to the habits and traditions of 
 centuries, submits cheerfully to the strictest and most painful 
 military apprenticeship. Is this the sort of aristocracy we 
 get by the medium of the purchase system ? T have hitherto 
 quoted the opinions of the opponents of purchase. Let us 
 see what the Duke of Cambridge says before the committee 
 on army organisation. He says, ' I think a great many men 
 enter the army who really do not mean to make a regular 
 profession of it. I think they want to try it for three or 
 four years, and see whether they like it.' What would Von 
 Moltke think of young gentlemen who 'do not mean to 
 make a regular profession ' of the army ? We know what 
 was thought of them by the great King who has set the tone 
 of Prussian military men. When a captain who left the 
 army in expectation of marrying an heiress applied to re- 
 engage on the failure of his hopes, Frederic replied, ' The 
 army is not a public-house, where people may run in and 
 out as they please. Since this man has once left the 
 service, he can have no ambition, and I hate such officers.' 
 For good or evil the Prussian is a real aristocratic system ; 
 while ours is a plutocracy tempered by social interest. They 
 take men of birth. We take men of wealth, with a certain 
 special advantage for the fashionable. And what a spirit 
 it fosters ! I have heard an officer say in the House of 
 Commons that if you promoted a man who had been in 
 a village draper's shop, you would ' destroy the whole tone 
 of a regiment.' I am not for the wholesale promotion 
 of elderly sergeants ; but I never heard that the tone of 
 French battalions was destroyed by the advancement of 
 enterprising, clever young men like Hoche and Pichegru. 
 
 As long as officers purchase their commissions, you can- 
 not insist on their possessing the qualities demanded by 
 their special branch of the service. You cannot supple- 
 ment the money test by an effectual test of military capa- 
 city. The present war has shown the immense importance 
 that attaches to the existence of professional knowledge and 
 high moral and intellectual qualities in the subalterns of
 
 Speeches on Army Reform. 37 
 
 the light cavalry. They are detached singly on the most 
 delicate service. They require to be well acquainted with 
 practical geography and topography. They must judge 
 rapidly and accurately the strength of a fortified place ; the 
 number of troops that proximately are quartered in a region 
 of country ; the state of the roads, bridges, and defiles ; the 
 resources which a district could supply for the victualling of 
 an army. They must, above all, have the moral qualities of 
 prudence, consideration, and self-restraint, which alone will 
 enable them to traverse a hostile country with any hope of 
 safety for themselves or their commands. But, unfortunately, 
 in our light cavalry regiments the price of commissions ranges 
 very high, and we must put up with the men who can afPord 
 to buy them. This autamn, looking casually in the papers, 
 I noticed that light cavalry officers had in six instances been 
 punished by the police magistrates in the space of about as 
 many weeks. The case of misconduct at Edinburgh apparently 
 took place at the time of a royal visit, during which I sup- 
 pose the military were charged with keeping order in the 
 city. How often do officers of the E-oyal Engineers, who do 
 not purchase, appear before the magistrates? And how 
 would such cases be dealt with under the aristocratic system 
 of Prussia? When a certain Countess asked Frederic to 
 admit her son into his army as a good training school for a 
 dissipated young man, the King answered, ' I look out for 
 good officers, but the debauched ones I send packing. Such 
 people, of whatever rank, I think no acquisition to any ser- 
 vice.' The frightful revelations in the Bankruptcy Court as 
 to the state of the Royal Horse Guards some years ago ought 
 to have opened the eyes of the authorities to the conse^ 
 quences of keeping up certain regiments as a playground for 
 the idle, instead of as a workshop for the well-informed and 
 industrious. But the interests which are bound up in Pur- 
 chase are too powerful and too subtle to allow a stone of the 
 rotten erection to be touched. Purchase is the excuse for 
 paying 40,000L a year of the national money to the Army 
 Agents for doing work which should be done by the Regi- 
 mental Paymasters, or should never be done at all. Ear the 
 largest part of this gigantic sum goes into the pockets of 
 one firm, which is strong with the strength of ancient and 
 wide-spread influence and connection. Such a deliberate 
 sacrifice of public economy to private gain is a permanent
 
 38 Speeches on Army. Eeform. 
 
 reflection upon the spirit of British administration. Then, 
 again, it is impossible to touch Purchase without making- 
 arrangements for rewarding generals by means of a just and 
 impartial scheme of salary and pension, in which all shall 
 share and share alike. But such a scheme would involve the 
 absorption of the sinecure Colonelcies, by means of which one 
 man gets his 1,800Z. a year, while another struggles on with 
 what is comparatively a pittance. Nothing but the strongest 
 expression of the popular will in the House of Commons can 
 induce the Horse Guards to part with this enormous 
 patronage. We are told that these Colonelcies are to the 
 army what pensions are to the civil service. But the first 
 condition of a pension is that it should not be enjoyed at the 
 same time and in addition to salary. Sir G. Grey and Mr. 
 Disraeli have pensions of 2,000?. a year ; but while the one 
 was Home Secretary and the other First Lord of the Treasury 
 the payment of their pensions was suspended, and they got 
 only their official salaries. But at the Horse Guards the 
 Commander-in-Chief, in addition to his salary of 4,000L a 
 year, gets his colonelcy of 2,200L The Adjutant- General 
 has his 1,000L a year as a colonel, in addition to his 
 2,000L as a working official. While the military secre- 
 tary to the Commander-in-Chief, besides drawing 1,500Z. 
 a year as salary, gets his 1,000Z. for his sinecure. And 
 what duties does he perform in return for these emolu- 
 ments? Sir Edward Lugard, the Under-Secretary of State 
 for War, says : ' My idea is that the military secretary is the 
 mouthpiece of the Duke of Cambridge — his amanuensis — to 
 save his E-oyal Highness trouble.' So, in addition to a 
 private secretary and four aides-de-camp, we are paying a 
 man 2,500?, a year for being a mouthpiece and an amanuensis, 
 — for doing for his E-oyal Highness what is done for the Board 
 of Admiralty by a post captain of the navy on 300?. a year 
 and his pittance of half-pay ! And this state of things exists 
 in the War Office after it has been reformed according to 
 the newest lights ! What stronger proof can there be that 
 Mr. Cardwell is unable to carry out a liberal policy in the 
 teeth of Horse Guards opposition ? There is no use in army 
 reformers calling our army a class monopoly, unless they 
 give the country facts to prove their assertion. Sir John 
 Pakington said, in the House of Commons, that he was 
 sorry I had lent myself to the fallacy about the army being
 
