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THE PEOPLE AND THE ARMY.

THE readers of the 'Times' have been startled of late by the appearance in its columns of two long essays bearing the ominous title, "Discontent in the Army." To

the first of these we turned in fear and trembling. We knew that the army was little satisfied with the treatment it had of late received, and the inference to be drawn from the text of the coming sermon seemed to be that discontent had culminated in mutiny. Great was therefore our relief when, on reading further, we discovered that the object of the writer was, not to give us news, good or bad, but only to show to the officers of the army that for the complaints of ill-usage in which they indulge there is no foundation in fact. It is a mistake to suppose that recent changes have in any degree interfered mischievously with their condition or prospects. The abolition of purchase, so far from operating to their hurt, has proved eminently advantageous to them. To be sure, a captain is now compulsorily retired when he completes the fortieth year of his age. But the country has provided for him a pension-£200 a-year for life, which is infinitely better for him, whether he can see it or not, than being allowed to spend a fortune in buying himself forward -only that as a colonel, or perhaps a major, he might sell out again. Starting from this point, the essayist goes on to argue that lesser grievances, of which he enumerates seven, are all of them imaginary. Thus much for the officers. And now, only the other day, comes forth a supplemental paper, in which the grievances of the rank and file are considered and discussed with an

originality which takes our very breath away. To this we shall advert very shortly, but not till after we have dealt with our author's well-intentioned endeavour to satisfy the class to whom his observations are specially addressed, that he knows much better what is really for their good than they know themselves.

We are sorry to say that however benevolent his intentions may be, he has not carried his point. The great body of officers, as well those actually serving as those shelved, refuse to be convinced by his reasoning. This

was

soon made manifest by the rapidity with which letter after letter appeared, flatly contradicting both his premisses and his conclusions. The officer sent about his business in the prime of life, so far from expressing gratitude for the liberality with which he has been treated, speaks with bitterness of prospects blighted and faith not kept with him. His junior, still in the ranks, complains that his profession opens for him no career. And gentlemen of greater experience than he, point out that recent changes, incident on abolition, have dislocated if not destroyed the good old regimental system, of which the leading characteristic was an abiding jealousy of the honour of his corps, such as rendered it next to impossible for any member of the mess glaringly to misconduct himself. every one of the objections thus raised to the well- intentioned arguments of the 'Times' contributor, we are bound to acknowledge that we recognise a large measure of truth. To nine out of ten of the cadets now at

In

Sandhurst and Woolwich, the the extravagance of mess expenses

army offers no settled career. By spurts and starts individuals among them may be hoisted over the barriers which time alone puts in their way. But the great bulk have nothing better to look forward to than twenty or thirty years' knocking about the world in subordinate situations, and then dismissal, with perhaps a step of honorary rank and an annuity calculated on a scale which compels the person receiving it to live like a gentleman, yet fails adequately to supply him with the means of doing so. Nor are the lamentations of those who remember what regiments and regimental life used to be forty years ago by any means to be disregarded. A long peace may have made the officers of that day less conversant than their fathers were with both the principles and practice of their profession. But their regiment was to them their home; the colonel was their father; and their brother officers, from the major down to the youngest ensign just joined, were truly their brothers. Now no man, even if he succeed to the command of a regiment in which his best days have been spent, can be expected to take the same interest in its wellbeing that he would have done but for the rule which limits his tenure of office to three or four years. And if the further rule be strictly acted upon which throws the command of regiments on selection, what motive will the new-comer have to regard either the officers or the men committed to his charge in any other light than as persons among whom it is his business to enforce for a given time attention to their military duties? The writer in the 'Times' denounces, not perhaps without justice,

and regimental entertainments; and one at least of those who reply to him, suggests that these and other abuses are not to be corrected, except by the exercise of parental authority over young men by commanding officers. But what commanding officer, who knows that in three or four years he will have seen the last of his regiment, will give himself the trouble to conciliate his young men, and thus qualify himself to become their adviser? And what regard are the young men likely to pay to other than the professional orders of a chief with whom they are perfectly well aware that their connection must cease before it can grow into anything like mutual respect and confidence? It appears, then, to us, that excellent as his intentions may be, the military critic of the 'Times' has said little to allay the discontent in the army of which he complains, and nothing at all to prove that either individuals or the public have been the gainers by that one particular act which confessedly lies at the root of the great bulk of the grievances which he has undertaken to explain away.

