THE DEFENCE OF ENGLAND.

Manawatu Herald, Volume XXXI, Issue 450, 23 February 1909, Page 2

THE DEFENCE OF ENGLAND.

Tiik military unpreparedness of England is a theme which MajorGeneral Frank S. Russell, C.M.G., expounds in the opening article of the Nineteenth Century and After. The writer vehemently traverses the statements made by Mr Balfour and Mr Arnold Foster in 1905, as to the impossibility of a successful invasion of England, and ridicules the contention of one of the admirals who took part in the discussion, and who asserted that the First Lord would not dream of allowing the Fleet to be absent from the North Sea if there was danger of an attack, MajorGeneral Russell says, that those who are most jealous for the honour of the navy should do all in their power to secure the establishment of a thoroughly efficient system of land defence, “ if only to free the navy to pursue its proper vocation, to act on a vigorous offensive, and to strike sudden and unexpected blows on the most vulnerable points of the enemy.” The argument is that without a strong military guard in England the battleships would be tied to the coast and prevented from performing their proper function of searching out the eneujy’s ships, wherever they might be, and destroying them, Major-General Russell urges that the territorial forces are absolutely insufficient in number for the task that may devolve upon them. And he asks that the naval base at Rosylh should be begun at once, and that the suggested construction of a Clyde and Forth Canal, capable of passing battleships from*' the North Sea into the Atlantic,

should be seriously considered.’ Colonel, the Karl of Krroll, in writing on the same subject in the same review, analyses the figures of the territorial forces, the special reserve, and the regular line, and arrives at the conclusion that under Mr Haldane’s new scheme England is worse off by So,ooo men than she was three years ago. He says that after deducting men physically unfit and men under 20 there are not more than 70,000 regulars in England, whereas Mr Haldane's scheme supposes the existence of an expeditionary force of 169,000 regulars, “ capable of going anywhere and doing anything.” The balance would have to be supplied by the the Army Reserve immediately on mobilisation, and the Army Reserve would be unable to supply troops for the inevitable wastage of war. In the National Review an article by the editor emphasises the inadequacy of the military defence of England, and quotes with approval Lord Rosebery’s “ stimulating speech on national defence ” at Edinburgh in December. The writer hammers home the same point that is taken by Major-General Russel. “Nelson roamed the world in search of the enemy,” he writes, “secure in the knowledge that the Homeland was safe from invasion, because no less than seven hundred thousand men out of a total population of eleven millions were under arms, and although in those days Napoleon commanded nothing comparable to the land forces at the disposal of Wilhelm II.” Lord Rosebery announced himself a firm believer in the Swiss system of universal compulsory training, and the editor of the National Review cordially supports him. “ The naval and military problems,” he writes, “are inseparably bound up with one another. An adeqi&te Home Defence Army is a condition of maintaining our naval supremacy without which, by common consent, everything goes by the board.”