ubmission to popular rulers. Wafted on iul navy, its magnifis, the army of England atnight have reached either tor Sebastopol, while the Russia were hermetically sealu their granite bastions. If we od such an army, what marvellous, * decisive success might, under able ection, have been attained in the st campaign! If 40,000 men had accompanied Sir Charles Napier to the Baltic, where would now have been the fleets of Sweaborg and Cronstadt? Burnt in their harbours, or prizes at Spithead. If a reserve of 30,000 men had been at hand in Malta to reinforce the army which conquered at the Alma, Sebastopol would long ere this have been taken. A real investment would have been made: and while half of our army pressed the fortress alike on the north and south, the other half would have covered the siege, and, if attacked, renewed the triumphs with which the campaign opened. Decisive success was within our power, if we had possessed, when hostilities broke out, a force at all commensurate to our national strength or material resources. If we have not gained it, and have only achieved barren victories, these are owing to the glorious chivalry of our officers, the indomitable courage of our men, which have, in some degree, compensated, though at the expense of their own blood, the long-continued blindness and infatuation of the country, which rendered useless all the immense advantages that Providence had put into our hands.

The anxiety which we now so generally feel for the safety of our heroic army, and the fearful chasms which sickness and hardships, more than the sword of the enemy, have made in its ranks, has forcibly drawn the attention of the nation to the causes of these disasters, and the way in which the prospects of a campaign, which began with such brilliant success, have become so overclouded in its close. The chief cause, as already shown, is to be found in the monstrous reductions of former years, and the infatuation with which our constituencies demanded, and our press applauded, and our rulers adopt

ed, the system of economy which paralysed our strength just in proportion as our enemy was increasing his. An army is not made in a day; long training, extensive preparation, is indispensable towards its formation. It takes two years to make a horse-soldier; fifteen months to make a thorough foot-soldier. If hurried into the ranks before thus instructed and trained, they may indeed become chair au canon, or encumber hospitals; but it is in vain to expect from them the efficiency of real soldiers. They may fight bravely in the field, but they will melt away under the severity of military duty: the dripping bivouac, the stinted rations, the service in the trenches, will prove fatal to their inexperienced strength. This has been sufficiently proved in the siege of Sebastopol. The troops which suffered most from fatigue and sickness there, were the new regiments and the young soldiers. The idea so common with civilians, therefore, that it is time enough to raise soldiers when they are required, and folly to maintain a costly peace establishment for the eventualities of war, is an error of the most dangerous kind.-If the army is not raised and trained in peace, it cannot act with effect in the first years of war. Early disaster is inevitable; and this, accordingly, has been invariably experienced in England for a hundred and fifty years. The defeats in Flanders in 1793, in Affghanistan in 1840, and in Caffraria in 1849 were examples, of which the horrors of the Crimean bivouac has been the last. To raise soldiers and send them off at once, after a few months' drill, to the seat of war, is worse than useless. It is sacrificing life and strength, courage and devotion, for scarce any advantage. To make a good soldier in 1854, he must have been enrolled in 1852, and disciplined through the whole of 1853; and a dragoon requires a still longer apprenticeship. There is but one

way of having a powerful and effi cient army in the beginning of war, and that is to have it established on an adequate scale, and thoroughly organised in peace.

Nor is this all. The administrative part of the army is not its least important department, and it is the one

in which long previous organisation and preparation is peculiarly indispensable. It is the one, accordingly, which invariably is found most deficient, and from the faults of which most disaster ensues on the first breaking out of hostilities. The waggon train, the providing huts and tents for the soldiers, the cooking department, the securing of magazines, the organising the means of transport for the baggage, the providing mules and bathorses for the officers and men, the arrangement and preparation of hospitals, medicines, surgeons, and nurses, the clothing and equipments of the men, are as much the duty of those at the head of an army, and fully as essential to its success, as combating bravely in the field. Cæsar tells us, in his Commentaries, he began all his expeditions with "Re frumentaria provisa;" and Marshal Saxe said, "he was the best general who fed his soldiers best." These administrative duties, however, are less conspicuous than those in the field. They are less imperatively called for in peace, and therefore, under an economical system of government, which, disregarding the interests of the public service, looks only to the diminution of its expenditure, they are the first to be neglected. Where is now the admirable waggon train, organised by Wellington, which brought up in the depth of winter the siege equipage that tore down the ramparts of Ciudad Rodrigo? Where the hospital establishment which awaited, and so wonderfully restored, the sick and wounded at Lisbon? The whole administrative department, which by incessant effort during six years he had brought to such perfection, has been quietly consigned to the vault of all the Capulets, in order that Liberal Ministries might obtain loud cheers from both sides of the House by bringing forward reduced estimates; and the camp at Sebastopol, the charnel-house at Scutari, the horrors of the mid-passage, have been the consequences.

