The Sun.
London, England, 1864-08-24 00:00:00

SPIRIT OF THE PUBLIC JOURNALS.

TIMES.—In India the position of the soldier has
long been what it is now becoming at home. There
the efficiency of the army and its readiness for the
field are the first considerations, and such a disposi-
tion of the European forces is made as will insure
their availability for service. Soldiers are stationed
in such places and in such numbers as will give them
a real military organisation, and a larger experience
than can be gathered by being cooped up a few
hundred together in some crowded town. But
this bringing together of a large number of men
has created evils and necessitated remedies of its
own. Idleness and listlessness, with their inevitable
tendency towards drink, reign wherever a great
body of men is brought together, at one of the Indian
stations, without much cccupation or any society
except that of each other. The remedies recently
adopted by the Commander-in-Chief are those which
have been found efficient in similar cases all over
the world. Experience has shown that there is no
set of men, however uninstructed and fond of animal
pleasures, who will not do some kindof work rather
than pass their time in absolute inactivity. The prim
saner works in his cell in sheer weariness of his
own thoughts ; if he cannot find some useful em-
ployment he carves legends on the wall with a rusty
nail or attends to the spinning of spiders or the
gambollings of mice. Half of the amusements and
pleasurable occupations of the man of leisure are
work, and often laborious work, such as the peasant
or mechanic would require good and steady wages
for performing. Hence we cannot wonder that as
soon as some regular occupation has been offered to
the scores of able-bodied young men who had usually
passed a large part of their days smoking in front of
their barracks, the offer has been eagerly accepted,
and most satisfactory results have followed. In that
torrid Indian climate it might have been thought
that the chief pleasure of the soldier, when he was
free from drill, would be to lie at his length be.
tween sleep and wake, or to indulge in common-
place talk with his companions. But even in India
the Commander-ineChief is able to congratulate the
men on the success of the regimental workshops.
and the excellence of the gardens which they have
laid out. He says that the Royal Artillery and
other regiments have distinguished themselves by
the excellence and neatness of their gardens. Seve-
ral of the military hospitals have good and prettily
laid-out gardens. His Excellency particularly
observed those of Pea hawur, Sea lkote, Meean-Meer,
and Allehabad." It is found that where large sta-
tion gardens are established at a distance from the
barracks the men do not care fur them, but that
they take great pleasure in and cultivate very
readily small gardens close by and attached to their
barracks. The feeling of property and possession
is aroused when each man has bis patch near his
own quarters, and can cultivate its himelf for him.'
self, receiving the produce and carrying- off any
prizes which may be given for proficiency in the
art. Evidently these improvements are of no small
importance in India, where, as elsewhere, the health
of the soldiers depends almost as much on their own
moral condition as on the salubrity of the site or
the season. But it cannot fail to occur to any one
who interests himself in this subject that there are
the same conditions and the same wants at home.
Of late years the necessity of massing men together
so as to accustom them to some of the habits of war,
and to teach them what they could not learn in
petty detachments, has been recognised by the Goa
vernment. There is nothing that resembles the
great Indian stations more than Aldershott, both in
its moral requirements and the means by which
they must be satisfied. Here are several thousand
young men in the full strength of life, impatient of
listlessness and inaction, ever endeavouring when
off drill to kill time by any means that suggest
themselves, and too often disposed to plunge into
intemperance for the mere want of something to do.
All this time the waste around them suggests a task.
The dust of summer, the mud of winter, are both
equally in keepiug with the desolation of the land-
scape. Certainly when the advisers of her Majesty
pitched upon this wild tract as the training-
ground of the British army they were not
under the influence of the love of the beauti-
ful. Nor, as it has turned out, had they much
foresight as to the comfortable, for on one thing
all mankind will agree,—that a less attractive
and convenient abode than Aldershott in either
of its two phases—the dusty or the muddy—could
hardly be found. It may be that the place was ill-
chosen, but the thing is done, and all that remains
is to make the best of it. Much money has been
laid out on buildings, and the House of Commons is
hardly likely to sanction any migration. But, as
the army is fixed there for good or evil, can they
not do es the soldiers of Meean-Meer have done, and
" bring the barren soil into profitable cultivation ?"
