men.

armaments " to which, he said, the Liberal Government had reduced the forces of the country. But Mr. Cardwell pointed to his proposed figures, which showed a total of 497,000 men under arms: 135,000 regular troops, 139,000 Militia, 14,000 Yeomanry, 9,000 First Army Reserve, 30,000 Second Army Reserve, and 170,000 Volunteers; and guns appropriate to a force of 150,000 These forces, Mr. Cardwell said, it was his object to combine into one whole; and the question was, how to achieve that object. As far as men went, were they to be raised by compulsion or voluntarily ? As far as officers went, were they to remain under a system of purchase or not? As far as the reserve forces went, were they to be still under the control of the Lords Lieutenant of counties or not? To the first question, Mr. Cardwell answered that he was not prepared, as yet, to resort to "anything so distasteful as compulsory service." To the second and third he said that the Government had made up its mind that purchase must be abolished, and that the control of the militia and other auxiliary forces must be taken away from the Lords Lieutenant and given to the Queen. In fact, the abolition of purchase and the increase of the efficiency of the reserve-together with certain provisions for giving a "local connection" to every

from those of the regular army. What is it that causes this conflict of interests? It arises from the fact that every one of these bodies relies for its existence merely upon the voluntary principle." With regard to the volunteers and the line, Sir William Mansfield did not think that any one would propose in England to change that principle; for the volunteers were ipso facto "persons who were willing to give up to the state such time as they could spare from the vocations pressing upon them," and "the regular army is called on to serve in all parts of the world, and frequently in tropical climates. I consider it, therefore," he said, "to be absolutely necessary that the line should continue to be raised on the voluntary principle. But there is a third body, as to which the circumstances are different, and this is the body that competes with the line for recruits as matters at present stand. The conflicting interests of the militia and the line can only, in my opinion, be reconciled by causing the militia to be raised on the ancient principle of obligation, which always belonged to the constitution of this country, which has always been recognised as the first duty of every member of the population, but which recently, for a certain number of years, has been in suspension. I believe it to be absolutely necessary that we should revert to that principle of obligation-regiment-were at once seen to be the principal views of that is to say, that every man, without respect to his rank or his position in the world, shall be liable to serve, in his own person, in the ranks of the militia."

Although Parliament and the country did not in the end consent to any such sweeping change as this, every one was prepared to see military reorganisation take precedence of all the other legislation of the year. The Queen's Speech gave a long paragraph to it, as follows:The time appears appropriate for turning such lessons [as those of the present war] to account by efforts more decisive than heretofore at practical improvement. In attempting this, you will not fail to bear in mind the special features in the position of this country, so favourable to the freedom and security of the people; and if the changes from a less to a more effective and elastic system of defensive military preparations shall be found to involve, at least for a time, an increase of various charges, your prudence and patriotism will not grudge the cost, as long as you are satisfied that the end is important, and the means judicious. No time will be lost in laying before you a bill for the better regulation of the army and the auxiliary land forces of the Crown, and I hardly need commend it to your anxious and impartial consideration." The promised bill was introduced by Mr. Cardwell, the Secretary for War, very early in the session; and it was seen that the increased outlay to which the Queen's Speech had referred was to be a reality. The total amount asked for in the estimates was £15,851,700, an increase of £2,886,700 over the vote of 1870; although Mr. Cardwell explained that a million of this would not be wanted in ordinary times. The gross addition to the numerical strength of the regular army was to be 19,980 men, of whom 5,000 were artillery, with a proportionate increase in the number of guns. Mr. Disraeli had on the opening night of the session made mockery of the "attenuated

the bill. It is to the way in which these subjects were dealt with by Parliament and the Prime Minister that we may now turn.

The history of purchase in the army is the history of a practice of various degrees of illegality, and of innumerable Royal Commissions designed to solve the contradiction between practice and law. The beginning of it dates from the reign of James II., who in 1683 issued a warrant, "ordering the payment of one shilling in the pound on the surrender of a commission to the person surrendering, and by him to whom the surrender is made." William III. made strenuous efforts to stop any traffic in commissions, and his successor forbade it, except with the royal approbation. But as early as 1702 the law courts had begun to declare the lawfulness of purchase, and the Court of Chancery enforced the payment of £600 from a lieutenant to his predecessor in a company. Twenty years later we find the distinction, so familiar in the present century, between "regulation prices" and "over-regulation prices" clearly marked; and in the middle of the eighteenth century we come to a commission definitely fixing the rate of payment to which officers should be subject-deciding that an ensigncy should cost £400, and a colonelcy £3,500. Royal Commissions continued to be issued at intervals, right up to 1856, and one and all seem to have reported in favour of purchase: partly and ostensibly on the ground that the system helped to quicken promotion and retirement; and partly, of course, that it secured that officers of the army should be persons of "social position." It is hardly too much to say that from the time of the Peace to the time of his death, the purchase system in the English Army was kept up by the influence of the Duke of Wellington, and notably by his celebrated memorandum of the year 1833. In 1856, at the end of the Russian War, when the

ABOLITION OF PURCHASE BY ROYAL WARRANT.

