under the impression that it could be settled by good-tempered theoretical discussion. The Boers, being resolved to defend their institutions and being well armed for the purpose, no sooner satisfied themselves that the issue was seriously raised than they mobilised their army. It was not until the Boer army was massed on the Natal border that the British Government suspected itself to be engaged in serious business. Even when the war had begun, and fifty thousand British troops were at sea, no member of the Cabinet appears to have quite grasped the elementary truth that the conduct of a war is the business of a government, which cannot clear its responsibility by delegating its powers to an inferior authority.

Speaking in the House of Commons on Tuesday, January 31, Mr. Balfour declared that the British Commander-in-Chief in South Africa, and in general the British officers in the field, had not been hampered by any orders or instructions whatever from the Cabinet. His idea seemed to be that the Government had fully discharged its duty when it had selected the general to command, and given him a free hand to do right or wrong, to muddle things or to straighten them according to his lights. But if a commander-in-chief throws away his army by dispersing it into fractions, and in this way loses his campaign, the duty of a competent government is, not to stand by idle, but so to instruct its commander-in-chief as to cause him to distribute his troops correctly. The only excuse for the neglect of a government to do this would be its incapacity for knowing whether the general was acting wisely or foolishly. The question of the distance between the seat of government and the theatre of war is for this purpose irrelevant, so long as telegraphic communication exists between the two places. For a competent government would be well able to distinguish between decisions which depend upon local conditions, and in which, therefore, interference from a distance is injurious, and those which, depending only upon the application of true principles, can be rightly settled by any strategist acquainted with the problem. Mr. Balfour's statement, made by him as a complete defence, was in fact a declaration of the strategical bankruptcy of the Cabinet.

Those who are to blame for the disasters of the four first months of this war are, primarily, the politicians of both parties, who have been eager to undertake, and have in turn carried on the government, without any of them understanding war, which

is the first business of a government. If Lord Lansdowne is at fault, his culpability in no way exceeds that of Sir Henry Campbell-Bannerman, who preceded him at the War Office. The nation itself is to blame for having entrusted its affairs to men who were notoriously ignorant of the art of national self-defence. The army is not to blame, for an army cannot administer itself, and the best men in the army have for many years been warning the politicians of both parties against the consequences of their neglect. The nature of the disease in the army and of its remedy has been perfectly known for many years to those who wanted to know it. In proof of this, it is only necessary to turn over the files of old newspapers. At any rate I cannot now give any better diagnosis than I have attempted in years gone by, and I venture to borrow for application to-day passages written before the present war was thought of. The following paragraph is taken from a newspaper article published in May 1885 :

'The shortcomings of the army have been discussed so often, and so many contradictory views have been expressed on the subject, that it might seem hopeless to renew the inquiry. But there is one opinion that has of late found increasing acceptance, and which may therefore bear repeating. The army, according to this view, suffers from lack of knowledge. This does not mean that individual officers are incompetent, or negligent, or culpably ignorant. But it does mean that the service as a whole in its habits and traditions has not yet reached a full appreciation of the value of the systematic, liberal, disinterested study of the business of war. There are officers in the British army to whom the study of war is an absorbing interest, but they are the exception, and, if we may trust the evidence of high authorities, the rare exception. Accordingly there is, or at least until recently there has been, no such thing in England as a body of recognised and competent opinion upon military matters. There is no system of knowledge in the army. Opinion is amateur, not professional, in its character. Accordingly, upon every question of organisation that has come up we have had a series of sporadic expressions which may be described as so many individual crotchets. But there has been no such unanimity as would be found on questions of principle among the students of one of the natural sciences.'

As regards the remedy, here is an extract from a newspaper article published in October 1887:

'Amid the mass of information collected by the recent commis

sions and committees on the army, its finances and its departments, one principal fact recurs again and again. The army is a body without a brain. There is no institution to do the work which in every other army is performed by a "great general staff." That work is the most important that an army requires. The business of a general staff is to study the art of commanding armies and of carrying on war; to train generals for the high and responsible posts; to arrange the organisation by which these generals shall control their troops; and to lay down the principles which must be followed by the officers entrusted with the training of the army for fighting. It is evident that an army without a general staff is like a workshop without a manager, and that it cannot work properly. This is the condition of the British army, and this, the gravest of all defects, has been pressed upon the notice of the Minister and of the country by all the most competent officers at headquarters. Lord Wolseley and General Brackenbury, to go no further, have implored Mr. Stanhope to begin by creating a general staff. Mr. Stanhope, we cannot tell why, refuses.

