In the House of Commons on Thursday the Opposition opened
their grand attack upon Mr. Brodrick's scheme. Sir Henry Campbell-Bannerman led off. The Government, he sug- gested, had made an excessive use of Lord Roberts's name in defence of their scheme, but he hinted that Lord Roberts had no experience of the difficulties of obtaining the raw material of the Army. He only knew the finished article. [That is the fashionable jeer in regard to Lord Roberts just now, and made by those who are ignorant of the fact that Lord Roberts for the last twenty years has held the most clear and enlightened views on recruiting,—witness his extraorrlinaaily prescient article on the terms of service printed in the Nineteenth Century in the early " eighties " and lately reprinted, and his interest in the cubicle question.] Sir Henry Campbell-Bannerman went on almost to suggest that the Government really meant to adopt conscription. In his opinion, the whole scheme was a departure from the policy of prudence, and was a plunge into militarism. Sir William Harcourt was equally gloomy as to militarism and the departure from our traditional policy. One might, indeed, have imagined from his and Sir Henry Campbell-Bannerman's speeches that Mr. Brodrick was a kind of new Napoleon, who had proposed to create a vast new military force and to turn England into a kind of armed camp.
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