 S2:feeches on Army B.efonn. 39 
 
 an aristocratic monopoly. ' Take up the Army List/ he said, 
 ' and read the list of names. There are not many well 
 known to Englishmen as aristocratic names ; bnt nine times 
 out of ten a lot of the oddest names that can be imagined. 
 Indeed, it always seems to me that the oddest names of the 
 country get into the Army List.' Yes, Sir John, but into 
 what part of it ? Into the list of generals and sinecurists ? 
 Into the favoured regiments quartered in the agreeable 
 places where fashion dwells ? Or into the hard-working regi- 
 ments which spend their time in unhealthy stations far away 
 from the haunts of pleasure and of influence ? The brigade 
 of Guards is the most fortunate branch of the service. The 
 pay is higher than elsewhere. An officer who commands a 
 company of the Guards gets 4s. a day more than an officer 
 who commands a company in the line. The Guards have 
 special allowances of a large amount. They are allowed to 
 manage their own recruiting and lios]3ital expenses out of a 
 lump sum paid by the State. The officers on guard have 
 5,000L a year from the nation to improve their table. They 
 have each a step in rank above an officer in the line who 
 performs parallel duties ; and in the services, civil, military, or 
 naval, precedence is valued (and I hope will ever be so valued) 
 more than pecuniary advantage. They are certain to be sent 
 wherever there is hard fighting, which is, indeed, among their 
 choicest privileges : but they are never despatched to deadly 
 climates or dull quarters. London, Windsor, Dublin, with 
 an occasional visit to Canada, give them the great advan- 
 tage of keeping constantly within the circle where good 
 things are going. In town they do not live in barracks with 
 their men, but are scattered about in lodgings, or in their 
 own or their fathers' houses. They have no difficulty in 
 obtaining leave of absence for shooting, hunting*, and foreign 
 travel. I have been told that an officer in command of a 
 company is frequently absent from his duties for eight 
 months out of the twelve. And to what class do these lucky 
 officers belong ? The number of titles affords a not unfair 
 test of the degree of wealth and social influence that exists 
 among any given body of individuals. Now, in the Army 
 List of 1869, among the 227 officers of the Foot Guards you 
 find one Prince, three Earls, three Viscounts, seven Lords, and 
 45 Honourables, (in all 59 titled men,) in the three regiments. 
 Now, (to contrast with those the social condition of the
 
 40 Speeches on Army Reform. 
 
 working officers), we will not pick onr regiments, but take 
 the first three that have one or more battalions on foreign 
 service. These three regiments have four out of their six 
 battalions quartered in India. They number between them 
 232 officers, and the only title which they have amongst them 
 -is one Victoria Cross. When once the nation has realised 
 these facts and figures, the system is doomed. The people 
 who have swept away so many monopolies, civil, religious, 
 commercial, political, and administrative, will not long 
 endure this monopoly of military position and emoluments. 
 They who have such a keen eye for privilege and injustice 
 in all other institutions of the State will awaken to the 
 knowledge that the purchase system is nothing more nor less 
 than an indirect but most potent methocl for keeping in the 
 hands of a class all that our army gives which is worth 
 having. And not only the bulk of the people, but the 
 fathers of the middle class, clergymen, men of business, 
 doctors, and lawyers, will come forward to claim for their 
 sons the birthright of Englishmen — the right of serving 
 their country, with a due expectation of advancement and 
 remuneration. I do not hesitate to say that, unless the 
 Government commences by clearing out the Horse Guards, 
 any plan of army re-organisation which they propose will be 
 a failure ; and any scheme for amalgamating the militia and 
 the line, unless it is grounded on the complete and instant 
 abolition of purchase, can be nothing but a nostrum. The 
 question is getting beyond the range of controversy. Every- 
 one who has heard both sides is convinced against the exist- 
 ing state of things, unless his eyes are blinded by personal 
 interest, or official predilections and habits of thought. The 
 opposition to reform has become hollow, obstinate, and selfish. 
 There is absolutely no great body of conservative feeling in 
 the country on this subject, such as exists on religious and 
 political questions. The nation has pronounced against the 
 Horse Guards theory ; and the hope of the party of reaction 
 rests exclusively on high social influences —influences which 
 have a fatal power as long as, in dealing with matters of 
 public import, leading men of both parties are swayed by 
 tenderness for their ovn career. 
 
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