twice or thrice that number, provided only, and provided always, that he has not first cleared the seas of all my available force; and, frankly, I don't see how he is to do that so long as the two-Power standard is maintained." Thus the naval problem is now disengaged altogether from the military problem, being solved by the sailor to the entire satisfaction of the Committee of Defence, and we can now turn with confidence to the soldier for the solution of the military problem. I, who am neither soldier nor sailor, have offered no solution of either problem. I have applied myself purely to the method of stating the problem and of looking for its solution in the proper quarter, and not to its subject-matter at all. That I leave entirely to the sailor so far as it lies in his province, and to the soldier so far as it lies in his. For the solution of the naval problem I have gone to the only authoritative source known to me, namely, the conclusions of the Committee of Defence recorded in 1905 by the Prime Minister of the day. Those conclusions hold the field until they are either modified or withdrawn on the same unimpeachable authority. For the solution of the associated military problem I am quite ready to go to the same source; and, since it is a purely military problem, I am equally ready to take its solution from the soldiers and not to listen to the sailors at all. The problem may now be stated thus: What amount of military force is it necessary to maintain at all times in this country in order to make sure that if any enemy seeks to invade us he shall be compelled to cross the sea with at least 70,000 men, and how should this force be trained, equipped, and organized for the purpose? It may be that the answer is to be found in the Territorial Force, or in such modification and development of it as Lord Roberts and his followers have advocated. That is not for me, a mere civilian, to discuss, still less to decide. I will only record my own conviction that, if the problem is solved on these terms, the Territorial Force, or any other force which may hereafter be found better fitted to discharge the same

function, will never exchange a single shot with an invader on British soil any more than its predecessors, the Volunteers, ever did. The Romans had a proverb, Res ad triarios venit, to signify that when the engagement had reached the triarii, the end of the conflict was at hand, and that so far it had gone against the legions. The Territorial Force, or any future substitute for it, will always be the triarii of the British array. If ever they are called upon to withstand an invader on British soil, the end of the Empire will not be far off. But, so long as our naval supremacy is maintained, it is much more likely that if they ever meet an enemy in the stricken field at all, they will, as many of their predecessors the Volunteers did, meet him thousands of miles from the shores they were enrolled to defend. Thus will patriotism once more be justified of all her children.

Perhaps at no time in the history of this country since the days of the Norman Conquest has the menace of invasion been so acute as it was in the two years before Trafalgar, when, as Captain Mahan says, "Nelson before Toulon was wearing away the last two years of his glorious but suffering life, fighting the fierce north-westers of the Gulf of Lyon and questioning-questioning continually with feverish anxiety-whether Napoleon's object was Egypt again or Great Britain really." The Grand Army, 130,000 strong, was encamped at Boulogne and along the adjacent coasts, whence "they could, on fine days, as they practised the varied manoeuvres which were to perfect the vast host in disembarking with order and rapidity, see the white cliffs fringing the only country that to the last defied their arms." England was shaken with alarms. The Army Estimates, which had stood at £12,952,000 in 1803, rose with a bound to £22,889,000 in 1804, and again advanced to over £23,000,000 in 1805. The number of effectives voted for employment in the United Kingdom rose from 66,000 in 1803, to 129,000 in 1804, and 135,000 in 1805, and even then they barely exceeded the numbers with which Napoleon, not forty

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xxix miles away across the Channel, was preparing to invade and hoping to conquer England. The martial ardour of the people rose to an unprecedented height. Every county resounded with the drill of patriotic Volunteers -over 300,000 in number. Dumouriez, the versatile victor of Valmy, pestered the British Ministers with plans for their permanent organization. Men wondered from day to day when "Buonaparte," or "Boney" as they called him, would come, and why he did not come. My own grandfather used to tell how false alarms of his coming would sometimes fetch the Volunteers out of their beds and march them off in the middle of the night to the nearest rendezvous. I daresay the soldiers of the day could demonstrate to their hearts' content that he certainly would come, and that there was really nothing, except the military array on shore, to prevent his coming; but the sailors never faltered. "Those far-distant, stormbeaten ships, upon which the Grand Army never looked, stood between it and the dominion of the world." And though the soldiers may have insisted that it was their preparations on shore that "set free" the outlying ships to occupy their stations far away, yet I cannot find that the sailors set much store by these same preparations, and it is certain from their own words and deeds that they knew, as surely as men can ever be sure about anything in war, that however quickly Napoleon's troops might embark on one side of the Channel, they would never be allowed to disembark on the other until the sea supremacy of this country had been overthrown. Nor, again, can I find that Napoleon was ever for a moment intimidated by the stir of military preparation in England. It was not that which stopped him, or ever would have stopped

