Admitted, then, that the state of our army and navy is by no means what it should be, and admitting that the two great wants of the day are, first, better organisation, secondly a large and rapid increase of our heavy and field guns, the problem is, how to set our house in order as quickly as possible. To me it seems that though much has been well said and written as to the better organisation of our forces, too little has been said about the absolute necessity of reorganising the administration of our Government departments, the sources from which much that is now complained of emanates, and will continue to emanate until a better system be adopted. And let me say at the outset that by reorganisation I do not mean disorganisation, consequent on the overburdening of one side of the department at the expense of the other, and then in a few years going back in a vicious circle, and destroying the work done by upsetting the balance on the other side. We have had much too much of that already. But by reorganisation I mean a well-considered redistribution of work and responsibility, by which every sub-department of the great spending services in Pall Mall and Whitehall shall be more directly responsible to the House of Commons and the public for the proper performance of its own special work and the presentation of its own estimates, under the controlling supervision of the Secretary of State for War and the First Lord of the Admiralty, than at present-something, in short, in which order and not confusion shall permanently reign.

The curse of the War Office (and of that, as having held office between 1874 and 1880, I speak with some experience) is overcentralisation. I lay stress upon the word 'over,' because in the abstract a certain amount of centralisation is a good thing. It is only where, carried to excess, it interferes with the free working of the sub-departments, that I maintain it becomes vicious in principle and detrimental to the public interests. This over-centralisation, as is well known, dates from the Crimean War. Most of us recollect how the departments connected with the War Office of those days had become very lax from a prolonged state of peace, and how the first strain of a great war completely broke them down. Denunciations of aristocratic jobbery and maladministration were freely bandied about, though the primary culprit now turns out to have been treasury economy.' Dickens's inimitable portrait of the Circumlocution Office, added to the disasters of the Crimea, sealed the doom of a system which had become manifestly inadequate for modern requirements. In the revolution that took place everything was sacrificed to centralisation. The Secretary of State was to be the central sun, round which all the minor planets of his department revolved, and through him, as a parliamentary centre of communication, all light was to penetrate by means of the Army Estimates into the unilluminated darkness of the public mind.

To carry out a revolution of this magnitude, and to make the

to

civilian element supreme was the work of many years, and did not reach its climax until the advent of Mr. Cardwell and Sir Henry Storks to power in 1869. The task undertaken by Mr. Cardwell was no light one, and if it failed, as it was bound to fail, it was due more to the inherent difficulty of the problem he attempted to solve than any lack of will on his part, or any want of loyalty on that of the military authorities. Oil is a good thing in its place, and so is water, provided they are kept apart to do the work assigned them; but mix them together, and no laboratory that has as yet been invented will make them assimilate. Now it is just this attempt to mix two antagonistic ingredients that clogs the wheels at every turn of the War Office machinery. It was Lord Cardwell's oft-repeated assertion that it was his mission to weld the forces of the Crown into one harmonious whole. An admirable theory, and one which every sensible man in the state would have sincerely wished to carry out. His error was in supposing that this could be done by a system of overcentralisation, which aimed at despotism rather than constitutionalism in the administration of his office, and which necessitated constant reference to the Secretary of State on comparatively insignificant matters, and forced him to have a finger in every pie however small.

Practice soon proved that nobody in such a position could be the omniscient and omnipresent deity who should be the main spring as well as the minor spring of all the heterogeneous departments under his sway. And the proof was that he had hardly been in the saddle a year before he felt it necessary to strengthen his administrative and parliamentary position by the revival of the SurveyorGeneralship of the Ordnance, with enlarged powers, as the chief of five great departments, namely, guns and stores, commissariat, contracts, fortifications, and clothing; and by the creation of another political officer in the shape of a Financial Secretary, in addition to the Parliamentary Under-Secretary already exisiting. The powers of these officers were very strictly defined by warrant, as at the time were those of the General Commanding in Chief; but it was perfectly clear, to anybody that cared to read between the lines of the warrant, that these officers were intended to be the subordinates rather than the independent advisers of the Secretary of State, themselves responsible to the House of Commons and the public. Indeed, the divide et impera' principle seemed to have a strong hold on Mr. Cardwell's imagination, for the new word of control' was coined to name a portion of the Surveyor-General of the Ordnance's department, under which the ordnance store and commissariat sub-departments were classified.

A more unfortunate name could not have been devised. Rightly or wrongly it was looked upon, by the military authorities and by the army generally, as an assertion not only of the political, but of the military supremacy of the Secretary of State; an idea which

gained ground from the substantial fact that a Comptroller was appointed at the headquarters of every general officer in the kingdom, whose duty it was to control expense and report directly to the Secretary of State through the new Surveyor-General of the Ordnance, Sir Henry Storks, and from the more trivial circumstance that, on the occasion of a grand review at Aldershot, Mr. Cardwell appeared mounted in Privy Councillor's uniform with cocked hat and sword, and seemed to accept the salutes, intended for the General Commanding in Chief, of the officers marching past.

The oil and water, unworkable enough before, were soon turned into oil and vinegar by these unlucky mistakes. Jealousies and antagonisms arose between the civil and military sides of the War Office, which had certainly not subsided when I had the honour of succeeding Sir Henry Storks as Surveyor-General of the Ordnance, and which I venture to say, notwithstanding the sincere loyalty and good faith of the Commander-in-Chief, have left their traces behind them even to this day. If anything went wrong in the department, either on the civil or military side, it became the invariable practice of all gentlemen who returned thanks for the army, or wrote in the daily press, to put all the blame upon the War Office clerks. Poor War Office clerks! If the public had only known the truth, they have had as little to do with mistakes of policy as the time-honoured lamb in the fable, who was said to have fouled the stream from which the wolf drank. But somebody had to bear the blanie, and who better than that class of highly efficient and inoffensive public servants who were perfectly unable from their official position to reply for themselves, and who appeared in military eyes as the representatives of civil and parliamentary control; the truth being that neither the clerks nor any other officials were to blame, but the system alone. Let us return to that.

