in my opinion, secure a class of men superior to any who have hitherto been drawn into the regular service. Joining the Reserve would be, of course, perfectly optional with each individual man. The qualification should be high. The men should have served a certain number of years in the Volunteers; they should be recommended by their own officers and should satisfy the inspecting officer, and should come up to any standard which it may be thought right to impose. Their term of engagement should not be more onerous than that attached to the Army Reserve, which is, that they are liable to be called out only after a great national emergency has been declared, and to serve only for the campaign; and their reserve pay should be the same as that of the Army Reserve-viz. 6d. a day, or 91. 28. a year. It is not very material whether, after joining the Reserve, they should remain in the Volunteer service or not; but my own leaning is in favour of retaining them, if they wish to remain, in the Volunteer force, where they would continue to do the regulation drills and attend the usual inspection, and would, moreover, greatly strengthen the regiments to which they belong. Their mode of serving, in the event of their being called out, would be matter of further consideration. They might be formed into separate companies attached to the territorial regiments, of which they ought to form part, or they might be formed into regiments and brigades by themselves. A portion of their own officers would probably serve with them.

During the late Government a provision was made by which a reserve of officers has been established. To this reserve officers of all branches of the service are under certain conditions admitted. Many officers of Militia and Volunteers have already inscribed their names on the list, and have thus made themselves liable to serve in case of national emergency. The power of rapid expansion in case of war is essential both in the ranks and in the higher grades. From among the large body of English gentlemen who have served in the regular army and the militia, an almost unlimited number could be found to take up the various duties of the commissioned ranks. But in the lower grades our resources do not appear to be equally large or equally capable of rapid expansion. The present First Class Army Reserve amounts to only 22,000 men, and though it is an annually increasing body, yet it would be highly desirable to reinforce it from other sources, such as I have above suggested.

The difficulty of providing in the future proper officers for the command of Volunteer regiments and companies has often been alluded to. But it must be remembered that annually a number of officers in the prime of life will be now retired from the army with pensions from the State, men who are in every respect highly suited for such commands.

The adjutants and the drill instructors of the Volunteer force are now drawn from line battalions. It is not impossible that at some future

time the commanding officers of regiments may be similarly appointed. As the territorial system develops itself, field officers who retire from the service will frequently settle in the towns and counties with which they have been associated while serving in the army. Some addition to the retiring allowances of these officers, or some arrangement by which Volunteer service in command of a regiment may be allowed to count as employment, would bring a valuable class of men into the Volunteer force. An officer of experience and ability could make for himself an important position in many of our great provincial towns, and would find congenial employment in the command of its regiments of Volunteers.

I have endeavoured shortly to describe the characteristic elements of the Volunteer force as we find it in the twenty-second year of its existence, and to point out the probable lines of its future development. Not large increase of numbers, but increase of efficiency both in men and officers, and in all the various branches which give completeness to an army, should be the aim of those who direct its future career.

We may thus look forward to a time when we shali possess in our Volunteers a force which, though differing essentially in constitution and in purpose from the regular army, will rival it in perfect adaptation to the end in view, and will be a lasting guarantee for the safety of our native shores.

R. LOYD-LINDSAY.

HEREDITARY RULERS.

SINCE nothing is absolute, either in the world of science or that of politics, nothing irreverent need be intended towards one of the most ancient and respected dogmas of the British Constitution, in calling up for self-defence and public justification the venerated theory that certain legislative functions specially appertain to the descendants of ennobled families, whose ancestors by the private favour of the sovereign, or through public deeds of valour and statesmanship, received the distinction of nobility as a reward for their commanding genius, or as a tribute to their assiduous devotion to the person of the Crown. No doubt, when we attempt to investigate the original grounds on which this theory is based, we find ourselves confronted by sentiments in its favour which are of world-old origin. Are we then to judge of the merits of these institutions relying specially on their antiquity and on their coeval development with our general civilisation, or are we to break away from the sacred thraldom of the 'quod semper, quod ubique, quod ab omnibus,' and consider the principle of hereditary qualification for government solely on the ground of its modern utility and application to the wants of the present day?

No doubt we live in a utilitarian age. The greatest of institutions is on its trial-the dogmas of an ancient church, and its sanction to claim the undivided faith of the people, are daily called in questionthe absolute is everywhere being discarded; everything is treated as relative. Is it not then almost an act of wisdom in the interests of a cherished monument, that we should draw it forth to public gaze and defend its existence and its claims to general respect, not on the ground of some mystical atmosphere with which it may be surrounded, but on its own solid qualities, as representing in themselves something of those elements of continuity in the life history of a nation-something which has a necessary part and share in the physical function of the political body, and without which the social organism must either starve in some portion of its field of energy, or be thrown back to a ruder and less evolved form of development?

