which we have a right to anticipate, in this respect, is, therefore, one which seems to us to promise universal benefit, both to individuals and to the public. The Army will be more generally considered as a profession; and when it ceases to be looked upon and dealt with as the pis aller of idlers, we shall have fewer idlers among the younger sons of our nobility and rich commoners. Has the greatly increased strictness in the exercise of episcopal functions and ecclesiastical patronage, which marks our timehas that diminished the number of aristocratic candidates for holy orders and cures of souls in this country? The reverse is as notoriously as happily the fact.

It is not for us to fix the standard of literary merit which may be considered as sufficient to establish a young man's fitness for a commission in the army. Certain acquirements are indeed so obviously necessary that even to point them out may appear impertinent. For example, every candidate for the rank of a British officer ought to prove that he is conversant with his Bible. An intimate acquaintance with the history of his own country, as well as a general knowledge of the principal events in the histories of Greece, Rome, and modern Europe, is surely not too much to expect from him. In like manner the geography of Great Britain and her colonies, physical and political as well as descriptive, ought to be at his fingers' ends; and if he have made himself acquainted with the principal features of Europe, and indeed of the rest of the world, it will be so much the better. In languages, too, we have an undoubted right to require, that, besides being master of his own, so as to write it correctly, he shall have some knowledge of Latin-the best preparation for French, Spanish, &c.—and that he shall be able to translate from French into English, and from English into French, without committing any palpable outrage upon grammar. We may add that in the present state of the world German is almost, if not quite, as requisite as French. Again, his acquaintance with arithmetic ought to extend as far as compound proportion; and his mathematical knowledge embrace the two first books of Euclid, with the four preliminary rules of algebra at the least. Besides these accomplishments there are others, such as drawing, and a more advanced acquaintance with mathematics, which, if not positively required, may deserve to be taken into account; but the youth who at seventeen or eighteen years of age cannot compass the course which we have here chalked out, has grossly neglected himself, and is manifestly unfit to be thrown into a walk of life where the means of correcting a defective education must, under the most favourable circumstances, be scanty.

We are satisfied, from what we saw and heard in the examina

tion room of the Training Institution at the Royal Military Asylum, Chelsea, that of the candidates for commissions among the non-commissioned officers of the British army, not one will be found, a few years hence, to shrink from this ordeal. Putting aside the languages, they and the private soldiers will have teachers at hand, well qualified to carry them to the highest point specified, and beyond it. Let us take care that the young gentlemen who come to the army from the upper ranks of civil life are equally well trained. Observe, we beg, that it will involve no outlay, or next to none, of public money. All that seems to be required is this: that a body of commissioners (three will be sufficient) shall assemble at stated seasons (say twice a-year), for the purpose of examining all candidates for commissions; that these candidates be nominated exclusively by the Commander-in-Chief, to whom, as well as to the Secretary at War, a return of the results of each examination shall be sent in; and that the Commander-in-Chief recommend to the Queen only those gentlemen of whose qualifications a favourable report has been made. Where the commissioners should sit-whether uniformly in London, or alternately in London, Dublin, and Edinburgh-is for the consideration of those in power; but as they will certainly not be occupied beyond a brief portion of every year, so there can be no necessity to pay them except for work done.

We feel no doubt that, whatever opposition may be offered to this proposal at the outset, it will, in substance at least, be ultimately accepted. Indeed, we entertain little doubt but that some plans of the sort must have already begun to find favour in high quarters; and we seek the commencement of a good work too earnestly to mar our own object by looking further ahead. But it is simply honest to warn all parties that a work of this kind, once begun, cannot be arrested till the fabric is complete. The moment you apply a test to the demands of individuals and of families for commissions, you excite a spirit of honourable rivalry among the officers themselves, which it will become your duty to encourage. You have supplied libraries in garrisons for the use of non-commissioned officers and privates, and you are now preparing a machinery through which the men shall be rendered capable of deriving benefit from them. You must not be less mindful of the intellectual wants of your officers. They, not less than their inferiors, will stand in need of libraries :but these must be of a different order. The officer, once attached to a corps, will be expected to render himself an accomplished scholar in the classics of his profession: and as it is impossible for him to carry about the books which must be

VOL. LXXXIII. NO. CLXVI.

2 G

read

read ere he can become such, it will be the duty of Government to supply them. Neither the Government nor the House of Commons need be much alarmed by this. A thousand pounds per annum will, in a very few years, provide for every headquarter station as many books of reference, connected with the history, science, and art of war, as can be needed,—and nobody would propose that any other than books of reference in the English, French, and German languages shall be furnished at the public expense. And then, should a further plan of examination be desired, in order to try the fitness of Ensigns for advancement to lieutenantcies, and of Lieutenants to captaincies, there can be little or no difficulty in throwing it into shape; the materials of study will have been amply provided, and we shall indeed be surprised if a year or two's judicious use of them fail to call forth one, at least, from every corps of officers in the service, both able and willing, provided sufficient inducement be held out, to superintend and direct the studies of his juniors.

