The Dominion. SATURDAY, DECEMBER 28, 1907. NATIONAL SERVICE.

Dominion, Volume 1, Issue 80, 28 December 1907, Page 4

The Dominion. SATURDAY, DECEMBER 28, 1907. NATIONAL SERVICE.

On Tuesday last we discussed the case against the' application of the Swiss Army system to'' Great Britain and her oversea dependencies, as recently set out by Mr. Harold: Cos, M.P., one of the committee of civilians appointed by the National Service League of Great Britain to investigate the Swiss system on the spot. The importance of the subject is our warrant for calling public attention to a fresh consideration of it. The territorial army scheme of Mr. Haldane has taken the question of universal training out of thevregion, of merely academic interest; and the announcement by Mr. Deakin on December 14 last that the Federal Government has decided to establish universal military training has brought the subject home tp the business and bosoms, as Bacon has it, of the people of this country. It will be remembered that. Mr. Harold Cox,_ putting the! ''Blue Water" position lit its most extreme form, objected that Great Britain, as an island, is the exact opposite'of Switzerland, which is a small country surrounded by military nations. A large national army, built up on the Swiss model, he contends, would only be required to; repel invasipn,' and is therefore a superfluous thing, for the reason that invasion would lie impossible so long as the British Navy keeps its supremacy, and would be unnecessary in the event of the destruction , of that supremacy, since the destroying power would in such a case merely stand oil' and starve Great Britain into submission by cutting off her food supplies. ".Raids," he continued, could be sufficiently met by a quite moderate standing army; and amongst his other objections lie claimed that the South African War was carried.to. a conclusion without the aid of any system ; of compulsion, that universal training would be wasteful and ; expensive and devoid of the moral and physical advantages claimed for it, and that military service is not a civic duty, that duty being sufficiently discharged by "the' honourable fulfilment of the daily round, the common task." • Even to those of our readers who agree in believing that compulsion must be avoided until "volunteering" is really shown to have been weighed in the balance and found wanting, the weaknesses in Mr. Cox's case must have been easily apparent. If the Navy, and the Navy alone, guards the safety of Great Britain, "where, it may be asked, is the necessity for any military forces at all? Lord Newton, replying to Mr. Cox in the current number of the "Nineteenth Century," disposes of the essentials of.Mr. Cox's argument very effectively. "A great national militia," he contends, is necessary in order to free the Navy for its real task on the one hand, and, on the other, to enable the regular Army to go abroad when required. "The freedom of the Nayy would thus be secured by the guarantee against the possibility of a successful invasion during its temporary absence from home waters." This argument must stand, and must govern all thinking upon the subject, unless it can be shown that the ships of Britain can always sweep the ' waters of the planet as triumphantly and as ruthlessly as a machine-gun can destroy a flock of herded sheep. And, as we showed in our recent article, and as a recent speech of Mr. Haldane's showed a few days later, the time is approaching when the British Navy simply cannot dominate the seas in the same manner as heretofore. As to the contention that a destroying power can starve Great Britain into submission, Lord Newton suggests—the validity of his suggestion can only be settled by experts— that "however nfach our commerce might be interrupted, it would hardly ,b6 within the capacity of am; Power

or Powers to blockade all our ports effectually, arid an invasion would be the natural conclusion." A great national army would therefore be a national necessity. Against the staggernig' figures quoted by Mr. Cox as a financial refutation of tlio advocates of universal training—an annual expenditure of nearly twenty millions sterling—Lord Newton protests that these figures are based upon a proportionate British equivalent to the extreme policy of Switzerland, and points out that on the Swiss,system the million men standard could be reached at' an annual cost of about £4,000,000, which is about the present cost of the 350,000 in the auxiliary Army. In this connection it may be noted that Mr. Deakin, speaking, of course, from financial notes based upon careful estimates by experts, intends to have a citizen army of 214,000 men in eight years by means of an extra annual expenditure of £250,000 above the £800,000 at present expended. ' Lord,. Newton is an advocate of "Compulsion to Serve," and without such compulsion, he holds, universal training would be unworkable, but at the same time he contends, from the actual statistics of the South African War, that in time of trouble even a voluntary reserve would yield a fighting power varying directly .as the numerical" strength and the degree of training' of the ( national defence force. The statistics referred to are those given in the "Times" history of the war: "Of the militia and yeomanry one man in five, of the volunteers one man in fifteen, and of the untrained and unorganised bulk of the male population' of fighting age about one in a thousand came forward in the emergency." Mr. Cox's suggestion that military service is not a civic duty was naturally an easy mark for Lord New-ton's-sarcasm, and nobody, whatever his views, will care to stand by Mr. Cox on this point, and thus lay himself _ open to the legitimate jeer that he is arguing "that a country can be successfully defended by the punctual payment of rates and taxes and by the citizen's pursuance /of a blameless domestic life." The truth of the matter, as we urged months ago when a mild scare was created by the news that the militia rolls wfere to be prepared, is that while compulsory military training is in essence correct, every, proposal for the introduction of the system must be ' opposed until' it is proven that national disaster can be staved off in no other way. Lord Newton appears to have missed the real cause of Mr. Cox's objection to the application of the Swiss system to England. It should have been obviousit is obvious-to us, at any rate—that Mr. Cox objects, not to compulsory' service, but to' the weakening of Britain's. naval resources that he fears would follow upon a greatly-increased expenditure upon the land forces of Great Britain._ That danger of naval retrenchment is perhaps not a serious one, but it is nevertheless an existent risk, and for that reason it is difficult to complain of even a fallacious argu-. ment against the' principle of national service when such an argument assists to keep the ; Custodians ; o£ Britain's sea-power up to the mark.