The Press.
London, England, 1856-05-10 00:00:00

THE ARMY.

THE speeches delivered on Thurday night in
the House of Lords indicate that the country
will very shortly be called upon to choose
between two different methods of preserving
our military efficiency. The remarks of Lord
PANMURE on the one hand, and Lord DERBY
on the other, though too brief and general to
come into direct collision, point nevertheless
to two perfectly distinct lines of policy.
Lord PANMIIRE advocates the maintenance of
a large standing army. " You have now an
" army formed in masses," said he ; " let me
advise you to keep it." His Lordship's notion
evidently is to maintain during peace an army
that shall be constantly ready for war. This
is a straighforward and intelligible plan.

The Earl of DERBY, on the other hand, seems
to be of opinion that the Militia constitutes the
true machinery for the preservation of our
military power :

I trust (said his lordship) that we shall not again fall
into the error of suffering the skeletons of those regiments
to crumble to pieces, of allowing the staff to be disor-
ganised, and of neglecting to retain such a nucleus of each
regiment as, called out overy year, or at all events once in
two years, for a limited period of service, may, in the first
place, keep alive the skeleton of the militia system, to be
clothed and filled np when occasion shall occur. And in
the next place, maintain among the men that military
feeling and those habits of discipline which must enable
them in the hour of peril to render good service to their
sovereign and their country.

His Lordship goes on to say that reduction
on a large scale must inevitably take place,
but that nevertheless we should so manage
that reduction as not in any way to affect the
organisation of our forces, but so as to pre-
serve during peace " the perfect miniature of
"an organised and effective war establish-
" ment."

It is. for the public to consider which of
these lines of policy they consider most expe-
dient. To the maintenance of a very large
standing army there are two important objec-
tions : first, the expense, which in the end
would certainly be fatal to the plan ; and
second, the evil of keeping up a larger force
than is required for actual service. In such
case the army would have a tendency to dege-
nerate, and, in spite of its additional numbers,
might not be found so effective in the day of
trial as a small force of picked men kept in
the highest state of discipline. We doubt
whether a permanent augmentation of our
regular standing army would be either desira-
ble in itself, or would long be tolerated by
public opinion.
The efficiency and high discipline of our
Militia was acknowledged with admiration by
both Lord PANMURE and Lord DERBY. This force
has contributed during the last two years not
less than 30,000 men to the regular army, and
its regiments have performed garrison duty on
various foreign stations. All that would be
required for the maintenance of a force which
has proved so admirable a nursery for our
regular army, would be a depot of some fifty
or one hundred men in our county towns, with
two or three non-commissioned officers, an
adjutant, and perhaps a recruiting-captain, to
overlook them. The existence of this small
body of disciplined men as a nucleus and
training-school for the entire regiment would
be invaluable. We are satisfied that a mode-
rate sum laid out in maintaining an efficient

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militia staff, would be far more useful in the
long run than millions annually expended on
the maintenance of an army not required for
actual service, and therefore likely to change
the whole current of popular feeling in respect
to our soldiery.