I have spoken of the tendency of overweighting departments, partly with a view of more complete centralisation, partly for the sake of economy; I shall have presently to speak of the indecision, delay, and constant change, which that system engenders, and which ends in being most detrimental to the public service. By overweighting I mean giving one department additional uncongenial work, without adequate power and responsibility to deal with it in detail-work which by its very nature necessitates constant reference to the central authority for instructions in case of difference of opinion. This overweighting was clearly visible from the outset in the Surveyor General's Department, and even now exists in the Commander-in-Chief's department.

In 1870 the theory of centralisation broke down at once, from the impossibility of housing under one roof five great departments in the War Office itself. The space available had been strained to its very utmost by the supposed political necessity of absorbing the

6

Horse Guards in Pall Mall, and the cramped room and bad sanitary state of the building forbade any further centralisation. The consequence was, that the head-quarters of three out of the five great subdepartments placed under the charge of the Surveyor-General, and those not the least important, namely, barracks and fortifications, clothing and contracts, remained outside, at the Horse Guards, in Pimlico and elsewhere. One result was, that the activity of the Inspector-General of Fortifications (a distinguished General of Engineers) was constantly put to the test. He complained feelingly that he had to do that which we are told no man can do, namely, to serve two masters, and that he had to serve them in the most unpleasant manner, by the physical exertion of running from pillar to post, from one office to another, before he could get any attention paid to his demands. A sort of no child of mine game' went on. If, in his opinion, a new fort or an additional barrack had to be constructed, or an old building repaired, it was necessary for him first to submit the plans to the General Commanding in Chief, and, having obtained his consent, to forward the estimates and plans to the Surveyor-General of the Ordnance, who in his turn submitted them. for approval to the Secretary of State. This process was known, in official slang, as going through the mill,' and as the mill' had many pigeon-holes in every office, it became more than probable that the most urgent demands would be delayed somewhere in transitu, unless pressed by personal importunity. The Director of Clothing was in no better plight for though his factory was in Pimlico, his interests necessitated his constant attendance in Pall Mall, lest he should prove the truth of the proverb, Les absents ont toujours tort.' Perhaps the Director of Artillery and Stores, with an office in Pall Mall, held the most difficult position of all; for not only did he perform that most useful function of 'buffer' between the Secretary of State, the Commander-in-Chief, and the Admiralty, but before the Ordnance Committee, abolished by Mr. Cardwell, was reestablished, he had to take the responsibility of advising the Secretary of State and the Commander-in-Chief as to the system of artillery and small arms to be adopted into the service. The onerous nature of such duties may be imagined by the simple statement of fact, that of the four directors of artillery who have held office in the last fifteen years, one is now suffering from mental affliction, another died from heart disease brought on by overwork and anxiety, and the present occupant of the post will have to thank his naturally very strong constitution if at the end of his period of service he has suffered no ill effects from the mental and bodily strain daily put upon him.

So much I am glad to be able to say, for it clearly shows that where the prescribed duties were of so mixed a character, and so many authorities had to be consulted, interminable correspondence,

delay, and friction became inevitable, before even the simplest business could be transacted; and I do not hesitate to affirm that but for the tact and discretion of the officials concerned, in pouring oil on the troubled waters, and their readiness to concede where concession was possible, no business could have been done at all. Since 1870 years have rolled by. The cards have been shuffled again and again, and a never-ending era of change, fraught with worry to the official mind, has set in. The Surveyor-General's office has been first reduced by the transference of the commissariat and transport to the Commander-in-Chief, and then has been itself suppressed and offered as a sacrifice to Mr. Justice Stephen's Commission. The civilian side of the War Office has thus been despoiled and in part abolished, and the military side has been pro tanto invested with its duties, but the system remains. And the proof that it does remain to blight the energies of our ablest military administrators is to be found in the fact, that although the commissariat was handed over to the Quartermaster-General more than eight years ago, its reorganisation on a military basis is still going on, and no efficient or sufficient system of transport yet exists, except on paper!

Similarly, plans for the embodiment of eight army corps were prepared ten years ago, but it is an open secret that the arrangements for the embodiment of even two army corps have not yet been completed, and that portions of the saddlery and accoutrements for even one army corps are not yet, or were not a short time ago, in store. Volumes have been written respecting the want of various articles of equipment for our reserve forces any time within the last twenty years, both inside and out of the walls of the War Office, but the want is as apparent now as it was then. Naturally the country asks why it is, as the late Duke of Somerset once said, our ships cannot swim and our armies cannot march, and guns are never forthcoming when wanted. Who is to blame? Is it the Secretary of State, or the Director of Artillery, or the War Office clerks, or the House of Commons, which refuses to vote the money wanted for the purpose? Certainly not. The one are the hardest worked and best abused officials in the kingdom, and the other have never been known to refuse the estimates asked for. There is but one answer. The system alone is at fault, because under it no one below the Secretary of State is directly responsible, and his responsibility ends with his term of office.

For years past our deficiency in heavy and field artillery has been notorious, and at this moment it is a crying evil. I do not say that this could have altogether been foreseen or prevented. After all, our neighbours are in very little better plight than ourselves. Far from being in that perfect preparation for war which is always assumed by alarmists, there is good reason to believe that not one of the Great Powers has yet manufactured guns enough of the new type