The army is without a general staff, and the work of the staff is not done. The consequence is that the whole system is unhealthy. From top to bottom, the right working of the machine is hindered by the absence of any connection between knowledge and control. A general staff is required, not to amass pedantic learning and fill an unused library with technical lore. What is wanted is to bring existing knowledge to bear on the settlement of all questions that have to be decided, and to ensure that whenever a decision has to be made—whether it concerns the halting of a corporal's guard, the building of a fortress, or the choice of the point of attack in a great war-the authority to make the decision shall rest with a man who by his previous life has been better prepared than any other man to make that particular decision wisely. So much for what should be the system. But instead of this we have the Intelligence Branch. General Brackenbury, a first-rate general, and six officers, all of them clever, and all hard-working, meet at an office in Queen Anne's Gate-a safe distance, be it noted, from the War Office. There they have a sort of museum of military knowledge, which the War Office may consult if it likes. Between the seven of them they try and get to know everything, but, being only seven and not seventy, they overwork themselves without succeeding. Seven officers, working all the time they could give to work without detriment to a healthy

balance of mind, could not do more than merely keep watch over the armies of the Continental Powers. But for the English army it is necessary to watch the whole world, and for this purpose seven officers are evidently too few. Some dozen military sciences, every day growing more complicated, have to be followed. A dozen drill-books have to be kept up to date. The plans of mobilisation and concentration for twenty possible campaigns ought to be kept in accord with the current state of the army and navy. Most of these things, the Intelligence Department, we believe, tries to do. Seven men cannot do seventy men's work, and the marvel is how much the seven accomplish. But when the department has done its work the authorities can take it or leave it. General Brackenbury and his officers are a sort of dictionary, which the War Office may or may not consult. The condition of things may be described very accurately by saying that there is a responsibility department in Pall Mall with a rope round its neck held by the financial secretary, and that the intelligence is kept at a branch office in another place. It is as though a man kept a small brain for occasional consultation in his waistcoat pocket, and ran his head by clockwork.

'An organisation like this appears to us to be hopelessly bad. The cure, as we believe, is to multiply the Intelligence Branch by ten, and let it absorb the War Office. We do not believe it possible in any other way to put the army right. A very few examples may be given to show how the army at present suffers from the separation between intelligence and authority. In the first place, the principal branches of the military art are not studied. There is no school of English strategy. No original book on the subject has appeared in the country for over twenty years. There is scarcely a school of tactics. School-books indeed are written on this subject, but original essays could be counted on the fingers of one hand. Even Lord Wolseley can permit himself the most slipshod language on the subject, because there is no school of trained tacticians who would keep him in bounds. The lay reader may imagine that the absence of a school of strategy and tactics-we use the word "school" to mean not a place of education, but a system of thought-is a matter of no importance. We venture to hold that it is the cardinal point.'

These passages, written many years ago, explain how it is that the British army in the present war has suffered in various forms from the unforeseen which ought to have been foreseen.

BIRD NOTES.

BY LADY BROOME.

A GREAT reaction of feeling in favour of the mongoose has set in since Mr. Rudyard Kipling's delightful story of Rikki-tikki,' in the 'First Jungle Book,' presenting that small rodent in an heroic and loveable aspect. But to the true bird-lover the mongoose still appears a dreaded and dangerous foe. It is well known that its introduction into Jamaica has resulted in nearly the extermination of bird life in that island, and the consequent increase of insects, notably the diminutive tick, that mere speck of a vicious little torment.

There are, I believe, only a very few mongooses in Barbados, and strong measures will doubtless be adopted to still further reduce their number; for no possible advantage in destroying the large brown rat which gnaws the sugar-cane can make up for the havoc the mongoose creates in the poultry yard, and, indeed, among all feathered creatures. It has also been found by experience that the mongoose prefers eggs to rats, and will neglect his proper prey for any sort or size of egg. He was brought into Jamaica to eat up the large rat introduced a century ago by a certain Sir Charles Price (after whom those same brown rats are still called), instead of which the mongoose has taken to egg and bird eating, and has thriven on this diet beyond all calculation. Sir Charles Price introduced his rat to eat up the snakes with which Jamaica was then infested, and now that the mongoose has failed to clear out the rats, some other creature will have to be introduced to cope with the swarming and ravenous mongoose.

It was therefore with the greatest satisfaction I once beheld in the garden at Government House, Barbados, the clever manner the birds circumvented the wiles of a half-tame mongoose which haunted the grounds.

Short as is the twilight in those Lesser Antilles, there was still, at midsummer, light enough left in the western sky to make it delightful to linger in the garden after our evening drive. The wonder and beauty of the hues of the sunset sky seemed ever