In the Lords it met with opposition at once more dignified and more effective. Nearly every eminent Conservative peer who had ever had anything to do with the army said something in favour of purchase: one supported it because it provided a cheap way of retirement, one because the officers liked it, one because abolition would cost so much by way of compensation, one because the old system had prevented the British officer from becoming a "professional man with professional politics." Lord Salisbury, whose tongue on this occasion was as rasping as usual, suggested a new name for the new method: "If purchase had been described as a system of seniority tempered by selection, the more correct formula for the new system was stagnation tempered by shall be cancelled and determined. jobbery." Lord Derby, alone of the Tory peers, joined with the advocates of the Government in supporting the

manner. Whether the blame of the irregular act is to be laid to the door of the House of Lords or to that of Mr. Gladstone, it was he that got all the unpopularity. Such stretches of exceptional prerogative as the issue of the Royal Warrant, or as the Collier promotion, did very much to lessen that personal loyalty to the Liberal leader which had been one of the great causes of his success in 1868. People took up Lord Salisbury's phrase, and talked of "the dictator," rather than of the leader; and the ordinary Englishman makes it a point of honour that he will not be dictated to. And so, although the object of the Government was attained, and the army "reconveyed from the officers to the nation," the Government and its leader were a good deal discredited; especially as the cost of the reform was very considerable indeed. The Government proposed to compensate the officers fully and liberally, paying them not only the legal "regulation prices" for their commissions, but the "over-regulation prices," which custom had legalised in the teeth of law. This compensation it was estimated would amount to, at the very least, six millions sterling-some said ten millions, to be spread, of course, over a number of years a large sum to take from the shoulders of the benefited class, and lay upon those of the general taxpayer.

The increased estimates for the year which the reform of the army made necessary were a sore perplexity to Mr. Lowe, the Chancellor of the Exchequer. It is true he did not lament the high expenditure of the fighting departments; for, he said, he regarded an efficient army and navy as the best commercial investment in the world; but he had to face a large estimated deficit-no less than £2,713,000. This he proposed to cover, first, by charging the duties on wills and successions so as to make them three times as productive as before; a slightly increased income tax; and, above all, by a tax on matches. It was this last tax which attracted the most attention; and its ultimate fate is a good illustration of the danger of over-cleverness in matters of finance. Mr. Lowe had been afflicted by the thought of the waste going on in the use of matches, and of the perils at tending such waste; and he thought that he might by one brilliant stroke lead people to economical habits and add a million to the revenue. For the number of matches annually made is almost inconceivably great; he announced that it was five hundred and sixty millions of boxes, without counting the forty or fifty millions of boxes of wax matches and fusees. He proposed, therefore, to put a halfpenny tax on every box of matches-a tax which, even if it had the effect of bringing down the manufacture by a third, would contribute nearly a million to the receipts of the year. But Mr. Lowe was either too much preoccupied to remember or too cynical to care that the match-making trade is in the hands of the very poorest of the London poor, and that to tamper with it would be to turn many thousands of human beings, most of them children, either into paupers or into criminals. The Chancellor of the Exchequer had invented a motto for the labels that he proposed to affix to every match-box;

and to withdraw the tax would be to nullify a good joke-an unanswerable argument against withdrawal. "Ex luce lucellum "-"Out of light a tiny gain ”—such was the inscription that every box was to bear; a motto which was a keen delight to the quondam Oxford tutor who proposed the tax, but which was a sore puzzle to the respectable House of Commons who listened to him, and which would have probably been neither illuminating nor profitable to the housemaids that were to use the matches. As it was, neither tax nor motto ever came to anything. When the amusement at Mr. Lowe's pun

had died away, people began to see the serious nature of the proposal and the strong objections to it. A procession of match-makers, squalid and miserable, and some thousands strong, marched from Bethnal Green to Westminster to protest against the tax, and it was withdrawn. The same fate befell Mr. Lowe's proposal to increase the succession duties,—a proposal which struck a blow at one of the most cherished interests of the propertied class: nor was there any better destiny awaiting the plan of altering the mode of calculating the income tax by a percentage, instead of so much in the pound. On the whole, the Budget of the year may be said to have been a conspicuous failure, and to have done serious harm to the Government that proposed it.

Nor were many of the other events of the session such as to raise the spirits of the Ministry. Mr. Childers, who, after a distinguished career in Australia, had come home and been returned for Pontefract, and been made First Lord of the Admiralty by Mr. Gladstone, was forced by ill-health to resign. About his work, which at all events had been very thorough-going in its way, the most different and extreme opinions prevailed; his friends maintaining that his reforms had been the making of the navy, his enemies that they had almost been its destruction. Mr. Goschen succeeded him; an appointment which was severely criticised by those who thought it-the Admiralty-the wrong place for a member for the City of London, but amply justified by the speed with which the new First Lord mastered the details of his new office, by the vigour of his administration, and by the breadth of his views of public duty. Nothing could have been more telling than the speech which he made soon after his appointment, nominally to an after-dinner audience at the Mansion House, but really to the English public, on the foreign policy which England had observed during the war, and which we ought to continue to observe. "A policy of isolation," he said, "need not be a policy of selfishness; and many a country in Europe would prefer the disinterested neutrality of England to the sinister policy of some continental states. Among foreign peoples, who are accustomed to a more complicated diplomacy, England is never credited with simple honesty in her foreign relations. Some Machiavellian design is always attributed to her. Europe would have it that we abolished the slave trade because we were jealous of the competition of the French and Spanish colonies, and that we sided with Denmark because we feared what would happen supposing Kiel and its harbour fell into German hands. But, really, we are more single-minded in our