On Thursday Sir Redvers Buller, presiding at a luncheon given
by the Queen's Westminster Volunteers, made a speech in which we b elieve that the nation will find the best possible justification for the declarations which we and others have made that Sir Redvers Buller is not a fit and proper person to be entrusted with.the great and responsible duties involved in the command of the First Army Corps. . We would fain Bay no more about the speech, for it is one which can only be fairly described as pathetic in its weakness and inconsequence; but, unfortunately, it is impossible for us to pass it over, for it must be urged upon public notice as one of the reasons which oblige us to continue our protests against the recent appointment to the First Army Corps. Sir Redvers Buller's speech was an attack on his critics in the Press, including the Times, the Morning. Post, the Statist, and the Spectator. He began by an astonishing story of how he was visited in Aldershot by what he calls " an international detective—possibly a spy : he was an old man and possibly has been at it all his life." This wonderful old man told Sir Redvers Buller that he had enemies, " men who mean to get you out of the way, and they will get you out of the way, and you had better get out of it quietly." Sir Redvers Buller says he did not of course ask who the enemies were, but informed this very oracular spy that if it was necessary for him to use that information he should. " And he said ' You can." Apparently Sir Redvers Buller seems somehow to connect this mysterious visitor with the articles on his appointment, in the Spectator and elsewhere. With Sir Redvers Buller's pathetic accusa- tion of "low form" and "want of education" in regard to ourselves we have no desire to deal; but we cannot admit either that he is without reckless gallantry as a man, or that he has it as a General on the grounds he gives—namely, that though he had Lord Roberts's telegram in his pocket "in which he was ordered to lose two thousand to three thousand men," he decided to withdraw.
