Page:Blackwood's Magazine volume 144.djvu/570

564 For the Survey in the future, as I have elsewhere shown, there is plenty of work yet in store. And in the hands of the present chief of the Department – whose professional training got its first start in North America, was afterwards developed in Palestine, again at the Topographical Depot in London, and later on in the Intelligence branch of the army in the East, very much under the public eye – we may rest assured its interests will be safe. But the coach can only run smoothly, provided that arrangements carefully thought out and planned in advance for its future progress be not wrecked or dislocated through a shifting policy, or an over-desire to economise on the part of those who have the pulling of the purse-strings. In this connection, the finger of warning surely has been pointed with sufficient pertinacity by Sir Charles Wilson's predecessors. Nor can I do better than take for my closing text upon State-mapping these weighty words of one whose pre-eminent position as well in the service of the State as in public estimation entitles him to be heard with the profoundest respect. "I am sure," said Lord Salisbury, in the House of Peers, on the 17th of February last year, criticising a noble lord's personal explanation as to quitting the Government, "that neither in public nor in private life will any wholesome economy be effected by cutting off a sum arbitrarily without inquiring into what effect that economy will have, or to what items it is directed."

T. PILKINGTON WHITE.