It is with great reluctance that I have sketched this glaring contrast, to the disadvantage of our own men, but until the truth is realised by the British man in the street' the evil will not be rectified.

Perhaps I should here interpolate that the American army as an entity is by no means deserving of unqualified praise. Its organisation is in most respects far inferior to ours; but the individual American soldier is, I believe, the best in the world, and for the simple and sole reason that he is paid better and treated better than any other. It is very difficult in this world to get anything good without paying the market price for it, and the United States Government is humdrum enough to recognise that fact. Our Government takes a more original view. It says in effect: The proper pay of a British soldier is one shilling a day. It has stood at this figure for over a century, and the fact that all other wages in the labour market have doubled in that time is interesting but irrelevant. We are aware, of course, that none but immature boys or derelict men could be attracted by this rate of pay; but as long as we can scrape together a precarious supply of these, what need to go further? The fact that in all other trades an increase of wages brings a better class of workman has no bearing upon Army recruiting, and the American experience is probably misleading.'

Mr. Brodrick has expressed his opinion that the American analogy may be pressed too far,' and I am well aware that a hobby may sometimes be ridden to death. But common sense is not a hobby, nor is it an American invention.

Mr. Brodrick has himself admitted We want more independence and more individuality amongst the men'; but those qualities can only be found in a higher class of man, and that higher class can only be secured by paying better wages. This fact is so patently obvious that it scarcely admits of argument, and it is simply begging the whole question for the Financial Secretary to contend that an extra ninepence a day would not prove effective.' This is a mere assertion which runs contrary to all experience in every walk of life. Mr. Brodrick was wiser in his frank admission that he could not suggest raising the pay so long as he was able to fill up the ranks without. If he were really filling them up with grown and effective men, this attitude would be perfectly sound, and there would be no justification for risking any extra expense. But my contention is that the present system of enlisting immature boys is exceedingly costly and wasteful, whilst the securing of mature and efficient men, by an increase in the pay, would not only be the truest economy in the end, but would involve little if any extra expense. This was the whole sum of my argument, and Lord Stanley and Mr. Brodrick were not quite fair in their methods of handling it during the debate.

They only put forward and discussed the debit side of the balance-sheet, and ignored the credit side altogether. That is to say, they corroborated my figures in estimating the gross nominal cost of increasing the soldiers' pay; but then, avoiding my main contention that this total would be practically offset by the savings from increased efficiency and the reduction of ineffectives, they accused me of wishing to add some 3 millions to the Estimates. Of course I advocated nothing of the kind, as a glance at my letter, published in the Times of the 7th of May, will clearly show. In that letter I set forth some careful, and very conservative, calculations, which I will not here repeat, but which led up to the conelusion that probably 3,000,000l. a year could be saved by merely abolishing that portion of our present paper Army which is admittedly ineffective. My concluding remark on the subject was: 'The actual balance-sheet could only be elaborated by actuarial experts; but, neglecting the priceless advantage of increased morale and efficiency, I cannot doubt that their calculations would show that the proposed increase in the pay of the soldier would not necessarily mean an increased burden upon the Imperial Exchequer.'

This contention may of course seem wholly unsound to the officials of the War Office, but it is scarcely fair to ignore the fact that it was the backbone of my argument. However, my individual opinions are of very little importance; and my only excuse for bringing them forward again is that I know them to be shared by many wiser people, who have argued these very points over and over again, in a far more able manner, but most of whom had no opportunity of taking part in the recent Army Debate. Neither they nor I have expressed the smallest desire to see any increase in our enormous military expenditure, nor are we actuated by any merely philanthropic desire to increase the pay of a deserving body of men. But we do strongly object to the present waste of money on inefficient paper soldiers, and to the notoriously false economy of attempting to. underpay labour.

An ingenious official argument is that, as we succeed in getting a certain small proportion of mature and efficient men at the present rate of pay, it would be most extravagant to pay them any more. So it would, if we got enough of them; but they are a mere fraction of the whole, and mostly represent the derelicts of the population who are driven by starvation to accept any terms that are offered, and who bear no sort of resemblance to our average type of recruit.

