Page:The Annual Register 1899.djvu/173

 1899.] War Office Administration, [165

year. That act specially exempted personal property from paying rates. Now one of the chief reasons why the act of 1840 was a temporary measure was the fact that it was felt that the rating of clerical titheowners ought to be dealt with. Parliament, in fact, always " looked forward to the. period when it should deal with the great problem and riddle of rating, and when it should try and abolish the extreme injustice which throws this vast expenditure on a kind of property whiclj. is one-fifth of the whole property of the country." The bill was then read a second time by 113 to *23 votes, and passed without further amendment.

In the House of Commons the closing debates on the estimates produced some useful information, and provoked some sharp criticism. In discussing the Army Estimates (July 21), Mr. Arnold-Forster (Belfast, W.) criticised very severely the organisation of the War Office, and quoted Sir Redvers Buller's evidence before the Decentralisation Com- mittee: "I should like to say clearly and openly that I start from this point, and I think I have verified it sufficiently, that the whole system of reports, regulations and warrants under which the Army now serves has grown up entirely for the benefit of the War Office clerk, and to find work for the Wax Office rather than to provide control over the Army. ,, What business, asked Mr. Arnold-Forster, had Sir Redvers Buller to make that statement ? It was made after he had been in full control for ten years. He was entitled to ask whether any explanation had been demanded of that statement. " The con- clusion they arrived at was that until they had a transformation of the manner of doing business at the War Office they should get no advance in the British Army at all." The Under Secretary for War, Mr. George Wyndham (Dover), in his reply refused, perhaps prudently, to deal specifically with these allega- tions, and only made a general defence of War Office arrange- ments. He denied that they had injured the Army by depleting the Reserve, for the Reserve was now 82,000 strong. The immediate problem was to find garrisons for India, Egypt, and at this moment an augmented garrison for South Africa. Then there was the permanent problem of finding garrisons for those places which the . War Office were informed, by the united counsel of their naval and military experts, ought to be occupied as naval bases and coaling-stations. " To do that required at least nineteen white battalions and twelve native battalions abroad, for the mere routine work of sentry-go round the world. Then seventy-five infantry battalions were required at home, seventeen and a half battalions to form what he might call the scheme of defence, and sixty and a half battalions to occupy India and other countries."

There was much more reasonable cause for fault-finding in the postponement until the fag end of the session of the Colonial Loans Bill. The Chancellor of the Exchequer, in