And if in this task we fail, from some flaw in our reasoning, some blot in the arguments with which we would wish to fortify ourselves in our old beliefs, should we for this reason retire discomfited from

the contest, and fall back upon the mystical argument of old? Certainly not. Unless the hereditary system can take its stand on the solid ground of general utility and suitableness to the best interests of the country, it is a simple potsherd-a broken vessel-its days are numbered —its kingdom must be taken from it and given to another. Lastly, if we do thus fail, is there no compromise (gentle word!) to be arrived at-no media via? Is heredity false in theory, bad in practice, ineradicably wrong in conception? This question we must clearly answer at starting.

The philospher who would sit quietly in his study and construct from the dry bones of his preconceived imagination the elements of a new world inhabited by a race of mortals or immortals, as the case might be, endowed with energies different from our own, and influenced by other surroundings, might well conceive a world fashioned after some fresh ideal. He would in his new system combine some pet abstract conceptions of ethics, some cherished dogma of his own philosophy; thus would he hand over to nature a new order of things in which both phenomena and noumena would be of his own creation, and the great world law of continuity might be unknown. Yet we live in no dream-world in England; and whatever may be the merit of abstract reasoning on the ultimate nature of things, and the search after ideal standards of human excellence, we English prefer to consider ourselves above all things a practical people; and, although we certainly eschew metaphysics in our political reasonings, we are none the less given to being influenced by sentiment; so much so that there is no single one of our social institutions about which there does not cling this halo; and there is scarcely any problem that we could argue about, either social or religious, in which we must not reckon with this highly indeterminate quantity.

A great writer lately departed was a true prophet of this order. To him ideas were great living entities. There was the kingly idea,' the aristocratic idea,'' the eternal established order of things.' He clothed them in his mind with symbols; the outward pomp and show of things were the raiment beneath which there lived a burning soul— the everlasting yea and nay.' Yet this is in truth nothing but transcendental imagery, although it has not lost its power of appeal to many minds, not withstanding the general materialism of the age.

There are still many who would rather not seek out for themselves, or have put before them, the grounds and reasons for their beliefs; these things which they have inherited would in their eyes lose half their almost sacred value, if we were to call upon them to justify the reasons for the faith which is in them. There is yet, however, another class, larger perhaps than the former, more energetic and with clearer views. To them no institution is good that does not satisfy the conditions of general utility; and, if they observe a falling off from this standard, they will put the institution or dogma, as the

case may be, upon its trial, and judge it by the hard canon of fact and evidence.

The schoolmaster and the iconoclast are abroad together; and it is no use either deploring the fact or raising the cry of sacrilege. The hereditary principle is one of those institutions which are most widely and generally menaced, and we must defend it if we can.

'Tis but a hundred years ago, and there yet lived in the minds of many the old-world belief in the theory of Divine right of kings. They worshipped, with the veneration of Russian serfs, the hand that disposed of their destinies. In England, it is true, this belief was rudely shaken in the seventeenth century; yet it died hard, and there were eminent ecclesiastics in the last century who did not think it beneath either their dignity or their intelligence to uphold the doctrine from the pulpit.

We must go back far into the origin of things to find the sanction for an old creed. The belief that the king reigned by Divine right, and that beneath him ruled the feudal lord, was an idea which was early ingrained into the mind of the people by the great co-equal of the Crown and Nobility-the Church. In early days there was a trial of strength between the two great ruling powers-the king and his nobles on the one hand, and the Church on the other. We all know how that contest ended in England. The early Reformation, which before all things was a political movement in Henry the Eighth's reign, was the answer which the Crown hurled back on the pretensions of the Church. The Church was signally defeated, and the Crown, vulgarly speaking, stepped into its shoes. The arbitrary act of an English king is become to-day a cherished dogma of the State, and from this period we date not a few of our civil and religious liberties. In those days the Crown was supreme in England, the various wars of succession had ended, and, except for family rivalries and party feuds, we hear no more in England of the country being divided against itself, in civil war over the rights of respective pretenders to the Crown, till the day when Charles found himself drawn up in battle array before the forces of the Parliament. It is from the Commonwealth that our real political history begins; yet its important features, so far as concerns the question we are discussing, do not commence till later, when the English aristocracy wrested from the Crown the political power it formerly possessed and held it over in trust for the people. This last condition of things we call in England Constitutional Government. We must, however, mark a difference in what was the state of Constitutional Government in its origin, and what it afterwards became.

The Peers and landowners, who in the name of the people rightly dispossessed the Crown of its prerogative in the seventeenth century, only repeated what the Crown had done regarding the Roman Church in the sixteenth. The victory was not only won after severe contest,