Page:Blackwood's Magazine volume 137.djvu/579

1885.] ready assent to the propositions of Sir William Armstrong" has been the characteristic feature of the whole period.

This brings us to the second danger, against which the United States Commissioners emphatically and with constant iteration warn their Government. And forasmuch as we would be thought to have gone of late on another tack, courtesy permits them to take England as an example of what to avoid.

"As examples," they say, "of a practical partnership between a Government and a private company in working towards a national object, the experiences in England and in Russia are very instructive, and warn against the adoption of such a system. In England the Government, in addition to paying during several years very high prices for articles delivered, was forced to pay £65,000 to close an agreement; while the company, besides the profits on manufacture, came into possession of a complete working plant at a merely nominal valuation."

It is obvious that, however great may be the evils of such a copartnership between a Government and a private firm when the conditions of the partnership are public and above-board, those evils become incalculably greater when the firm is a nominally independent body, competing with other manufacturers in the country, while at the same time men, closely connected with the firm, are virtually accepted as Government advisers in relation to matters of contract. During part of the period which has elapsed since the termination of the copartnership between Sir W. Armstrong and the Government, it is beyond dispute that some members of the firm – Captain Noble certainly, if not others – acted not merely as Government advisers, but as members of the actual body which practically determined the issue of contracts, – the one which gave the scientific decision on all questions of ordnance. During the greater portion of the time, and up to this hour, a mysterious connection has unquestionably existed between the firm and the department, probably unknown to successive Governments. The practical power which it has exercised, through Mr Rendel at the Admiralty, through Captain Noble at the War Office, and the strong presumption that has been established of other channels of influence, distinctly call for public investigation. We are far from charging either Captain Noble or Mr Rendel with any conscious act of unfairness in behalf of the firm of which one is an active member, and of which the other recently has been. But we do say that the whole condition of things is unsatisfactory, and that the sooner a system is established which enables us to call on Captain Noble and Mr Rendel as valuable witnesses, whose evidence may be fairly sifted, with that of others, and the sooner these gentlemen cease virtually to act as judges in their own cause, or at least to approach most unpleasantly near to that unsatisfactory position, the better it will be for the credit of our form of government, and the sooner shall we arrive at a means by which to encourage the general manufacturing power and inventive talent of the country to provide us with proper artillery.

We have been inveighing against a "system of obscurantism." We wish carefully to guard ourselves