ENGLAND'S "only General," in his most excellent Handbook for Field Service,' gives this piquant piece of advice to staff officers: "Your commander must never be ignored, even when you know him to be a fool."

Yet most of us can remember a certain Mansion House dinner, at which, forgetting to practise the maxim which he had preached, he compared his own commander to the "fifth wheel of a coach "- -an encumbrance so useless as to require removal. And this incident is a fair index to what has gone and is still going on, in the way of so-called army reform.

"Anything that has been is bad and must be destroyed," is the new cry; "and from the ashes of our past mistakes and mismanagement will arise, Phoenix-like, the army of the future, an army fitted for the days of progress in which it is modelled, and therefore as unlike as possible the old wornout machine which preceded it."

So we have regiments of "field officers," very few generals and

VOL. CXXXII.-NO. DCCCII.

captains, and no ensigns at all; paymasters, who are mostly captains, too poor to live on their pay, and so induced to keep the accounts of those who can for a consideration, which has already dwindled from what was promised; a new Discipline Act, and Queen's Regulations, in which the student. is constantly referred back to a preceding "para," as often as not contained in a previous issue, and so not calculated to allow work to be got through with that certainty and celerity which are so essential to military discipline.

Then there is "short" in place of "long service;" warrant officers step in promiscuously, and neither know their own places nor want them when found; the "sergeant drummer" grasps the baton which the "drum-major" has trundled at the head of every English regiment since England has possessed an army; and the old regiments themselves are lost in the confusion of quaint and unmeaning "territorial titles." But to prolong the list

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would be to follow our reformers' lead, and set ourselves only to destroy what they have set up.

In some points their system is an advance on the old one, and is worthy of all attention; in others the advance is altogether backwards, and can fairly be criticised in the hopes that changes may still be made; as they have been made in the very backbone of the new system-Short Service.

Short service came in with a rush immediately after the FrancoPrussian war. A certain set of military men-known in those days as the "German school"-started the system; and with our insular idea that every novelty started by the intelligent foreigner must be better than any of our old, wormeaten fabrics, we adopted it.

Now the so-called "German school" consists of extremely clever men, whose lives have been passed in the War Office, the Horse Guards, the Royal Arsenal, the educational establishments, the Intelligence Department; haply they have the management of powder-mills, telegraphic lines, postal arrangements, the planning of fortresses, or the construction of barracks-in fact, men tied to the desk and not to the men. Regimental officers accustomed to the command of men were hardly consulted; and so the practical being excluded, the fanciful gained the day, and a short service of three years with the colours and nine with the reserve was the result.

Now this was quite unsuited to our wants. We went at a bound from ten years a period extended at the man's pleasure to twentyone, with a liability of two years more when the whole twenty-one years were up-to three years, virtually, all told. The "German school" found it convenient to overlook the fact that three years' service

to a German, subject to universal conscription, and subsequent residence, if drawn, in his native town or district, was a far more suitable state of things than were three years to the English recruit, who voluntarily gave up the three years of his life most adapted to learning a trade in order that he might find out how many islands there are in the Mediterranean, or in how short a time passed in India he could lay in a stock of liver complaint which will last him a lifetime. But our reformers are clever men with the country's interests at heart; and they soon saw the state of things which three years with the colours induced, and lengthened the period little by little, until now our men enlist for periods of seven years with the colours and five with the reserve, with the option-if they are sufficiently interested in soldiering to have earned a non-commissioned officer's stripe

of continuing on for twelve or even twenty-one years altogether. And all praise is due to them for the system of "short service" as it now exists.

Much has been said in favour of "long service;" a great deal of which made its mark at the time in the public mind when uttered by Sir F. Roberts at the Mansion House; but after careful consideration, and an intimacy extending back as far as the Crimean war with "long service" men, we must give our vote in favour of "short service," on the following grounds :

From Waterloo till the Crimean war, a period of forty years, our army had been a peace army, and for such an army long service was exactly suited. Work in peace-time is mere routine: day follows day with military regularity, and for such work who could be better than men whose noses had been at the grindstone for fifteen or twenty