ments, and of these inferior functionaries to look for approbation or promotion according as they exhibited the same qualities, without the slightest regard on either side to the interests of the public, or the right administration of the public service. Dread of visible expense was the bugbear which stood before every one's eyes. There was an enemy whom they all had to face. He was to be found, not on the Continent, but in the House of Commons. His leader was neither Nicholas nor Napoleon, but Joseph Hume. Reduction in all departments was the one thing needful: it was the condition of ministerial existence, the sine quâ non of official toleration or patronage. If any young public officer, unacquainted with the secrets of the service, was indiscreet enough to propose anything involving present expenditure, however small, to avert future disaster, however great, he got first the cold shoulder; next, if he persevered in his efforts, dismissal. We speak of a matter as notorious as the sun at noonday. If any one doubts it, let him consult, in private, any Government functionary, in any department of the public service.

This has been the main cause of all our disasters during the present campaign, which otherwise would be incredible. Every public functionary, from the Chancellor of the Exchequer downwards, has been taught during nearly half a century to avoid everything which, however slightly, could entail present additional expense on the public service; and not even to hint at deficiencies or evils, how great soever, which by possibility could swell the estimates for the ensuing year. So invariable has been this practice, so stern this necessity, that it has stamped its image and superscription upon our whole public servants from the highest to the lowest. They all bent to necessity, and that w necessity of propitiating a House of Commons, whi

cause of our Crimean disasters, it is sufficient to mention the fact, that the evils which have been experienced have been all those which belonged to what may be called the extraadministrative service, and required extraordinary outlay at the beginning of war beyond the usual and accustomed estimates. The ordinary commissariat was excellent, and it fed the troops as well at Constantinople or Varna, or day by day at Sebastopol, as it had done at Chobham or Knightsbridge; but nothing was provided for storing magazines in fine weather, and during summer, for the storms of winter, or providing a road while the sun shone which would stand when the storms of winter began. The ordinary clothing was good, and excited the admiration of all who beheld it, when the troops first arrived at the Bosphorus; but winter clothing was never thought of till absolute want forced attention to it upon Government, in the beginning of November. The regimental surgeons were excellent, and in more than the usual proportion to the men; extra surgeons, a medical staff at Scutari, though destined to receive the whole wounded from the Crimea, there were next to none. The artillery horses were good as they appeared at Chobham; where were the reserve horses and waggon-trains to bring up the siege stores and magazines, and supply the casualties of the campaign? It is not to be supposed that the many sensible and able men in the various departments in the administrative and medical branches of the army were not ali ciencies, and, in pointed out by th officers of the ventured to vernment, not sen

less liable to the influence of insignificant military details, objects of care to martinets, or of powerful military connections. But admitting this on the one hand, it seems equally clear, on the other, that there are some things which the nation has a right to expect in one who undertakes the direction of its military armaments. It is entitled to expect that he shall know that winter succeeds summer; that it sometimes rains, and somewhat heavily, on the shores of the Black Sea in November and December; that a Russian winter is severe, and absolutely requires warm clothing for the troops to be ready before it sets in; that it takes three weeks for the military tailor to clothe an army, and three weeks more to send it to the Crimea from London; that men require food at all times, and armies magazines in bad weather; that wounded and sick men require surgeons, and attendants, and hospitalsand vessels conveying the maimed to them, suitable attendants; that if roads are bad, or liable to be broken up, they should be mended during the fine weather; and if a winter campaign is to be entered upon, the men, if they are not to die like dogs, must be hutted; that meat cannot be ate raw, nor coffee drank unroasted; that fires cannot be made without fuel, nor fuel got without beasts of burden to bring it to the camp; that Russia is a great military power, and England, in comparison of its strength, a very small one. These are not great requirements from a War Minister; and if to these are added the essential requisites of moral courage, and ability to face a reformed House of Commons, the main duties of a War Minister will be satisfactorily discharged, though he possesses neither the energy of Napoleon, the administrative powers of Marlborough, nor the constancy of Wellington.

