THE GOVERNMENT PLAN OF MILITARY DEFENCE.
THE House of Commons on Tuesday accepted the Government plan of military defence with unex- pected readiness and placidity. There was plenty of room for sharp controversy, for the Government not only asked for half-a-million more than usual, but threatened to spend a sum large enough to justify a loan upon the reform and renewal of the barracks throughout the Kingdom ; but the debate only lasted two nights, and there was no serious, and above all no professional opposi- tion, Sir George Trevelyan's able, though on one point viewy speech, containing only a suggestion, a reduction in 4' the preposterous number of inactive Generals, which the Government is perfectly ready to accept. The House acted with the celerity and the sense of an older time, and the reason is not far to seek. Mr. Stanhope's speech was not only far and away the best, because the most per- ;suasive, he ever made in his life ; but it was penetrated by tone for which all politicians of all parties have for years past been longing. The country is sick of the un- reality and indefiniteness it finds in all military debates,— tired and fretted with the alarmists, fretted and tired with the official defences for inefficiency, and wants to be assured first of all that the grand object it seeks is being attained ; in other words, that it has or will have the means of destroy. ing any army likely to land upon its shores. The question of over-expenditure, though most important, can wait for a time. The question of party responsibility can wait for ever. What cannot wait is the question whether we have within these islands a reasonably sufficient Army to destroy an invader, an Army which can move, which has sufficient munitions, guns especially, and which, above all, will be ready when required, the deepest of all latent suspicions being that it will take the field just three or four days too late. The answer of the Minister of War is not on every detail completely satisfactory ; but at least it is an answer to -the point. A civilian when he has read it knows fairly well -what, in the event of invasion, would be the extent of the resisting force, and perceives that, if the statements are true, there would, with ordinary good fortune and average general- ship, be no danger of the occupation of London. Hampered as she is by the national reluctance to sanction compulsory military training—we do not mean conscription—and bur- dened as she is by her ideas of pecuniary fairness, ideas resulting in a cruel and needless amount of dead-weight, Britain does not get the powerful Army she ought to get for her money ; but she does get, or rather, will get—for there are still bad breaks in the chain of her organisation —a reasonable amount of safety-. The Government per- ceives the weak places, acknowledges the weak places, and is steadily, and above all industriously, bringing them up -to the required strength. It wants time still, and that is a bad want, for if we are attacked at all, it will be with as little warning as energetic chiefs controlling vast resources can contrive ; but the neglect of years cannot be remedied in a day, and the War Office is pushing on with a clear idea of its necessities, and a resolution to supply them.
It may be taken, we suppose, as established even in the minds of alarmists, that England cannot be invaded without long warning by more than a hundred thousand men. No grand combination of Powers can strike at us suddenly, and no single Power can by possibility throw more than that force upon our shores. An army is not a crowd of men, but a vast organism, travelling with indispensable baggage of enormous weight, and no Power has the means of trans- porting across the sea in effective order a greater force than that. Experts, indeed, say that is far too high an estimate ; but we will allow something for an enemy's rashness,- and something for the facts that all distances in England are slight, and that the power of wasting soldiers • given by the conscription involves the power, if you are only .cruel enough, of dispensing with adequate impedimenta, and will assume the highest conceivable figure. To attack that army, says Mr. Stanhope, we shall have, when the Reserves are called out, an army of Regulars eighty -thousand strong, "with a proper proportion of all arms of the service," supported by a mobilised Volunteer Force apparently at least as great, and admirably provided with artillery ; and by a hundred and twenty-four thousand Militia and Volunteers told off for garrison duty. The mobilisation of this force has been provided for in every detail, the general plan, the lists of officers, and the action of the railways having been thoroughly prepared. The Government has sufficient horses for transport registered on the Continental system, and can take more under compulsory powers conferred last year, and a new arrange- ment for decentralising stores is now being carried out under which their issue, when required, "will be exceedingly rapid, and the greater part of the operations required for mobilisation would take place automatically on the order being given, without requiring instructions from head-quarters." There may be delays, there may be inefficiency, there may be confusion ; but they will be avoided as carefully, so far as preparation goes, as on the Continent, and a special precaution will be taken to remedy our