ENGLAND AS A POWER.

Southland Times, Issue 602, 10 December 1866, Page 2

ENGLAND AS A POWER.

(From the Spectator.) Wars, it is said, are so rapid, that a week may destroy a nation. Well, we also believe that if any enemy could land in. England, with our small army and half disciplined volunteer force, with no generals worth naming, with a commander-in-chief chosen by birth, with statesmen all over sixty, and with no means of organising rapidly the patriotic willingness of the people, England might come to very serious trouble. The march from Hastings to London would not be a very severe task for an army such as that which obeys the Crown Prince of Prussia, and '*' resources " we willingly admit are useless unless at hand. But we contend some time must be granted, if only we have the sense to keep our fleet up to its ancient mark —that of first among the fleets of the world, and the time required would be small. In the hour of danger the habits, and traditions, and prejudices, and withes of system which swathe English life till it gasps as if about to expire, drop from about it like burnt flax, and men like Indian civilians, bureaucrats to the core, stand out in hour fit to sit on a Committee of Public Safety, men who have swallowed formulas, and will shed blood like water rather than yield an inch. The " liberty " which is supposed to hamper us is a faculty capable of being suspended, or a want that can be very quickly filled up. It would be impossible perhaps to-day to shoot a volunteer for any conceivable offence; an hour after an enemy landed he might be shot for having a button awry. It would be impossible in India now to make a general into a major. We made one during the mutiny out of a lieutenant, and a captain of artillery held the the Viceroy's commission in his pocket — to be used if Lord Canning died. Parliament itself perhaps could scarcely remove the Duke of Cambridge now. "• It would not take much to hang him if he lost a battle in Sussex. Our lethargy is from plethora, not starvation, from the total absence of that feeling of fear which Continental peoples, who are divided from enemies by a river, and whose fathers remember to have seen horses stabled in their cathedrals, never loose; froxa.

a flabbiness of mind which long rest ■produces in nations as well as men. All that is needed is an organisation democratic in its best sense ; an organisation tliat is, by which the genuine strength of the nation can, in the hour of need, be brought easily into play. We do not say we have it. We are sadly conscious that we have it not, that we are gyed and bound by prosperity, aud habit, and the ignorance of the masses, But we cax have it if we will, and that is that what we conceive the Pall Mali Gazette implicitly to deny. We can if we please recognise the truth taught us by two great wars — the American and the German — that it does not take years but months to make a man a soldier, that long service is waste, not gain, that a man trained for three years may be sent home for ten and stop' out in the eleventh a better soldier than his comrade just finishing his time. That single fact, when we see it, will settle half our difficulties of recruiting. We can if we choose remedy the absurd system under which the whole population, however willing, is refused admittance into the ranks unless it will bind itself to a slavery of ten years, can make soldiership a trade to be pursued or chitted at will, like work j in dock-yard or an engine-room. We j can if we will perfect the volunteer system, and link the militia scheme fairly to it, providing tbe volunteers with trained cadres till we have a permanent home army of 300,000 men, equal to at least three battles with any invading force which modern science could by any possibility land upon our shores, an army capable at any notice of expansion till it rivalled in numbers, at all events in spirit, any array on earth. Whether we shall do any one of these before the serious alarm arrives to shake us out of our lethargy we do not know ; if we are governed by old men chosen because of their acres and their pedigrees, probably not, but we can do them and do them very fast, the AEmpire, as the ~Sa.ll Mali Gazette says, that is, our vast possession in every sea, may be a source only of weakness, but the national strength is unimpaired even by comparison with the new forces around us, the national spirit is undiminished, and we aeed but the organisation which shall bring the system we have to work into harmony with the new needs of the people whe have to work it. A democratic English army would be the most formidable enemy with which the Continent ever had to contend, and an army demoeratie in all essentials, which it is easy to join, and easy "to leave and easy to rise in, an army lax in points as the volunteers, stern in discipline as the strictest regiment Prussia regulars, should now be our ideal. Had we defended Denmark, as we advised, we should have had such an army, though after a catastrophe we certainly did not forsee. The first army despatched would have been destroyed, and then the fetters of custom, old generals, double responsibility, royal commanders-in-chief, long terms of service, closed careers, all that prevents the most martial people in Europe from being one of the most powerful, would have dropped off like tow. We cannot interfere on the continent, says the ' Gazette,' and the men who said it under Charles 11, believed it at least as fully, and were right while the torpor lasted and the Stuarts reigned. Then we had Marlborough, and "the Continent found, as once in a hundred years it always does find, that the powerlessness of Great Britain is not death, but sleep. If before the great hour arrives we can but educate every Englishman as every Prussian is educated till he understands why discipline is required, and the cause for" which he is asked to fight, the awakening will be a rough one, and less easily forgotten than those which have gone before. Even now, though our organisation is clotted with prejudices, though we distrust ourselves to such an extent that a free army, an army in which a private can resign, like an English ofiicer or an Indian sepoy, seems to old officers a mad dream, we can place a force of eight}*- thousand men on any point accesible by f*ea, snd keep the?u there in full and incessant renewed activity if need be for twenty years. The nation which can do that, or twice that, the day it earnestly wills to do it is not a feeble nation, save in the wise abstinence from that central compulsion which on the Continent is a substitute for a national resolution. It is flabbiness of will, not feebleness of sinew from which our country sufl'ers.