would stereotype a condition of veiled civil war through South Africa, and render the hope of ever conciliating the Dutch sentiment almost futile. No; it is only on British troops that we can rely to maintain. order in the conquered provinces ; and if we can escape without locking up something like a whole British Army Corps in South Africa for the next two decades, I believe many of our best military authorities will think that we have got off rather easily. Here, then, is at once a great addition to our military responsibilities, and one which will involve a complete reconstruction of our present system. That system is just able to cope with the task of feeding the Indian Army and other foreign garrisons in normal times, without mobilising the Reserve. Even the comparatively small addition involved by the Egyptian Army of Occupation threw it out of gear, and compelled the Government to raise fresh battalions. With a permanent force in South Africa more than half as large as the British Army in Asia, the whole system will break down completely unless it is largely modified or entirely recast. Even if we do no more than attempt to provide for the immediate exigencies of the situation, some forty or fifty thousand troops would have to be added to our regular military establishment.

But unfortunately we are compelled to do a great deal more than that. The lesson of the South African War will be completely thrown away if we do not. Englishmen ought to realise what this campaign means to us. It has been sometimes held up as an example of the success of our system of short service and reserves, inasmuch as it has shown that we really can call up to the colours the reservists when we require them, and that with their aid we can put into the field a considerable force at comparatively short notice. Yes; but let us understand that with all this we are able to do no more than supply just sufficient men-if they are sufficient-to beat down a sparse population of farmers in one corner of our Colonial Empire. Do not let us make any mistake about it. The available British active-service Army is at this moment occupied in fighting General Joubert's militia and the Cape rebels. On that object we are employing practically the whole of our infantry which is fit for service, including all our corps d'élite, such as the Guards, the Rifle Brigade, and the Highland regiments; our best cavalry regiments are utilised also; absolutely the whole of the Army Service Corps is in the field; the greater part of our artillery has been embodied; and with all this we have to eke out our resources with Colonial contingents, Volunteers, Yeomanry, and South African mounted irregulars. We have even had to draw troops from India, which, properly speaking, is not able to spare a man or a horse to send beyond the seas. Left behind are a good many halfdrilled men of one kind or another, but scarcely more than the elements out of which a fighting army can be formed. We have

some good Militia regiments without transport, a sufficient artillery, or an adequate staff, and we have the Volunteers (with their best men already called out), who are merely civilians with some notion of drill and a slight acquaintance with the use of the rifle. There is excellent stuff no doubt among these auxiliaries, just as, indeed, there is plenty of good material in our fields and towns to be got by paying a sufficient price for it. But a recruiting ground does not make an army; and what we should do if a sudden call came upon us to send another seventy or eighty or one hundred thousand men to some other quarter of the world it is difficult to say.

Nor is it fanciful to suggest that such a necessity might arise. Thanks to our usual good-luck, we have got into this South African War at a time when there is no other call upon our military resources; but who shall guarantee us a similar immunity in future? If things had gone somewhat differently, any time during the last few years, we might have had to fight President Kruger in Africa at the same moment as we had to dispose of the Khalifa in the Soudan, to send an Army Corps to the Far East, and perhaps even to array 100,000 men upon the Indian frontier. As it is, a very little shifting of the sands of European diplomacy, coupled with the death of the Ameer of Afghanistan, might involve us in the last-named necessity at any moment.

With an Empire like our own, guarding the second longest land frontier in the world, and faced with subject populations in two Continents, it is impossible to limit the calls upon us, or to suppose that we can continue to exist on the utterly inadequate margin of safety we have been content to tolerate so long. I am aware, of course, that we happen to possess a Navy, and no doubt I shall be told that we need not be unduly alarmed as long as our iron shield-wall remains intact. But when we are told that naval supremacy can of itself compensate for military inferiority, there is a simple reply. Even a British ironclad cannot get to Pretoria, nor can a whole squadron of cruisers demonstrate effectually at Cabul. One is not ignorant of the great proposition which the naval experts have been for years past industriously hammering into the heads of the British public. Stated briefly, the maxim comes to this: if the Navy is strong enough we cannot be attacked; if it is not strong enough, no army can save us. So far as applies to the invasion of these islands that theory is sound, and no sensible person cares to dispute it. The argument was very effectively illustrated, by that excellent correspondent of the Times who calls himself Navalis,' in a recent letter to that journal. If,' he said, 'you had caught a lion in a pit, you would not require to descend into the trap to kill the animal; you would simply leave him to starve to death at his leisure.' If our Navy is mastered on the seas, the enemy would scarcely need to take the risks and burdens of invasion. He would simply sit still and wait until distress and loss of foreign trade had forced us to

surrender. This may be true; but two things remain to be said. In the first place, though Great Britain is an island, the British Empire is not. Outside Europe we are a great Continental Power, exposed to all the duties and dangers of such a position, and, as the South African War has shown, and as the course of international affairs at any time during the last few years should have taught us, we have no security that we may not receive a sudden call on short notice to send a very large army across the seas. If we have escaped the necessity, except in the one instance before us, it is more from good fortune than from any other cause. A very trifling mistake at the Foreign Office in Downing Street or the State Department in Washington might have entailed upon us the obligation to transfer a couple of hundred thousand men to North America in 1896, at the very moment perhaps that President Kruger might possibly have chosen in such circumstances to strike at us in South Africa.

arm.

