The Express.
London, England, 1868-07-28 00:00:00

IS PUBLISHED

EVERY EVENING.

LONDON, TUESDAY, JULY 28.

THE RIFLE MEETING AT VIENNA.

IT would be a strange development of French
Imperialism if one result of excessive mili-
tary government in France should be the
creation of national and popular armies of
self-defence, as opposed to aggressive forces,
throughout central Europe. Already we have
to thank the Emperor NArotioN, or rather
those fire-eating Colonels who figured on a
memorable occasion in the Moniker, for the estab-
lishment of our own volunteer army of defence.
And, although something of the military fer-
vour of our citizen force may have
cooled since the silly threats from which it
sprang have been forgotten, and the exercises of
our rifle corps may have subsided into a recrea-
tion and a sport, still the substance and the soul
are there of an army of reserve, unsurpassable in
all the qualities of a free, self-ruling, and self-
reliant race. The purely military deficiencies of
our volunteers arc such as every soldier's and
almost every civilian's eye can detect
at a glance. Nothing less than a threat
of foreign invasion would suffice to give
the peaceful and business-like Briton a taste
for playing at soldiers. In ordinary times,
the march out, the drill, the manmuvring, the
field-day, the review, the encampment, and the
shooting matches. are regarded as manly and
athletic games. In the Swiss cantons the rifle
meetings and matches have always united the
citizen and the military element, as becomes a
people who breathe the mountain air of freedom.
Perhaps, however, it is rather among the great
German people that the idea of Rifle Associations,
as defensive national forces, was born and bred.
Through centuries of disunion and division, through
the long agony of civil and religious wars,
under the pressure of military monarchies, of
petty feudal tyrannies, of a diplomatic and
bureaucratic system expressly devised to enervate
and repress the national and popular impulses
of the race, the ancient German in-
stinct of a free associated nationality was
never lost. Sometimes, as in 1813, it has been
appealed to by the very Princes who had dreaded
or disdained it so long as their own thrones were
safe. After the fall of NAPOLEON, the German
monarchs and princelings, with one or two enlight-
ened exceptions, did their best, or their worst,
to lay the national spirit they had evoked against
the common enemy of kings and nations. Yet
even in the darkest days of the reaction there
always existed somewhere in Germany the
ineradicable and irrepressible idea of the
national unity defended and affirmed by a
national army. Here and there, this idea found a
patron in some enlightened Prince, who en-
couraged the meetings of rifle, or choral, or
gymnastic associations of Germans from all parte
of the Fatherland. Here and there, Princes,
whose domestic government was reaationary,
if not despotic, have favoured these occa-
sional celebrations, destined to bear fruit
in the future. In 1848 the old associative spirit
of Germany burst out into a flame, and, though
suppressed for the moment, it smouldered on,
until the ambition of the two rival military
monarchies of Prussia and Austria rekindled it
in Schleswig Holstein. The war of 1806, which