Page:The empire and the century.djvu/270

 officers who are well trained, experienced, and tactful, a very high standard of discipline can be maintained. The individuality and self-reliance so essential in modern war need no encouragement. The Corps of Engineers, the Supply and Transport Corps, and the Ordnance and the Army Medical Service, are recruited from those classes who exercise in civil life the functions which they are required to discharge in war. Little difficulty is found in obtaining men experienced in supply, in transport, and in medicine, to fill the ranks of the departmental corps charged with such work, so that automatically, and without special departmental training, recruits for these essential and technical services can be obtained, which at home in the Regular Army are created with much difficulty, and only maintained by a system of laborious and expensive training.

It was generally admitted that no administrative unit in the South African War was more effective or complete than the New South Wales Army Medical Corps, which was organized in 1893 upon the principle described.

A complete military organization has thus been created in Australia, which, while capable of expansion, forms a carefully constructed framework into which the additional and necessary fighting material can be fitted when the time of action arrives. A military system, therefore, suited to the modern requirements of a self-governing and democratic community has been brought into being, which has satisfied all shades of opinion. There can be no better test of the unanimity of feeling in this regard than the fact that the military system of the Commonwealth now adopted was evolved in less than three years out of the motley defence forces previously existing in the six States of Australia, in spite of drastic retrenchment, and in spite of the halting administration of three successive Governments so widely divergent in