The principle laid down by the school of naval experts, who have very advantageously dominated English thought on the subject for the last few years, was that the country neither could nor ought to rely for defence on its Army; it could not, because the most overpoweringly strong military force could not possibly protect us against the adverse consequences of losing the command of the sea, and it ought not to imagine that any army could possibly perform the functions which should only be allotted to the maritime We are, therefore, bound to devote every effort to maintain the Navy at its highest point of efficiency, and at all costs and sacrifices to keep it at such a strength that it could successfully oppose any hostile maritime combination that is likely to be formed against us. The corollary of this policy on the diplomatic side was an attitude of friendly but lofty isolation. We did not seek allies, nor indeed did we particularly want them, so long as we could rely on our own unaided strength at sea to guard us against any international dangers that could reasonably be expected to threaten us. The doctrine industriously hammered into the public mind by a very able body of naval strategists and writers had this great benefit, that at least it concentrated attention upon the Navy, and brought home. to all parties in the country the paramount duty of maintaining our sea-power at the highest possible point of efficiency. There is some danger, I am aware, that the great cardinal principle of English defensive policy may be lost sight of, as soon as we begin to regard the Army as anything but a valuable auxiliary to the Navy, intended chiefly to assist it by supplying gigantic landing parties, and to garrison the stations and dependencies of Great Britain beyond the seas. Yet, even for that purpose, the experience of the past year has shown that our military resources are inadequate. And it must always be recollected that the naval as well as the military situation is now fast altering to our disadvantage. The system of isolation and polite

defiance was in many respects extremely suitable to us for the last thirty years of our history; since during that period we have only had to reckon with one first-class and one second-class foreign navy, and with three or four others which had hardly to be taken into serious account. When they had placed us in a condition to overcome the combined fleets of France and Russia, our naval administrators had pretty nearly performed their duty.

But the problem of the future is a larger one. No less than three new great naval Powers are appearing on the sea, and they promise in a few years to become very nearly as formidable on that element as our older rivals. It is most significant that the German Government has just laid before the Reichstag a project for doubling the Imperial Navy; and, though that scheme in its present form may be rejected, there can be little doubt that in the course of the next few years the German people will turn resolutely to the task. of equipping itself with a really powerful maritime force. There is nothing, as far as one can see, to prevent the Germans from becoming a first-class naval Power, if such is their desire; money, skill, science, and a capacity for warlike organisation, they possess in abundance. In the iron and steel manufacture they are scarcely second to ourselves. They own a fairly extensive coast-line, some good harbours, a large mercantile marine, and a valuable strategic adjunct in the Baltic and North Sea Canal. If their maritime population, though excellent in quality, is rather limited in numbers, it is always possible that they may succeed in enlisting many a sturdy Hollander, who might possibly repay us in this fashion for the attentions we have bestowed upon his brother Boer. To judge by the present tone of the Dutch press and Dutch society, we might even go further and speculate on the possibility of a close alliance between Germany and Holland, which would open the ports of the latter country to the warlike navy of the former, and bring us once again face to face with a great naval Power having its bases on the Texel and the Scheldt.

And if Germany may possess a strong navy, the United States, with its inexhaustible resources, its vast population, and its colossal manufacturing industry, can be as strong on the seas as they please; and that they will please to establish one of the most powerful navies of the world there can be no reasonable doubt. Japan, again, has been making desperate and successful efforts to add to her fleets, and within the next year or two will have a claim to be included among the great maritime States. Thus, then, in the course of the next twenty years or so we shall have to make our calculations not merely with a French and a Russian Navy, but with five Powers-France, Russia, the United States, Germany, and Japan-each of which will have to be regarded as a first-class naval nation. When, therefore, we talk of possible combinations at sea,

we must revise the old hypotheses. It is no longer a case of keeping ahead of one or of two rivals, but of five, and, looking at the chances and changes of international politics, it cannot be said that a hostile league of three or four, or, under certain contingencies, the whole five of these States against us, is unthinkable. Cobden, in an oft-quoted passage, asserted that we must maintain our naval supremacy even if it cost us a hundred millions annually to do so; but one may doubt whether even that enormous expenditure would enable us to retain that unchallengable superiority over all rivals which we hold at present when these new navies are complete.

The system, then, of holding our own by merely counting up ships and guns abroad, and adding, if possible, a bigger ship and a heavier gun for every one constructed in the foreign dockyards and arsenals, will need some modification. We may have to revert to the ideas of the last century, when it was practically acknowledged by our statesmen that we must avert hostile combinations, which might prove too strong for us, not merely by the superiority of the Navy, but by suitable and well-chosen foreign alliances. Excellent as our fleets were, and beyond all comparison more efficient than those of any single rival, it was always felt that an alliance of the Continental Maritime Powers might expose us to dangers against which we could not prevail by our unaided strength. As a matter of fact, on the only occasions in which the fleets of France, Spain, and Holland were arrayed side by side against us the country was in more serious peril of invasion than at almost any time in its previous or subsequent history. In 1781 that combination temporarily deprived us of the command of the seas, and in spite of Rodney's activity in the West Indies, and Hyde Parker's victory over the Dutch off the Doggerbank, it required a rather exceptional dose of our traditional luck to save us from the most serious disaster. In 1797, when the French, Dutch, and Spaniards, if they had been properly commanded, could have swept us from the Channel, we were within an ace of catastrophe, and escaped almost by a miracle. It was to avert such perils that during the greater part of the century our statesmen, very wisely, abandoning the isolation policy, took care to secure the aid of one or other of the great military monarchies of Europe. We may have to fall back on some such method again, and to imitate its broad lines, though no doubt with a considerable variation in detail. One hardly anticipates that we shall ever again send British troops to fight upon the Rhine or the Moselle; but who shall guarantee us that we may not have to vindicate our own interests not merely by assisting foreign allies with our ships, but also by despatching some large expeditionary force, perhaps to the Persian Gulf or to Asia Minor, or to the Balkan Peninsula, or to the shores of the Yellow Sea? As it is-I have said it before, but the obstinate truth cannot be reiterated too often or too urgently-the British Army, in its present shape,