REINFORCEMENTS BY REDUCTION AND RECASTING.
If is necessary to maintain our defensive powers in a state of per- fect efficiency, argues the Morning Post, and the addition an- nounced to the strength of our forces is reasonable; but "the pre- sent moment is unhappily chosen for making the announcement to the world "—a "blunter against good sense and good taste" ; for the reason that France is so peacefully inclined, and that Louis Napoleon is reducing his army. The argument appears to us to be of that peculiar species which best serves the view opposed to it. In the first place, we do not see how it was possible to make a con- siderable addition to the marine and military forces of the country without making the fact known to the world. It is not possible to recruit even the Army so extensively as it will be re- cruited without the fact's transpiring. The augmentation of the Artillery must be still more obvious. But under all the cir- cumstances of the Navy—the great demand for sailors, and the ne- cessity for improvements in our marine regulations—it would have been absolutely impossible to make anything like the proposed Addition without publishing the fact to the whole English people, and therefore to the world. To say in straightforward terms that which we are doing is, according. to English standards, both good sense and good taste; and if what we do is so perfectly justifiable as even the censor admits, it seems desirable, for the very avoid- atioe of misconception, that we should say distinctly what we are at. ( But we question in the strongest manner the fact upon which the I Morning Post mainly relies for its objection. The reduction of
the French army., so Galled, by the dismissal of a portion to their homes after service is counter oed by the calling out of the conscription for 1853. But it is now notorious even in Paris, much more than London, that certain transpositions are taking place a inwee&age Frexhitaarmy ; that efficiency ciene y sletoisns to be of the dismissed troops will be retained, (the ile'pOts, as we should call them here,-.. a plan by which the men may be recalled at a moment's notice ; that the auxiliary force of the gendarmerie is to be largely recruited; that the munitions of war are collected in the greatest abundance ; and that the troops are practised in all the evolutions for the field and for embarkation which can secure the utmost amount of working strength in proportion to numbers. Louis Napoleon will have one of the largest armies in Europe, picked, packed, and practised to the highest possible degree. This is not a reduction of the army, though it may suit the adventurer, who has effected all his steps by surprises, to call it so. It is a concentration of the French army. We agree that it should be an example to this country, but it should be an example in its own sense; teaching us not to rely on recruitment alone, but to look to our equipments and our organiza- tion. Too much attention has been paid amongst us to the lowest qualities of a military or naval force, neglecting the morale and the highest incidents of effective working. Our army might be- nefit by reductions not leas than recruitment—by weeding its ranks of the drunkard, the sluggard, and the mualingerer. But still more our officer force might be strengthened by the same process, and most of all in its highest grades. An anti-mili- tary contemporary is usefully bringing its strictures to bear on this part of "military reform," and is reminding us how many general officers we have who hold commissions only for their own benefit and not for that of their country. There are men who have been fifty, sixty, seventy, ay, seventy- three years in the service. Of such a veteran Sir Edward Blake- ney said, so long ago as 1848—" He may have a claim to the rank, but the country would not benefit by his services ; and, then you load the list of general officers, and it is said you have 500 or 600 general officers, and they have no army to command; and people do not understand that it is a retirement almost." They do not so understand it because it is not so. General Elphinstone was notoriously unequal to extricate his troops from the fatal fast- nesses of Cabal, years having cramped the energies of his mina and body; and General Godwin holds back Captain Tarleton from accomplishing the conquest of the Rangoon at a blow ; the con- quest to be carried out in the more leisurely style suited to the movements of the ultra veteran. In short, we have a corps of pensioners, we call them "generals," and to cheat the country lest it grumble at the expense, we do without real generals. We ro- serve our most important commissions, not for the fourth or middle age of man, which is naturally that of the soldier, but for the fifth, the sixth, and even the seventh. And that we call practical— economical. The time for such wretched trifling passes; may the need not come upon us before we have made some progress in better ways! Let it not be supposed that it is only in generals that we must revise our whole system. In a time of active service our whole system of etiquette and routine ought to be torn away like the gewgaw figures on a twelfth-cake, or like the holyday awning of the quarter-deck. The idle rules that forbid instant advance- ment to an Eldred Pottinger or a Herbert Edwardes ought to be revised betimes, if we do not intend to match an Elphinstone or a Godwin against a Reclean or a Lamoriciere. We must choose our generals and our colonels for being made of the right stuff. Again, as our Militia is developed, we must not make it a place in which gentlemen of family or county influence can play at masquerading in uniforms, but must give a well-grown and spirited set of men real officers who can execute the orders of a Napier or an Eyre. County influence would not give pause to the invader, nor would high birth command the deference of St. Arnand's "Algerines." Yet, again, the same rule holds good even in the Navy ; where a stupid economy makes us stint the common sailor until he hates the ser- vice, keep him in floating durance for a term, and then "ay him off"; to be caught again with great trouble and expense. We must keep our sailors by liking for the service ; and in lieu of being paid off, they must be rermented on a plan suited to naval organi- zation. These and many other improvements are needed to get our money's worth, and what is more, our nation's worth, out of our Army and Navy, officers and men.
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