Page:The empire and the century.djvu/239

 new cults was the Royal Engineers Submarine Mining Corps, now in process of disbandment. No more costly affair has ever been devised. The moment it was placed in its proper perspective by Sir George Clarke and others it was bound to be revealed as more dangerous to friend than to foe.

The Royal Commission on the war showed that if we could have sent a striking force of a single brigade to Natal when war became inevitable, the whole course of the war would have been altered. We see from this instance that the National Debt is swollen by costly wars that might have been avoided by convincingly adequate organization, or, at any rate, curtailed by rapid blows at the outset of the war. The policy which devotes one-half the expenditure, and nine out of eleven soldiers—whether regulars, militia, yeomanry, or volunteers—to the work of passively waiting for the blows of an enemy, can only be compared to that of a football team which ties up nine out of eleven of its men in the goal. The comparison is unfair only in respect of the fact that the goal in football is really liable to be threatened, whereas in strategy the British goal is already covered by the operations of a strong navy.

The Cabinet's policy was outlined in the Stanhope memorandum of 1891, which formed a written constitution for the army. It showed that we no longer enjoyed the power of thinking in battleships which characterized Louis XVI. of France, who used to justify his economies by saying: 'Hush! it will give us a ship of the line the more.' It is clear that we have to educate our statesmen into the way of thinking in battleships, for the alternative is to drift into a bankruptcy both of strength and resources. Given the problem as stated in the now abandoned Stanhope memorandum, there could be no finality to expenditure, and so the credit of the country was threatened. Financial credit is closely related to naval supremacy, for the latter enables London to become the banking