If an example be wanted coaxer home, it may be
found at the camp of Chalons, where the' labour of
the troops has been advantageously directed to that
cultivation which may be made successful wherever
a large body of men is brought together on a plain,
however sterile and unpromising. When we con-
sider that for nearly ten years there have been on an
average about 12,000 men and 1,000 horses at Al-
dershot, and that three out of four of the soldiers are
from the agricultural classes, there seems hardly a
limit to what might have been done. These thou-
sands of men, instead of passing in idleness, much
of the time which is not spent in drill, might have
made the whole camp ground a meadow. Instead of
paying for the removal of the sewage and the refuse
of the camp, they might have employed it on the
sandy soil, and obtained by one process the best of
disinfectants and the means of fertilising the waste
they lived upon. We trust the lessons taught by
these Indian stations will not be lost. No pains can
be too great on the part of the Government and the
commanding officers of the army to give soldiers
such employment as may take away some of the
greatest objections to a military lite. Since the
Crimean war and the Indian mutiny we do not, in-
deed, hear those acousatione against the British army
which were common a few years before among some
politicians; but the old belief that the military life
is unhealthy and immoral, as well as demoralising
to those who are brought in contact with it, has still
a strong bold on the popular mind. 'Whatever
truth may be the basis of thie feeling is no doubt
caused by the idleness in which the soldier has had
to pass a great deal of his time. Idleness is, as we
know, the root of all evil, and especially of those
particular evils which are the bane of the soldier's
life. Others it might produce indirectly, but to
these it led immediately and with terrible rapidity.
The reforms that have been already made have done
much to diminish these, and there is reason to hope
that nothing will tend towards this good object
more than a st stem of healty outdoor work, at an
occupation which is the oldest and the most natu-
ral to man, and the most conducive to keeping a
sound mind in a sound body.
DAILY SEWS.—Monster guns were to be expected
in this age of strong sensations as naturally levia-
than giant balloons, and everything else huge and
astounding that springs from the brains of great
engineers and omnipotent contractors. 'For aims
time past the reports of the tremendous powers of
the gun which has been not inaptly named " Big
Will" have been cheering the advocates of fortifica-
tions_ This gun has smashed no less than three
targets by land and at sea, all as strong as the
Warrior's sides ; though it is said that the gun has
been treated with some partiality in being planted
at a fixed mark, and at a range which made it next
to impossible to miss. Its backers tell us with
confidence, and some show of science, that the gun
will do precisely the same at four times the range,
and therefore we are to feel quite easy in our minds
as to the passage of a fleet of swift ironclads between
the forts that are planned to guard Portsmouth
Dockyard. We are asked to believe that, as the
greatest distance from a fart at which a ship could
pass in this channel would be about 2,000 yards,
and as the 600-pounder has hit and smashed a hole
through a target once out of five times at 500 yards,
therefore it would be certain to do the same at 2,0 V
yards. We imagine that most people will agree in
thinking this is rather a singular conclusion to come
to from the facts ; and when we observe how the ex-
periment was conducted upon which an assumption
so highly important is based, it Will be seen that the
trial of the gun really afforded only a guess at what
it might probably be able to do. When a weapon of
such prodigious power is proposed,the evident course
would be to try it at the utmost stretch, but this
has never been done on any one occasion with this
gun. It has been treated more like a dangerous
scientific toy
in a !ccture-room, loaded with half its
proper charge, and fired at quarter the distance at
which it is said to be se destructive. The explana-
tion of this curious method of testing a gun offered
by the scientific artillerists is, that as the detruc •
the effect of a shot on striking an iron-clad ship
depends on its velocity, cud as this quality may
be regulated by the charge, the same effect is to be
obtained by low charges at short range as by high
charges at long range. The theory is no doubt a
most convenient one, because it avoids any chance
of bringing out weaknesses in the construction of
the gun, and puts out of the question the quality of
accuracy which, it must not he overlooked, is far
more important and necessary in a monster gun,
simply because it is more difficult to aim at long
.range ; and because the gun would find its snatch
Di smeller ordnance unless it p.)sEessed this power
of striking its tremendous blow at a distance where
other guns are uselees. Now, without entering into.8
the objections to this theory, which we should. say 1
held by equally ecienfallacious,
we artillerists to he fallacous,
we have merely to point out the simple way of
putting an end to all doubt upon the matter by
' firing the great gun at its extremeofpower.of aSu,rteill.