Another official argument, which was first disclosed to an astonished House of Commons in the course of the recent debate, was that the terms now offered to the British soldier are equivalent to 30s. a week. I will not attempt to speculate as to how this dizzy total was arrived at, but surely it is sufficiently disproved by its effect upon the working classes. Does it not stand to reason and

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common sense, if the soldier's living were anything like as good as this, that it would prove an irresistible bait to the young men of the working classes, to the vast majority of whom such terms would be relative wealth? The proof of the pudding is in the eating, and for purposes of this argument it is sufficient to note that the present inducements held out to the soldier, however alluring in theory, are in practice insufficient to attract any but callow boys and a few desperate men. This being the case, it is ridiculous to gird at the cost of higher pay, even if it were not more economical in the end. On this point the official attitude is inexplicable, unless, as the Times suggests, the War Office really believes that 'one shilling a day is one of the fundamental laws of nature, or one of the eternal principles of the Cardwell system.'

The average man of business will, I think, take a more elastic view of this elementary problem. He knows that if he wants to buy a hat he has to pay the market price for it, and that no sane hatter would accept his plea that he does not care to pay more than half the proper figure. From this he will readily deduce that if the State wishes to buy a good class of soldier it will have to pay the market price, and that the working man cannot be hypnotised by the antiquarian charm of 'one shilling a day,' even if it does represent a fundamental or eternal principle.

I will not attempt to labour this question of pay any further; its importance is self-evident. But I hasten to add that it does not contain the whole solution of the problem. It must be concurrent with better conditions of barrack life, suitable to the better class upon which we desire to draw. In this direction I do not think that the American analogy can be pushed too far'; and, to do Mr. Brodrick justice, I think he is fully alive to the importance of improving the attractiveness of the soldier's life. He has already held out a promise of certain distinct improvements, and I have every confidence that this important side of the question will be dealt with in a sympathetic spirit.

I fear, however, that when it comes to financial amelioration of the soldier's lot the cloven hoof is shown again, and that there is no intention of dealing with the substantial grievance of 'stoppages." There are certain stoppages, for recreative and other purposes, to which no exception can be taken; but there is another category of vexatious stoppages, such as for upkeep of outfit, hair-cutting, and the like, which are bitterly resented by the soldier, and which are a real obstacle to recruiting. To abolish these altogether would only cost the State some 300,000l. per annum, and this outlay would be more than compensated for by the increased popularity of the Service.

I have now endeavoured to recapitulate the chief arguments in favour of a more liberal policy of recruiting, and I am confident that

in doing so I am backing a winning cause. The solution of the recruiting problem is an indispensable preliminary to making any reorganisation really effective, and as long as it remains unsolved the dry bones' of Mr. Brodrick's scheme cannot be clothed with flesh and blood. Moreover, it is a problem which will push itself to the front with ever-growing insistence, and when the war is over it must engross the attention of the War Office, to the exclusion of almost everything else. In the meantime I only wish to again emphasise the fact that this recruiting question is not a technical military matter, intelligible only to experts, but a plain commonsense question, which can be understood by any man or woman who is possessed of ordinary business instinct. This is an important point to realise, as the problem will eventually have to be solved, not by any stroke of statesmanship, but by the good common sense of the people.

ARTHUR H. LEE,

LAST MONTH

No one can have mixed freely in London society during the past month without becoming conscious of one fact-that is, that men of all ranks and conditions, and of all shades in politics, are sick of the war and are longing for some signs of its approaching close. If this feeling of intense and almost painful weariness were accompanied by any indication of a weakening in the resolve to carry the conflict through to the end, I should avoid any reference to it in these pages. But the friends of the Boers need not comfort themselves with the idea that because there is this general yearning for peace there is any intention of abandoning the struggle before its fruits have been secured. One may therefore refer freely to the prevailing mood without fearing that in doing so encouragement will be given to the national enemy. It is not, however, the natural weariness at the prolongation of the painful and costly struggle that calls for comment. It would be surprising if men were not weary of a war which has already lasted for months and almost for years, instead of for the mere weeks that were originally assigned for its completion. But what is surprising is the fact that so decided a feeling of pessimism with regard to the course of the campaign should be displayed in many different quarters. The frequency with which the confident hopes of the experts have been disappointed, and fresh vistas of apparently interminable effort opened up, so soon as any particular stage in the conflict has been accomplished, seems to have had a demoralising effect upon those who were originally to be counted among the optimists. Our newspapers, including those which were most warlike twelve months ago, have been openly despondent, and our politicians, though they may have kept silence in Parliament, have not concealed in their private conversation their feelings of gloom and depression. It is a new phase of public sentiment, and not a pleasant one, that is thus revealed to us. That there is any real justification for this surrender to pessimism I cannot pretend to discover. When men seek to justify it they do not refer to the despatches of Lord Kitchener or to any of the notorious facts of the situation. They cite the despondent letters and telegrams of the Times correspondent at Pretoria; or they