The first blame which we attach to Government, in the conduct of the present war, is that they did not call out the militia of the whole empire, and largely increase the regular army years before it broke out. They tell us themselves that it was long foreseen, that it was known to them, that

was unavoidable, and that they are made aware by the words of the

Czar himself to Sir H. Seymour, that he contemplated the partition of the Turkish Empire, and invited us to share in its spoils by accepting Egypt and Candia. Well, knowing this, aware of an impending rupture with the greatest military power in the world, what did they do to guard against its dangers? Why, they went out of office in February 1852 rather than call the militia out even in England, and for six weeks pertinaciously resisted Lord Derby's effort to establish it. In Scotland and Ireland it was not called out till August 11, 1854, and it is not yet embodied. Lord Eglinton and Sir A. Alison loudly complained of this extraordinary neglect at the great meeting on Scottish Rights, held at Edinburgh on November 4, 1853, six months before the war broke out, but four months after the Pruth had been crossed, and it was evidently unavoidable; but they met with nothing but ridicule and abuse for their pains, especially from the Times newspaper. Had their advice been followed, we should, in May 1854, have had 40,000 additional disciplined troops to defend our own shores, and serve as a nursery for the troops of the line. The Foreign Enlistment Bill was the child of this supineness and folly. We were obliged to incur the contempt of the world by seeking for foreign mercenaries with a population of 27,000,000, because we had not courage to face the hostility of a reformed House of Commons, by proposing in time the requisite measures for the arming of our own people.

When the war did break out in March 1854, our preparations at that, the eleventh hour, were wholly disproportioned to the magnitude of the contest in which we had engaged. Mr Gladstone proposed an increase of 15,000 men to the regular army, and £3,000,000 to the estimates, to combat an empire possessing 70,000,000 of inhabitants and 600,000 men in arms! It is true, £3,000,000 additional was voted when the war was raging and the House had somewhat warmed in the fight, but still no word of the Scottish or Irish militia, which to this day is not embodied, though we have been three months in mortal strife in the Crimea with above 100,000 Russians. When we now

would gladly agree to the most liberal grants of money.

Two other particulars deserve especial notice before concluding this subject.

The first is, that the department of the army in which the superiority of the Russians has been most apparent, is the very one in which the English, in the pride of intellect, expected the most decisive success. We boasted of our science, our mechanical skill, our arts; and the complacent admirers of existing things told us confidently our artillery would at once prove its superiority to the Russian, and that Sebastopol would be "smashed" in three days. Where are these boasts now? We have defeated the enemy, but it was by the qualities which have descended to our officers and their soldiers from their Norman and Saxon forefathers, but from no aid which we have derived, either from the wisdom and forethought of our popular Government, or the skill or genius of our mechanical people. In both these respects we have been beat by our despotic enemy, outdone by his barbarian subjects. In number and weight of guns, the Russian artillery has shown itself as superior to ours as the Russian administration has, in the raising, feeding, and bringing up of large bodies of soldiers. Whence this extraordinary difference, so exactly the reverse of everything which, in the pride of civilisation and intellect, we had expected? Simply in this, the one cost money, the other did not. The blood flowing in the veins of our officers, which recalled the chivalry of Richard Coeur-de-Lion, in those of our soldiers the constancy of Agincourt,cost Ministers nothing; but it would have cost them a great deal, and they must have faced a reformed House of Commons five years ago, to produce an artillery and siege equipage superior to what the Czar had collected at the very extremity of his dominions. Thence the victories of Alma and Inkermann won by our soldiers, and the siege of Sebastopol still protracted, amidst heroic constancy, from the long-continued faults of our Govern

ment.

The next circumstance worthy of notice is, that the deficiencies which have appeared in our service have

appeared chiefly in those departments where, according to the popular doctrines, we should least have expected them, and the success has been achieved in those where, if their principles were correct, deficiency and ruin were to be expected. There has been no failure in the Guards, headed by the flower of the aristocracy, at the Alma or Inkermann, or in the cavalry led by the chivalry of England in the immortal charges at Balaklava; but can the same be said of the commissariat department, the reserve medical staff, the harbour arrangements at Balaklava, the providing of draught-horses and passable roads at Sebastopol? In these departments, intrusted to the direction of the sons of the middle classes, the deficiencies we all deplore have chiefly appeared. Observe, we do not ascribe blame to the employés in these departments; we do not say they have failed because they were the sons of clergymen and physicians. We know well what the British empire owes to the sons of these men. We neither repudiate nor are ashamed of our own order. But what we do say is, that the calamities we deplore have been owing to a general cause which has rode over them both, and that that cause is to be found in the senseless economy and reductions which have been forced upon successive Governments since the peace, by public clamour and the Liberal press; and that it is unfair to say it would be remedied by substituting for the class in which glorious success has been obtained that in which chiefly deficiency has been experienced.

Having said so much on the general causes of our present difficulties, we have little space left for that which occupies so large a portion of public attention, which is, the comparative merit or demerit of the persons engaged in the service that has experienced them."

We are not among those who require much from a War Minister, still less of those who assert that civilians are incapable of rightly discharging the duties of the office. On the contrary, we think that a civilian, if an able and instructed man, is sometimes more likely to fill the office with advantage than a military man, because he is