On the whole, we conceive that, as the time has come for taking up in right earnest the great subject of education for the British officer, so the means are neither too remote to be readily seized, nor too costly to prevent our making immediate use of them, even in the present state of the empire and the exchequer. We ask for no expensive seminaries, to be conducted upon principles which, whatever they may be in name, cannot, in fact, be military. The young officer's military education he acquires most correctly with his corps, whatever it may be. And hence, even with respect to Woolwich, we should prefer to the theoretical Academy, as it is now conducted, a good school of practical gunnery and engineering, which, taking educated young men in hand, and working them thoroughly, should send accomplished engineers and artillerists to their respective regiments. But, at all events, while we ask, in the name of the country and of the service, some sufficient pledge that our infantry and cavalry shall be commanded by educated men, we deprecate, on every account, the plunging into an enormous outlay, for the purpose of setting up none but bad imitations of the military schools of France, Prussia, and Holland. To one strictly military establishment we do indeed think that greater attention ought to be paid-viz. the senior department at Sandhurst-where, with few, and these unimportant, changes in the routine of study, staff officers might be trained as efficiently as in the Ecole de l'Etat Major itself.

ART.

ART. VI.-1. Mein Antheil, &c. :-My Share in Politics. By H. C. Baron von Gagern. Stuttgart. 1823-45.

2. Geschichte des Achtzehnten Jahrhunderts, &c.:-History of the Eighteenth and Nineteenth Centuries down to the Fall of the French Empire. By Professor Schlosser. Vol. vii., Part i. Heidelberg.

3. Historical Memoir of a Mission to the Court of Vienna in 1806. By the Right Hon. Sir Robert Adair, G.C.B. 1844. 4. Histoire des Cabinets de l'Europe pendant le Consulat et l'Empire, écrite avec les Documents réunis aux Archives des Affaires Etrangères, 1800-1815. Par Armand Lefebvre. 1845-47. 5. Correspondence between Viscount Castlereagh and the Emperor Alexander of Russia respecting the Kingdom of Poland. Vienna. Nov. 1814. Presented to the House of Commons by Her Majesty's command, in pursuance of their Address of Feb. 8, 1847.

6. Denkschriften des Ministers Freiherrn von Stein, &c. :-Memoirs of the Minister Baron von Stein on German Constitutions. Edited by G. H. Pertz. Berlin.

7. Wichtige Urkunden für den Rechtszustand, &c. :-Important Documents concerning the Public Law of the German Nation, with original Annotations by J. L. Klüber. Selected from his Papers and illustrated by C. Welcker. Mannheim. 1844. 8. Die Verhandlungen der Bundesversammlung, &c. :-Proceedings of the Diet from the Revolutionary Movements of the year 1830 down to the Secret Ministerial Conferences at Vienna. From the Registers of the Confederation. Heidelberg. 1846. 9. Die Verhandlungen der Bundesversammlung von den Geheimen Ministerial-Conferenzen, &c.:-Proceedings of the Diet from the Secret Ministerial Conferences down to the year 1845. From the Registers of the Confederation. Heidelberg. 10. Oesterreich und dessen Zukunft. (Austria and her Future.) Hamburg. 1847.

11. Deutschland und Friedrich Wilhelm 1V. Von J. von Radowitz. Hamburg. 1847.

12. Die Deutsche Centralgewalt, &c. :- The German Central &c.:Power and Prussia. By Count Arnim-Boytzenburg, late Minister of State. Berlin. 13. Memoir on the Constitutional Rights of the Duchies of Schleswig and Holstein, the Right and Duty of the German Confederation, and the Purport of the English Guarantee of 1720, presented to Lord Palmerston on 8th April, 1848, with a Postscript. By Chevalier Bunsen.

14. The Relations of the Duchies of Schleswig and Holstein to the 2 G 2 Crown

Crown of Denmark and the Germanic Confederation, and the Treaty Engagements of the Great European Powers in reference thereto. By Travers Twiss, D.C.L., F.R.S.

15. La Russie et les Russes. Par N. Tourgueneff. Paris. 1847. 16. Panslavism and Germanism. By Count Valerian Krasinski.

THE IE extinction of the Germanic Empire in 1806 was the natural and almost inevitable result of the preceding relations of the various members of the Empire. It was the final act of a long drama, which announced that the feeble links which united the Germanic body had melted away, and that the artificial edifice of the Empire had lost all coherency. The act of abdication was only the ratification of the previous act of the Confederated States of the Rhine; it was but a graceful form of words, in which the Emperor avowed his recognition of a settled fact.

The Germanic Empire had never, in its most palmy days, a very strong central organization. But even the old combining forces were materially weakened by the religious dissensions which the sixteenth century ushered in; and the germ of dissolution was already traceable in that new principle of association amongst the princes of the Empire, which the religious movement necessitated, and the religious leagues embodied. It required no great power of divination to foretell the ultimate issue of a struggle, the opening scene of which concludes with the recognition of a religious division in the Empire at the Peace of Augsburg (A.D. 1555), and the next embraces the eventful period of the Thirty Years' War. Two great principles amongst others were sanctioned by the Treaty of Westphalia, which worked a complete revolution in the constitution of the Empire. The Jura Singulorum were no longer to be regulated by the plurality of votes in the Diet; and the individual states were recognised henceforth to enjoy the plenary rights of territorial superiority. The eighteenth century introduced a new great North-German kingdom upon the stage, disposed, like the Gaul of Roman story, to cast its sword into the scale against the successor of the Cæsars. The episode of the Seven Years' War disclosed the formidable character of this new Power, which through the genius of its rulers soon acquired a preponderating influence amongst the Protestant States of the Empire. The internal dissensions were meanwhile fomented by foreign diplomacy, on the part more especially of France and Sweden, as a means of neutralizing the power of the Empire for offensive purposes.

The Empire was nominally comprised amongst the parties to

the