THE RE-APPEARANCE OF LORD

ABERDEEN.
TEE east wind has played with uncommon
harshness for the last few days, and the
" severity of our English summer," as HORACE
WALPOLE called it, has been seasonably ushered
in by the reappearance of the Earl of ABERDEEN
in the debates of the House of Peers. The
Ministers were thinking of triumphal arches
and garlands of floral emblems, but a bleak
blast from the lips of the Chief of the Coali-
tion must have made their teeth chatter. In
more ways than one the oration of the Noble
Earl was most cutting :—" I rejoice," he cried,
" that the warlike reputation of my Noble
" Friend now at the head o f the Government
"has rendered it possible to make a peace
" which, if done under my auspices.
"might have produced serious reprehension."
A sentence sharpened with more double-edged
sarcasm could not have been spoken. The
" warlike reputation " of Viscount PALMERSTON,
who quietly sat in the same Cabinet with the
Duke of NEWCASTLE at the terrible autumn of
1854, when our army was rotting ! But there
was something severe in calling Viscount PAL-
MERSTON "my Noble Friend." Some of the
small " Liberal" members, wishing to distin-
guish themselves in " the returns line," ought
to move for copies of any previous speeches in
which Lord ABERDEEN ever called the Pre-
mier his " friend." There was an air of humi-
lity in the Noble Earl's sighing reflection, " if
it had been done under my auspices." But, en
revanche, he made a desperate lunge in
saying —" If (the Peace) is not of the
" triumphant character of that treaty
" which it was my good fortune to sign
" in the same capital some forty years ago."
It is rather " antiquated " to commence con-
fessions about a bonne fortune of such old date,
but " the travelled Thane " desired to show
that if his rival beat him at the end of his
career, the time had been when victory was the
other way. The sly Earl, with his sharp tongue,
seems almost a match for the vivacious Vis-
count with his boisterous speeches.
The philosophy of Lord ABERDEEN'S speech
discovered something like what one of the
present Ministers would call, in his free way,
" imbecility." He said, "It is a remarkable
" circumstance that all our treaties of peace,
" however unpopular and objected to at the
" time they were made, have ultimately been
" sanctioned by the deliberate opinion of pos-
" terity." Fudge ! The assertion is not his-
torically true, and even if it were, the expla-
nation of the fact would lie on the surface.
Of course people cannot be clamorous, as
some men are only wise, in the purely retro-
spective fashion. The public is now quiescent
upon treaties upon which our ancestors
fumed, but if the circumstances were t o occur
again we might be equally indignant with our
forefathers. The blunders and betrayals of
four or five generations are safe from fierce in-
vectives, and we live in the present, except
those who dream over historical novels, or
doze under superannuated debaters, who re-
collect what they heard Mr. PITT say about the
Treaty of Utrecht The silence of posterity
about treaties, whose consequences have been
modified by subsequent changes, cannot be
interpreted as " sanction." Ephemeral cla-
mour out of doors cannot be appealed to as
natural opinion. There was clamour against
the Treaty of Utrecht beyond doubt, particu-
larly with reference to its commercial pre-
visions, but the extent of that clamour was
vastly exaggerated at the time. The mercan-
tile interest was not then so large as now, and
although the House of Commons refused to
ratify some of the secondary provisions of the
treaty, addresses from all parts of the kingdom
were in favour of it at the time (as is admitted
by Whig historians), and the fact is beyond
dispute that large majorities of both Houses

C

43d

of Parliatneat voted addresses of thanks to
Queen!ARNE on that occasion.
LOA ARK/IDEEN, however, has a curt and
arrogant way of settling everything. His
cynicism would be more caustic if it were less
°welted. We are living in times when ques-
tions cannot be settled by a -reference to what
" Mr. Pitt," or " Mr. Fok," said or thought
about them. So limited appears to be the
information of this veteran diplomatist about
the Treaty of Utrecht, that he seems to be
ignorant of the important fact that Lord
BOLINGBROKE himself (one of its makers) was
of opinion that there was a strong and justi-
fiable ground fur the clamour a,gainst the
treaty. In his " Letters on the Study of
History," Lord BotmenoxE, using the free-
dom of a historian's pen, wrote in the closet,
"If placed in the same circumstances again,
" I would take the same resolution, and act
"the same part." But ho then continues,
" Notwithstanding this, I shall not be sur-
prised if you think that the Peace of Utrecht
" was not answerable to the saceess of the
" war, nor to the effects it made on it. I think
" so myself, and have always owned, even when it
"was making and made, that I thought so." And
he states at length his reasons for that opinion.
(" Letters on the Study of History."—Letter
viii.) We observe, also. that Mr. HAr.t..km, in
his " Constitutional History," so tar from
"sanctioning" the Treaty of Utrecht, says,
" It is impossible to justify the course of that
"negotiation which ended in the Peace of
" Utrecht. It was at best a dangerous and.
" inauspicious concession, &0., &e." (" Constitu-
" tional History," Vol. iii. p. 21.9, Bth edition.)
And his hard words applied to BOLINGBROKE
we shall not repeat. So much for Lord Aemt-
DEEN'S loose notions about the Treaty of
Utrecht I

It is the' characteristic of red-tapist poli-
ticians like Lord ABERDEEN to think that they
can silence adversaries by supercilious asser-
tion. Freezing indifference of manner does
not always represent calmly-penetrating intel-
lect, and Lord ABERDEEN ought to know so
much. Ho has kno sledge, experience, long
training, but he has no practical sagacity, and
he might be a little less arrogant in his de-
meanour towards personages who are his
equals in all things, and his superiors in some.
He is not un orator, he is not a great states-
man, he is not an efficient ruler of a connec-
tion, and he will be chronicled in history only
as "an austere intriguer." He does not believe
in "popularity," which is a diplomatic mode of
indicating his own opinion about himself.
His estimate of " popularity " can scarcely be
tested by his own experience of that most de-
ceitful but delicions elixir under which so
many strong intellects have reeled. Lord
ABERDEEN in his frequent harping about the
hollowness of " popularity," reminds us of
what CURRAN said to a barrister who professed
to despise " mere popular esteem." " Ah! my
" dear friend, that is a liquor of which you
" have rarely taeted7
ouuttui wf 610