Surety
we have had enough of adopting a system
lery without proper trial in the instance of the 110.
pounder breech loaders, two thousand of whioiltare

condemned to be converted, if that be possible, into
some sort ot available gun for the service. Yet here
we find the War Department ordering these mon-
ster guns, and again adopting an untried system,
involving endless and indefinite expenditure in the,
working. The practice-ground and school of gun.,
nery established at Shoeburyness, on a scale of such
magnitude and expense to the country, must be put
to very little use if they do not ensure a conapleto
and exhaustive ordeal for every kind of gun pro-
posed for the service. It is not to be a grand field
for displaying the triumphs of ingenuity in artil-
lery, for showing that enormous guns can be made
upon the coiled-iron principle nearly as large as the
American monsters of cast-iron, or for performing
those absurd iron target experiments which the
Admiralty always contrives to make when the ship
they refer to cannot possibly be altered or even
modified according to the result. Indeed, it re'
quires no great penetration to see that the War
Department does not exercise that control over
the experiments carried on at Shoeburyness,
antler
the auspices of the Ordnance Select Committee,
which should be maintained. The Minister of Wary
in obedience to Parliament, appoints a *eel"he t
Committee, to examine and report upon
Armstrong and Whitworth guns ; and the
questions involved in this inquiry are
certainly of no less importance than the
total reconstruction of the artillery of the armyand navy. The committee are of unquestioned com-
petence, they have accomplished the greater part of
their task, and there is every reason to expect re'
suits of. an importance equal to the contemplated
expenditure of some £50,000 or more; but before
the report of this committee can be known. on any'
,
part of the inquiry, and before the completion i-
the investigation, the Ordnance Select Committee
pursue a course of their own, having no reference
whatever to that laid down for the Special Commit'
tee. Take, for example, the trial of the 70 pounder
proposed as suitable for broadside guns against iron
plates. While the Special Committee test these
guns at every range up to 800 yards, to ascertailail
their power, with shot and shell, using the ftl‘
charges, the Ordnance Select Committee are Pe."„
forming, according to their particular theories,
guns ot large calibre, fired with half charges, at the
short range of 200 yards. How both these methods
of experimenting can be right we are at a I°s° t°
understand, and yet the War Department is flea's;
sarily, under the advice of the Ordnance Sel„
Committee, bound to act upon the results Which
that body obtains. The 600 pounder is tried 1,11,,
every way but the right one, and orders give°. `;
make the gun, but not at Woolwich, as it requtre_
special mactlinery. The heavy smooth bores, in ,_ v
same way, after having passed the sham trial, orA
adopted ; and the shunt rifling plan is also adopted
as the only means of converting the now old bree":
loaders of the service. All this time the
War Den
partnant are awaiting the deeision of their oW
committee, not only as to which of the two opciost`e
systems of artillery is the best :or the service, 000
of which is the shunt plan already decided upon a.s
largely for these converted guns, but which gigle
the strangest and cheapest in construction. ‘'.
the whole subj&ct is still anything but clear, eit _
as to the systems of rifling, the projectile, or the
construction of the gun—while, iu addition to at
Armstrong and Whitworth systems, we know .tl,
there are Mr Lancaster, Capt. Scott, Col. Bitulte ir
and Mr Mackay all claiming superiority for thert.
guns, and Capt. Palliser showing the War DePuns
a
ment how to convert old condemned cast-iron
g
ata erY
into good serviceable rifled ordnance "I
with
trifling cost—we say that it would be far tteratilo
i
commit the condemned breech loadersthan
decent regret to the Campo Santo of Woolwich
to arm the Navy with patched up failuree•