MR. GOSCHEN'S BOYS.
IT is difficult to imagine a scene more dramatic than that which is now being enacted at Carthagena, and described almost daily by the Times, which, with its old luck, has 'caught two men who can both see and understand, and are as indifferent to risk as if getting killed were part of their daily duty. The great port, with its ring of fortresses and harbour full of ironclads, has fallen into the hands of men who are not like Spaniards at all, but like French Jacobins,—men who can govern as well as chatter, who have done with " halfness," .as Carlyle says, and hold nothing sacred except their cause. Are there no cannon in the forts ? Take them from the arsenals to the fortresses by man-power. Are there no troops ? Every man above sixteen, "being necessarily an Irreconcilable," must arm and fight for that cause. Are there no sailors ? Boatmen, quay loafers, and other people accustomed to water must man the ironclads. Is there no money ? Dig silver out of the nearest silver mines, and strike coin somehow, and pay two francs a day to every man in the service of the State. All these orders are given as the Municipal Council of Paris once gave them, and they are all obeyed, till Car- thagena, with its roughs under arms, and its maritime popu- lation at work, and its dockyardmen on the Numancia, Mendez Nunez, and Fernando Catolico, is as safe as London, and .correspondents wander about rather annoyed by everybody's regularity. And there, on the furthest hill, is the dangerous fort, commanded by a man once a marine, then a postman, now a hero in his own eyes, who has proclaimed his fort a Canton, and himself chief by divine right of the bravest, and -says he shall blow himself up, and may at any moment fire into Carthagena, or at the Spanish fleet, or at strangers' ships outside. For there, to complete the bizarre character of the scene, lies a Spanish fleet, unable to do anything because it is of wood ; and the Swiftsure, English ironclad, in charge of the two Spanish vessels stopped from bombarding Malaga, and in some vague way of Carthagena, for he is waiting orders, 'and until they arrive nobody is to come near the Swiftsure or the ships she protects, under penalty of immediate capture both of fleet and town. Behind him, no doubt, lie vessels from half the navies of Europe, Spanish, Italian, French, American, all in some sense leagued together, and all likely to follow him. But the Captain of the Swiftsure is not think- ing of them, but of his own position, and of what he can and will try to do if these Reds attack him—he, with his own vessel, and possibly the captured ships, and certainly the men behind him,—the ragged-school boys whom a wise policy has manufactured into first-rate sailors.
That, in the midst of all the broil, of the muddle of hostile powers, of social enemies, of conflicting international laws, of the entire coming affray, is the point which strikes so keenly on our imagination. The sailors in that ship, the men upon whom their Captain relies with an absolute certainty, if the order is to go to inevitable death, the men on board the Torch who were so furious to engage the Mendez Nunez, which ought in ten minutes to have destroyed her,—the men who, if there were but enough of them and the order were given, would seize the Spanish Titan and pulverise Carthagena with her own shot, are the street Arabs, the class which the world holds dangerous, but which England alone has made one poor effort to utilise. The Government has but held up its finger, and out of the dark lanes, and horrid closes, and fetid courts have poured children whose guardians are willing that they should be fed, clothed, and disciplined, and then serve for ten years, standing at twenty-seven free men to follow their own will. English in blood, streety—that is, resourceful—by habit, thoroughly fed, accustomed from childhood to disci- pline, these men make the best sailors in the world,—quiet and docile and powerful of limb, and as was shown the other .day at Elmina, and to-day at Carthagena, as ready for battle as any old salts who ever swore, or chewed, or defied the cat. There they are, 20,000 of them, scattered over the world, with the same good report from the officers everywhere, with the same love for the Queen's service, and the same handiness for every other, which, however, they will seldom enter. They have been turned, not by philanthropic petting or overmuch preaching, but by an immovable, though kindly discipline, from street lads into educated fighting men, as good as the very lute of the Prussian Army.
It seems to us that the swift solution of our most serious difficulty, the difficulty of inducing men to devote themselves to the State service without exaggerated pay, lies in this direction. These boys are countless. Given the requisite time and the 3,000 a year we now take could be brought u to 10,000 without any perceptible strain upon the State. Wholly apart from the street Arabs, the unskilled labourers as a body, when over-mcumbered with boys, are only too glad to give one or two of them over to a trade in which no entrance fee is demanded, in which they are well educated, and in
which they can earn their livings all their lives. The ten years' service which seems so oppressive to recruits seems nothing to men who have been brought up with that out-look, who never enjoyed the absence of discipline, and who never forget that their service is their pay to the State for a great boon conferred upon themselves. What reason is there why the system should not be extended, why 3,000 boys a year should not be trained for Cavalry soldiers, and the Artillery filled with them, and the Sappers and Miners, and half at least of the regiments of the Line ? There is no original stain upon them. They are singularly amenable to a discipline sterner even than that of the Army. They are proving themselves as brave as any men in the world, while their physical power is, from good food, good exercise, and good regulation, superior to that of the average men of their age. Or suppose that we should ever find that the amalgamation was a mistake, and that there is service for the Queen's Regiments nearer home, whence could the India Office obtain such a supply of young power, drawn away from the streets and the lanes, with no loss of force to the nation, and every benefit to the lads themselves ? Those who declare all war immoral may deny that, but even they will admit that if war is to be made, it had best be made with material which might otherwise have been positively noxious to ourselves, that the severe training, the regular discipline, the thorough manliness of the work exacted, do and must do more for the men when turned out than the peaceful village schools can do. To those who do not think war immoral, who maintain, to alter a phrase of Castelar's, that the force of right must sometimes be supported by the right of force, who desire to see the Kingdom great, and know that the power of using power on occasion is the condition of greatness, the addition of such a force to the Empire must be a personal relief. We shall go to war if we are so strong ? Why ? any more than Prussia, in which no soldier had ever seen a shot fired, except a corps d'armee in the petty Danish war, till the result of fifty years of peaceful training astonished Europe in the field of Sadowa? London is not the only great city in this country. In a dozen cities which on the Continent would be capitals, in a hundred towns which elsewhere would be great cities, the streets are running over with untaught, unhelped wretches, whom training on the Naval plan would change into good sailors, soldiers, artillerymen, or engineers. Why waste a resource like this, 80 vast in its extent, so easy to use, so directly beneficial while it is being used ? The proportion of boys to men seems to be one-tenth, and will any philanthropist not belonging to the Peace Society deny that 10,000 lads taken from the streets of our cities, and villages—where they are quite as bad as in our cities—and turned into useful servants of the State, would be anything but a great gain to the morale of the nation, as well as to its fighting force?
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