1 These figures are taken from the Annual Register. Fuller details will be found in the valuable work on The County Lieutenancies and The Army, 1803-1814, recently published by the Hon. J. W. Fortescue. It is only right to acknowledge that Mr. Fortescue puts the total strength of the Regular Army at a higher figure than those given above. But his account of the organization and equipment of some portions of it goes far to explain why Napoleon was never intimidated by its numbers.

him, if the fleets which barred his way could once have been put out of being.

"Our great reliance," wrote St. Vincent, "is on the vigilance and activity of our cruisers at sea." When the menace of invasion first became acute in 1801, before the Peace of Amiens, Nelson wrote: "Our first defence is close to the enemy's ports "—that is, his ports in the Channel-" and the Admiralty have taken such precautions, by having such a respectable force under my orders, that I venture to express a well-grounded hope that the enemy would be annihilated before they get ten miles from their own shores." Again, Pellew said in his place in Parliament in 1804: "As to the enemy being able in a narrow sea to pass through our blockading and protecting squadron with all the secrecy and dexterity, and by those hidden means that some worthy people expect, I really, from anything I have seen in the course of my professional experience, am not much disposed to concur in it." These words are as pertinent in 1909 as they were in 1804, and I would commend them to the special attention of soldiers in our own day. Finally, I would point out that if the Ministers of the day were really relying on an Army of 135,000 men, supported by 300,000 Volunteers, to keep the 130,000 troops of Napoleon out of the country, they were guilty of something like treason in sending no fewer than 11,000 regular troops out of the country on distant and secret expeditions, as they did in 1805, at the very crisis of the Trafalgar campaign. One of these expeditions, consisting of some 5,000 men, embarked in April 1805, about a fortnight after Villeneuve left Toulon for the last time. The troops were destined for Gibraltar, Malta, and Naples, where they were to co-operate with a contingent of Russian troops, and where in the following year they were destined to win the victory of Maida. It was the presence of this combined force in Southern Italy that determined Napoleon's instructions to Villeneuve to make for the Mediterranean when he left Cadiz to encounter Nelson at Trafalgar. The

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xxxi troops were under the command of Sir James Craig, and were convoyed by two line-of-battleships under the command of Rear-Admiral Knight. Nelson was ordered to furnish them, if he deemed it necessary, with additional convoy in the Mediterranean, and just before he left for the West Indies in pursuit of Villeneuve he detached the Royal Sovereign for that purpose. The other expedition, consisting of some 6,000 men, under the command of Sir David Baird, was despatched in August of the same year at a time when Villeneuve was still at large and still undefeated. Its destination was the Cape, and in January 1806 it captured Cape Town and put an end for ever to the rule of Holland in South Africa. These singular episodes have generally been overlooked. They seem to show conclusively that the British Government, in 1805, was very far from quaking over the insufficiency of our military defences at that time. The knee is nearer than the shin. You do not send troops abroad when you want them to repel the invader at home. The sailors had apparently convinced the Government that the management of the invader could safely be left to themselves.'

It was left to the sailors, with what results we know. There were chances of failure no doubt, but so there must be in any war. Napoleon knew this as well as any man, and complained that his admirals had "learned-where I do not know-that war can be made without running risks." But the sailors of England had learned their lesson

1 It is, moreover, highly important to note that Mr. Fortescue is of opinion that, after the rupture of the Peace of Amiens, England could and should have taken the military offensive abroad from the very outset. "An attitude of passive and inert defence," he says, "is very rarely sound and was never more false than in 1803.... Napoleon was not prepared for war.... It may be asserted without hesitation that the British Government could, so far as the safety of the sea was concerned, have sent any force that it pleased to any point that it pleased, and thirty thousand, or even twenty thousand, men despatched to Sicily or to Naples in the summer of 1803 must almost certainly have broken up the camp at Boulogne." In other words, if the soldiers wanted to share with the sailors the task of keeping Napoleon at bay, they could, in the judgment of this high authority, have done so much more effectively by organizing a counter-stroke abroad than by filling England with tumultuary forces which Napoleon never even affected to fear.