The truth is that the writer whose paper we are noticing, like every other out-and-out supporter of the new order of things, rides off from a statesman-like consideration of what the system has done for the country on points of detail, as these affect or are held to affect the fortunes of individuals.

To the consideration of officers' grievances he accordingly devotes in his first paper rather more than two closely printed columns, while his defence of army organisation, of short service, and so forth, is suppressed into four brief sentences. This is not surprising. From the standpoint taken up in

dealing with the former subject, there might a good deal be said that was plausible. Into the discussion of the latter no sophistry could be introduced; and hence one or two bold assumptions, not one of which will bear a moment's serious examination, are all that he has judged it expedient to put forth. To these, as well as the more elaborate details of his second essay, we may advert byand - by. Meanwhile the care with which he has reduced to eight distinct headings, the wrongs of which officers are supposed to complain, at once enables and compels us to put in a proper light the question really at issue between the Government and the nation. It is this. Has the abolition of purchase among officers, followed up by the introduction of short service as now practised, proved to be for both officers and men the beneficent measures which their author expected them to be? In other words, did an exercise of the Royal prerogative, such as had not been heard of for centuries, bring relief to the tax-payer, while at the same time it brightened the prospects of those classes in society from among which the bulk of our recruits are drawn, and must always be drawn? For these, after all, are the points which it most deeply concerns the people at large to understand. Whatever lies beyond them may be open to dispute; but whether the democracy has gained or lost, by an act not voluntarily perpetrated-of that we may be sure-but forced upon a Liberal Government by its Radical supporters, that is a question which the Times' writer keeps steadily in the background, and that is therefore the question which we now propose at some length to discuss.

Two reasons were assigned for the abolition of purchase-one be

VOL. CXXXVI.-NO. DCCCXXVII.

fore, the other after, the issue of the Royal Warrant. The latter came from the Minister more immediately connected with the service, and therefore assumed to be a prominent adviser of the Crown in that instance. The former was advanced by the bulk of his Radical supporters in and outside the House of Commons. We may as well deal with the Ministerial apology in the first place, both because it was spoken, so to say, in a whisper at the time, and because it has never, as far as we know, been publicly enlarged upon since. It was this-that without doing away with purchase in the line, it would be impossible to accomplish the end which the Government had in view,-i. e., "to weld"-such were his own words -" into one harmonious whole, the discordant elements of which the military force of the country was composed." This somewhat grandiloquent expression meant, when reduced to common English, that the militia must no longer be treated as a semi-civil force, but being brought under the absolute control of the War Minister, must henceforth regard itself, and be regarded by the country, as an integral portion of the regular army. Now, for the life of us, we could not understand at the moment, and we are still unable to comprehend, what possible connection there could be between abolition of purchase in the line, and the transference of militia business from the Home to the War Office. If, indeed, the Minister had intended, either by Act of Parliament or by a second arbitrary exercise of the prerogative, to convert militiamen bodily into linesmen, then some glimmering of light might have fallen upon his declaration. Purchase in the militia has ever been a thing unknown; and to

X

sanction exchanges from non-purchase into purchase regiments, would have opened the door to all manner of abuses. But we doubt whether the Government ever seriously entertained such an idea; and we know, that whether entertained or not, it was never acted upon. Militia regiments have no doubt so far lost their identity, that they stand in the Army List as supplemental battalions to regiments of the line. But neither may an officer in a militia regiment exchange with an officer in a line regiment, nor can a noncommissioned officer or private in a militia battalion be transferred without his own free choice to one or other of the line battalions with which his own happens to be connected. The excuse, therefore, offered by Lord Cardwell for a measure concerning the policy of which we suspect he entertains serious doubts, may safely be relegated to a place among those highsounding phrases with which men in power usually endeavour to hide from others, if not from themselves, the mistakes they have made or are meditating. We accordingly leave it where it stands, a striking example of the shifts to which wise and good men are often reduced when driven to assign reasons for acts in themselves unreasonable, while we deal more at large with the point raised by the Radicals, and over and over again, we regret to say, reiterated and enlarged upon by gentlemen high in office, of whom better things might have been expected.