special difficulty, the imperfect drill and dis- cipline of the supplementary forces. They are probably, man for man, superior in physique to any average soldiers in the world ; and if they escape panic—which is quite possible, for the soldiers who won Waterloo had most of them seen as little service as the militia who lost Bull Run—they will probably fight as well ; but still, they are not regular soldiers. Therefore, while the Government rejects absolutely all schemes for the forti- fication of London as visionary and impracticable, it will take certain precautions. "There are certain strategical positions round London commanding roads and railways which are essential to its defence. These have been care- fully examined by our most experienced officers, and places have been marked out where, upon the occurrence of grave emergency, certain steps, arranged in every way before- hand, could at once be taken. Every preparation will be made for enabling the work to be executed with- out delay. And these are the positions on which, on London being threatened, the defenders of London would in a few days be concentrated and entrenched. There are a few sites of specially urgent importance which we deem it essential to acquire at once. It is the intention to establish ordinary field-works in the form of entrenched camps, which would form the backbone of the defensive line, and in which certain articles which would be required at the shortest notice could be stored, and where it will be possible hereafter to exercise some of the defenders in the actual place which they might have to defend." Supposing the preparations to include commissariat, and the stores to be as adequate as they are assumed to be—always our doubt, because it is at that point that both corruption and the desire to avoid expense intercept efficiency—this reads like a reasonably effective plan. We could wish that the eighty thousand Regulars were a hundred thousand at least, that a much larger proportion of Volunteer brigades were brought up to the highest standard, and that the improvements in the scheme for supplying artillery in the field had been carried out before ; but still, granted the conditions, and remembering always that the Army is only the second line of defence, and that if the first line does its duty successfully, half the invading army will be drowned, the readiness of the House of Commons to be contented was creditable to its sense. The only enemy we expect could be forced to surrender.
The points on which we must express discontent are two. It is probable that the argument against calling out the Reserves every year is sound, as an annual summons would. indispose everybody to employ Reserve-men, and therefore destroy the force ; but the argument against one experiment in mobilisation on the great scale is bad. It is simply that it would cost too much. Mr. Stanhope might as well say that preparations altogether cost too much. We shall never know without the experiment where the weak places would be found in the hour of emergency—we never did know it about the Navy till the Navy was mobilised—and the expenditure is as necessary as that for barracks. Let it be added on to that, and considered as what it is,—an outlay intended to produce positive and adequate results throughout the next quarter of a century. All waste is bad, but we might just as well object to the money spent in testing a hundred-ton gun, as object to the cost of trying, once for all, the perfected system . of defence. The second point is, that we see no provision for the despatch of even a sumll army abroad. Sir George Trevelyan says, so much the better, for we must never again land troops on the Continent even to help an ally ; but surely that is not sense. We may be com- pelled by our pledges to land troops on the Continent ; and if not, what is the difference between landing troops there and landing them in Egypt or Canada ? We have engagements everywhere, interests everywhere, and obliga- tions to our subjects everywhere, and it is simply pre- posterous to believe that we can hold a fifth of the world with our Fleet alone, or keep indispensable allies, yet refuse to aid them in their hour of extreme need. The Govern- ment of Washington may pursue that policy just as the government of a planet might pursue it ; but we have watchful enemies throughout the world, and at least three frontiers, even if we skulk out of Egypt, which may demand defence. We entirely agree with Sir George Trevelyan in his horror of waste, which always means inefficiency, and in his belief that much preventable waste has hitherto been allowed ; but we nevertheless maintain that we ought to possess the power of sending away at a week's notice at least one carps armge, without leaving the country, even in appearance, defenceless. Sir George remembers well when we had to send eighty thousand troops to India without warning, and sent them ; and the Mutiny of '57 is by no means the gravest danger to which we might be exposed. It is useless, however, to discuss that just now ; the hour is full of menace, not to the Empire, but to the Kingdom, and it is most satisfactory to find that the Government recognises the danger, and can reply unhesi- tatingly to any sudden demand, whether it be for the evacuation of Egypt or the surrender of India, which General Boulanger may make.
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