Add to this, that the duties of a soldier are only half learned by all the military tuition he has received during the last forty years in the British Islands. Take a soldier in the Guards,

Tighland Brigade, the Scots

Greys, or the 11th Hussars. He is admirably drilled, disciplined, and equipped; he is as brave as a lion, and excites the admiration of every beholder by his gallant bearing in Hyde Park and the hills of Chobham. If called into battle he will exhibit the heroism of the Alma, the devotion of Balaklava, the iron constancy of Inkermann. It is well; his country may well be proud of him, and she is proud. Is that all she has to do? Do these heroic efforts in the field exhaust his military duties? What preparation has been made for the remainder

that is, for nineteen-twentieths of the duties he has to perform, the life he has to lead? Put him in the trenches of Sebastopol, with the water up to his knees, and a cannon-ball every minute whizzing over his head; place him on a night-watch, with a stealthy Muscovite battalion creeping up in the dark to his feet; send him to cook his victuals, to put up his tent, to assist in getting firewood, to lend a hand in dragging guns through the mud, to forage a country for provender for the horses, to do any other of the daily pacific duties of a soldier in the field, and he is as ignorant of them as the child unborn. He has never been taught them, and he is left to pick them up as he best can, by the pressure of hardship and suffering in the field, often under the guns of an enemy, or by observing what is done by his better instructed and experienced Allies.

It is commonly said that this is owing to our insular situation, and happy exemption from actual warfare, by the respect excited by former victories. There never was a greater mistake, at least so far as the last forty years are concerned. The truth is, that, so far from having had less military experience than other Powers during that period, we have had incomparably more; and, in particular, far more than the troops either of France or Russia. Our naval supremacy and colonial empire have brought us into collision with fierce and barbarous nations in every quarter of the globe. The former of these Powers has never fired a shot during that period, except at Antwerp in 1832, at Algiers in 1830, and with the Arabs in Algeria afterwards. The lat

ter has had no warfare since the peace of 1815, except in Turkey in 1828-9, and Poland for nine months in 1831, and Hungary in 1849, with occasional conflicts with the Circassians and Persians. But the English during that period have maintained great and long wars in every quarter of the globe: they have successively encountered the Mahratta alliance of 1817, the Pindarree war of 1819, the first Burmese war of 1825, the storm of Bhurtpore, the Goorkha war, the two Affghanistaun expeditions, the Scinde campaigns, the Gwalior conflict, the desperate passage of arms on the Sutledge, the battles of Ferozeshah, Sobraon, Chillianwallah, and Goojerat, the second Burmese war of 1852, the three Chinese campaigns, the two bloody ones in Caffraria. All the armies of continental Europe put together have not had the military experience which those of Great Britain, especially in India, have enjoyed since the battle of Waterloo.

How, then, has it happened that an army composed of such admirable materials, headed by such noble officers, and trained by so much and such dear-bought experience, is always found so lamentably deficient in practical skill and administrative organisation, when serious hostilities first break out? The answer is to be found in two circumstances, springing out of our constitution and government, which have been little attended to in the first conflict of parties during the last anxious months, more solicitous to heap blame upon individuals than affix a stigma on institutions or customs. It is in these, however, that the real cause of the present disasters and anxiety is to be found, and in the awakening of the nation to them that the only security against their recurrence is to be looked for.

The first of these is, that, from our army having been reduced to so low a figure since 1815-at an average not more than 100,000 or 110,000 men, of whom one-half was absorbed in isolated colonial stations, or detached garrison duties at home-great part of our army, and nearly all the young soldiers, have never known what it was to act in large bodies together. There are many regiments

