The Press.
London, England, 1856-04-05 00:00:00

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314

THE PRESS.

SATURDAY,

were enlisted in a moment of emergency, who
have deserved well of their country, and who,
by the practice of arms, and the wild life of a
camp in the enemy's country, have become in
a great degree unfitted for the pursuits of in-
dustrial existence at home. For some time to
come we may be assured there will bo a large
army, and a large military expenditure. The
question is, how to utilise the lipg.er as much
as possible—in other words, how to carry
through the greatest practicable amount of
army reform with the least offence .to indivi-
duals, and that before the average English
mind subsides into its usual profound indiffer-
ence to everything connected with the business
of arms.

respect the navy has an advantage ; for every
ship afloat engaged in continual conflict with
the elements is a camp of instruction in itself.
Lastly, as some reduction must be made,
make it in the fipe, RF# in the militia. Too
much colonial (pity is still done by British
troops. panad, otild 4ustralia, at least, nugl}t
suffiep, by %pans of local forces paid by
themselves, for.their owo protection in time of
peace. ;pdia oust have a European army—
knd it ;patters httle whether that army be
called the Queen's or the Company's, espe-
cially as the double Government will sooner
or later cease to exist altogether. But since.
in prudence, and in deference to public feel-
ing, a considerable body of armed men must
for some years be retained within the four
seas, let a part of them, at least, be withdrawn
for six weeks only in each twelvemonth, not
for the whole of their time, from industrial
occupations. Militiamen, well-driaed, are
little inferior to regulars. In any popular
quarrel they would enlist rapidly enough to
fill up the ranks of the line. In fact, they did
so throughout 1854 and 1855 ; and, since our
oldest and most constitutional force is also the
cheapest, it were folly to throw away an advan-
tage so easily retained.
These hints, roughly outlined, we put forth
for consideration and discussion. Now or
never army reform must be worked out. Two
years hence it will be too late, for then Alma
and Inkermann will have consecrated as many
abuses as the Peninsula and Waterloo.

the picture for him, his views of the desira-
bility of annexing everything having been
announced to India in the Satta►•a case. He
seized, therefore, and annexed the province,
revolutionising it after his peculiar system.
And the consequence is, that the revenue ob-
tained from it would have long ago left it in
hopeless bankruptcy but for the aid of the
surplus revenues of Bengal. His Lordship's
method of preparing the public accounts, it
may be noticed, is peculiar, for he credits all
the revenue received in his newly-annexed
provinces as so much gain ; while all the most
material items of the cost of occupation are
debited against the general government of
India, and paid for out of the surplus accruing
from the revenues of Bengal. At this rate, of
course, there is no province so costly, no dis-
trict so barren, that will not pay. The most
irredeemably bad bit of land in England would
pay likewise in the hands of a capitalist who
was content to leave the interest of capital
and money expended on wages and stock
and implements—in short, the entire cost of
his operations—wholly out of account. Farm-
ing is always successful with gentlemen who
do not look to profits, and who, let them spend
what they may, have always a handsome
balance at Coutts'. But when that balance
turns to a deficit things wear another appear-
ance ; and that is precisely the case with Lord
DALHOUSIE, who has at last exhausted what
seemed the inexhaustible surplus of Lower
Bengal,—Bengal, that has ever cost us little,
paid us most munificently, and made more
progress in material wealth than all the rest
of India put together, simply because, ►n the
outset, it fell under a good plain man, the
Marquis CORNWALLIS, one of the noblest
beings that ever lived. He was net a grasp-
all ; on the contrary, his tendency, like COKE
of Norfolk's, was rather to be over-generous to
the tenantry ; but his generosity has had its
reward. He made the settlement light, and
confirmed it in perpetuity ; and this simple
process has been the secret of the zemindara'
progress, and of his great success.
Lord DALHOUSIE'S next annexation was Pegu,
which was described by him and his organs at
the time as the richest acquisition that India
had ever made. It was to furnish teak for
shipbuilding, and rice for food, not only for its
own inhabitants, or even for all India only,
but for England and America as well—in short,
for all the world. We long since pointed out the
absurdity of such expectations in this Journal,
and what is now admitted by the Indian organ
of the Government to be the result? Why, in
a paragraph copied the other day in the Times,
we were informed that the bubble had burst,
that it was found that all the valuable timber
in Pegu had been loaf; since cut down, and
that we should have to grow our forests, if we
were to have forests at all, before we could
expect to have a tree to sell. As to the rice,
it was discovered that Pegu was either de-
serted, or could never have been much inha-
bited, and that the only chance of our getting
rice from it lay in the importation previously
of some four millions of people to cultivate it
from Bengal ! In the meantime the few
millions sterling expended on the acquisition
form what repudiating foreigners call passive
capital," our only present consolation being
that if we hold Burmah two hundred years
longer the province may then be peopled, and
our teak forests be iu order for cutting down.
The last new bubble is Oude, but that will
soon burst too, as all the others have done :
indeed, the whole statements put forth re-
garding it are much more befitting the period
of the South Sea bubble than our own more
sober times. We have not hesitated to enter
into the question as regards these proceedings
in all its bearings, because we are compelled
by duty to do so, but we feel at the same time
that by far the most fitting person to dispose
of this ridiculous revenue seeker from un-
planted forests and uninhabited swamps is
our laughter-loving contemporary Ma. poses.
The fact is, that, however good a thing it may
appear to be to have the ownership of land, the
only revenue that can possibly be derived from
land is the result of the skill and capital that
are applied to it. Whether the question be of
mines, of agriculture, of building, or of forest
culture, the maxim holds good. To revolu-
tionise a State, therefore, on the Dalhousie