The popular notion of purchase in the army ten or twelve years ago was, as we believe it still is, something like this. The Crown, instead of dealing fairly by the people, and appointing the best men, whether of noble or humble birth, to military trusts-put up

commissions in the army for sale, and thus provided good incomes for the sons of the aristocracy at the public expense. In acting thus, it not only abused the constitutional rights of the sovereign, but it handed over to the persons with whom it dealt, the absolute control of the armed force of the country. For gentlemen who paid down hard cash in exchange for appointments acquired a vested interest in such appointments, and were placed in a position towards both their superiors and inferiors incompatible with the maintenance of proper discipline. Moreover, the injustice done to all who contrived, through interest or otherwise, to obtain commissions without purchase, was crying. These might be few or many in number; but whether brought in from civil life, or, as occasionally happened, promoted from the ranks, their condition in either case was pitiable. They found themselves purchased over, time after time, by boys whose sole claim to advancement was a well-filled purse, and had no brighter prospect to look forward to than long years of service as subalterns, to be followed by reduction to half-pay when they became old and worn out. Such a system could be regarded only as a glaring wrong done to the democracy, the members of which body endure all the hardships of military life without being allowed any adequate share in its advantages. Our readers will doubtless recollect how often a soldier so distinguished as De Lacy Evans used to indulge, from his place in the House of Commons, in rhodomontades of this sort-apparently forgetting that he was himself a living witness to their hollowness, inasmuch as promotion from a lieutenancy to a lieutenant - colonelcy had come to him, with

out purchase, in the brief interval of two years. But if we look back with surprise at inconsistencies of this sort, still greater is our astonishment to find that there are public men, and among them Ministers of the Queen, who continue to encourage an unthinking crowd in harbouring these delusions. Thus, in a remarkable speech, delivered not very long ago in Reading, Mr Shaw Lefevre repeated, by unmistakable insinuations, all that Sir De Lacy Evans had been in the habit of asserting twenty years ago. After enumerating a long list of favours conferred upon the country by a Liberal Administration, he wound up by saying, "Lastly, outside the line of legislation, great administrative changes have been effected. The purchase system in the army has been abolished. Competition for the whole public service has been substituted for patronage. The army has been reorganised." And the crowd assembled to listen applauded these statements to the echo, believing that a substantial boon had been conferred upon the taxpayer, and the people's right asserted to see that the army should hereafter be so managed as to throw open to poor as well as to rich men the honours and the emoluments of a noble profession. When we mention, in reference to the substitution of competition for patronage in the Civil Service, that there are, while we write, four vacancies in the Government offices, for which more than fifty young men are competing, some idea may be formed of the chances of success for him whose parents or guardians are not rich enough to give him the best education which money can procure. But this by the way, as a point for the aspiring democracy to consider, after they shall have taken in

what we are about to tell them about purchase in the army and its abolition.

With the true history of purchase in the British army, we are inclined to suspect that not many of those who either regret or rejoice over its abolition, are very well acquainted. It will be our business, before bringing this article to a close, to enlighten both parties on that head; but before entering upon that subject, it may not be amiss to satisfy ourselves as to what either the taxpayer or the people-using that term as it is used by Mr Bradlaugh and orators of his stamp or the public service, has gained by the administrative changes, for effecting which the Chief Commissioner of Works desires his party to get credit. As far as concerns the tax-payer, we find that the immediate cost to him of the realisation of a Radical crotchet was something more than six millions sterling, that being the amount advanced for purchasing up saleable commissions. There is, however, a farther and not less serious demand upon our pockets. The sum paid last year in the shape of pensions to officers compulsorily retired, appears to have been between three and four hundred thousand pounds; and there is every prospect of its becoming, as time rolls on, continually greater. And not the least curious part of the matter is, that while the Government which has laid these burdens on the people takes immense credit to itself for the liberality with which it treated, and continues to treat, army officers, the credulous people are hoodwinked into believing that, in some mysterious way or another, they, too, have benefited by the proceeding. Now, how stand the facts of the case? The reorganisation of the army,-in other words,

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