in our army which, for the first time in the experience of nine-tenths of the officers and men in them, had never been brigaded with another before they stood shoulder to shoulder at the Alma or Balaklava. They had formerly seen only outpost duty in Ireland, or garrison duty in the Mediterranean or the West Indies. This is an evil of the very first magnitude, which, in the long run, and for the active administrative duties of a campaign, often renders the courage and strength of the men and heroism of the officers of little lasting avail. They are sent into active service, and exposed to the hardships and sufferings of real warfare, without the smallest knowledge or preparation for it on the part of either the civil or military authorities of the army. If, like all the Continental states-even the smallest-we had had camps of 20,000 or 30,000 men together annually formed, moved about and provisioned from magazines in England and Ireland during the last twenty years, we should never have seen the woeful and almost incredible ignorance in those respects which the Crimean campaign has exhibited, and with which, not less than with the courage of our troops, Europe is now ringing from side to side. It is impossible it could have been exhibited, if experience had taught our civil and military officers in the Queen's service, as it has long done those in the Native Indian army, the necessities of men when banded together. But the thing could not be thought of till 1853, when it was begun on a small scale at Chobham, because we had not men to brigade together; and if we had possessed them, the Chancellor of the Exchequer could not have faced a reformed House of Commons with a proposal of £200,000 or £300,000, to instruct our troops in the first elements of real military service.

The second is, that, during the forty years of peace and incessant clamour of the constituencies, the House of Commons, and the press, for economic reduction, it has become a fixed habit of all superior functionaries, in all departments of the public service, to estimate inferior ones according to the reductions of expenditure which they could effect in their several depart

in which long previous organisation and preparation is peculiarly indispensable. It is the one, accordingly, which invariably is found most deficient, and from the faults of which most disaster ensues on the first breaking out of hostilities. The waggon train, the providing huts and tents for the soldiers, the cooking department, the securing of magazines, the organising the means of transport for the baggage, the providing mules and bathorses for the officers and men, the arrangement and preparation of hospitals, medicines, surgeons, and nurses, the clothing and equipments of the men, are as much the duty of those at the head of an army, and fully as essential to its success, as combating bravely in the field. Cæsar tells us, in his Commentaries, he began all his expeditions with "Re frumentaria provisa;" and Marshal Saxe said, "he was the best general who fed his soldiers best." These administrative duties, however, are less conspicuous than those in the field. They are less imperatively called for in peace, and therefore, under an economical system of government, which, disregarding the interests of the public service, looks only to the diminution of its expenditure, they are the first to be neglected. Where is now the admirable waggon train, organised by Wellington, which brought up in the depth of winter the siege equipage that tore down the ramparts of Ciudad Rodrigo? Where the hospital establishment which awaited, and so wonderfully restored, the sick and wounded at Lisbon? The whole administrative department, which by incessant effort during six years he had brought to such perfection, has been quietly consigned to the vault of all the Capulets, in order that Liberal Ministries might obtain loud cheers from both sides of the House by bringing forward reduced estimates; and the camp at Sebastopol, the charnel-house at Scutari, the horrors of the mid-passage, have been the consequences.

Add to this, that the duties of a soldier are only half learned by all the military tuition he has received during the last forty years in the British Islands. Take a soldier in the Guards, the Highland Brigade, the Scots

Greys, or the 11th Hussars. He is admirably drilled, disciplined, and equipped; he is as brave as a lion, and excites the admiration of every beholder by his gallant bearing in Hyde Park and the hills of Chobham. If called into battle he will exhibit the heroism of the Alma, the devotion of Balaklava, the iron constancy of Inkermann. It is well; his country may well be proud of him, and she is proud. Is that all she has to do? Do these heroic efforts in the field exhaust his military duties? What preparation has been made for the remainder

that is, for nineteen-twentieths of the duties he has to perform, the life he has to lead? Put him in the trenches of Sebastopol, with the water up to his knees, and a cannon-ball every minute whizzing over his head; place him on a night-watch, with a stealthy Muscovite battalion creeping up in the dark to his feet; send him to cook his victuals, to put up his tent, to assist in getting firewood, to lend a hand in dragging guns through the mud, to forage a country for provender for the horses, to do any other of the daily pacific duties of a soldier in the field, and he is as ignorant of them as the child unborn. He has never been taught them, and he is left to pick them up as he best can, by the pressure of hardship and suffering in the field, often under the guns of an enemy, or by observing what is done by his better instructed and experienced Allies.

It is commonly said that this is owing to our insular situation, and happy exemption from actual warfare, by the respect excited by former victories. There never was a greater mistake, at least so far as the last forty years are concerned. The truth is, that, so far from having had less military experience than other Powers during that period, we have had incomparably more; and, in particular, far more than the troops either of France or Russia. Our naval supremacy and colonial empire have brought us into collision with fierce and barbarous nations in every quarter of the globe. The former of these Powers has never fired a shot during that period, except at Antwerp in 1832, at Algiers in 1830, and with the Arabs in Algeria afterwards. The lat