Our suggestions on this head will be brief,
and we shall leave them with very little argu-
ment to the good sense of our readers.

First,—let-us, once for all, agree to drop
invidious comments, replies, and recrimina-
tions about the merits or demerits of respec-
tive officers in the crisis of fifteen months ago.
" Life is short, art is long "—the necessities
of the present may very well absorb whatever
energies Nature has given to any of us—let
the past be past—let peace be declared at
home as well as abroad. Even NAPOLEON has
proclaimed an amnesty ; the war is over, and
well over; the characters of all who took a
prominent part in it are decided by public
opinion ; and neither newspaper controversy,
nor reports founded on hearsay evidence, will
alter the world's judgment, though it is quite
natural that the parties themselves and their
champions should think otherwise. Next,—
let every political man who has sense to see
truth, and honesty to declare it, exert himself
to remove, as far as may be, from the popular
mind that plausible and dangerous delusion,
that a large army is necessarily an effective
one, and a small army necessarily a feeble one.
At no time is this theory true ; least of all is
it true in time of peace. An immense estab-
lishment, kept up on a war-footing for a series
of years, will merely leave us at the end of the
present generation with heavier taxes, a debt
not diminished, vast stores of weapons and
munitions of a kind which later inventions
will probably have superseded, and a pension-
list burdened with superannuated colonels
and generals. What England wants now, is
not a prodigious number of soldiers kei>t
under arms, but a thoroughly trained and
efficient corps of officers, camps of instruction
for the men, a militia disembodied, but yearly
called out for exercise, and, above all, stringent
tests of scientific aptitude imposed on the
engineering and artillery departments.
In these departments, if nowhere else, every
commission should be thrown open to compe-
tition, due care being taken to provide for the
exclusion of candidates physically incapable.
The effect of open competition in stimulating
industry needs no proof; and if it did, the
Indian Civil Service examinations have sup-
plied that proof in abundance. Farther—by
this means you do away with the risk either
of dangerous levelling or of invidious ex-
clusiveness ; for to recognised superiority of
professional knowledge a degree of precedence
will be granted by the soldier which he would
reluctantly yield either to mere wealth or to
mere rank.

k

For other branches of the service a com-
petitive test is not necessary ; indeed, while
purchase lasts, it would be impossible to es-
tablish one. But examinations there should
be ; not of the pedantic character of those
hitherto imposed, but plain, practical, and
searching as far as they go. Elementary
mathematics, drawing and mapping, physical
geography, tactics, strategy, fortification, and
at least one modern language, may be re
quired, and are all useful to the future com-
mander.

Camps of instruction serve a threefold pur-
pose—they accustom the soldier to live as in
real war, roughly, and supplying most of his
wants by his own skill; they teach officers to
handle large masses, and regiments to act in
concert ; and, most important of all, they en-
able those in command to distinguish the
mere barrack-lounger—the officer who comes
into the service allured by the notions of idle-
ness, independence, society, and a red coat—
from the working, zealous subaltern, to whom
war is a profession, not a pretext. In this