very much with local prosperity and improvement. The expenditure of highway rates increased the value of property contiguous to the highway, and when advantage was thus conferred upon localities they had no claim upon a national fund to repay them. As to prisons, charges of lavish expenditure were easily made, without investigation. Where there was an efficient body of police the value of property increased in consequence of the additional security. With regard to the punishment of crime, we had quite sufficient aid from the State. Forcing people into workhouses would cause a great deal of discomfort, break up many homes, and make whole families paupers. State subvention for the poor-rate was entirely out of the question. The less we had of State subvention the better; it resulted in strife and vexation. Guardians were not so wonderfully tender as to spend more money than was absolutely necessary.

Mr. J. A. LYON (London) had obtained considerable experience of local affairs as affected by imperial subventions. A great many mistakes were made through supposing that money grew for Government to spend. When they gave anything to a locality they only returned money they had received. He did not want more subventions than he could help; but it was quite right that certain expenditure should be met by taxation over a larger area, and in that way he was willing to accept it. The Metropolitan Board of Works was an illustration of the principle. The vestries went to the Board for such general improvements as ought not to fall upon local funds, and for assistance in borrowing money upon the credit of the local rates. When a large number of poor were driven into other districts by the demolition of houses, a subvention was occasionally obtained from the Poor Law Board. The interference of that Board in details was miserable. Giving something towards the support of the medical officer was regarded as entitling the Board to interfere, and the guardians could not even employ and pay a casual applicant for relief, to scrub the infirmary floor, without the sanction of the Board for each individual so temporarily employed. The occasional assistance of a policeman for parish work could not be obtained without application to Scotland Yard, and the necessity often passed before the requisite sanction was given. As to rating, land which increased in value regulated itself. If it was worth 51. a year for agricultural purposes, and was turned into building land, it was then properly rated afresh.

Mr. ROBERT WHITE (London), speaking as an old member of a City of London Union comprising ninety parishes, stated they could not get rid of outdoor relief in that union. He moved a vote of thanks to Captain Craigie for his paper. This was seconded by Mr. Lyon, and carried.

Captain CRAIGIE (in reply) admitted most unqualifiedly the sovereign power of the State to interfere for the good of its subjects in any matter under its jurisdiction. To entitle a local authority to a subvention, the State must interfere by requiring that authority to discharge a particular duty in a particular manner, in definite and fixed terms, agreed upon by Parliament, and universally enforced throughout the country. He had purposely omitted Government loans in order not to

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make his paper too heavy. Government might greatly help a locality in carrying out works of a semi-local interest by enabling it to borrow upon easy terms; and the legislation of the past session had facilitated such assistance. Mr. Hastings preferred to rely upon local patriotism for local government, but he (Captain Craigie) was not quite clear what local patriotism meant, unless it was a member of a local authority willing to give up his time and services to the community around him. That was not a function understood by the term 'patriotism,' and he could not draw the line between local and central patriotism. There was no immediate possibility of trusting local authorities with greater fiscal power, to enable them to draw from all classes within their district a proper graduated taxation. The simple easy form of rate could not be dispensed with. It might be premature to hand over the police to the central authority, but the tendency of legislation had been towards the assumption by the State of the control of police and prisons. Crime would be much more effectually repressed, and money saved, by abolishing petty subdivision, and striking out a new line of management. The repression of crime was too serious a matter to be made an experiment of. An agreement had been arrived at as to the mode of treating prisoners; it was therefore quite competent to the State to assume the direction of prisons.

Dr. FARE, F.R.S. (London), said the question raised was of great importance. He hoped the principle of municipal government would always be maintained. Our system of local government must be made as perfect as possible. The municipal boundary was the proper boundary; the town council should be the head of the local government, and should be entrusted with the expenditure and taxation. It was not desirable the Central Government should go into the matters referred to by Mr Lyon. Responsibility should never be divided, and the local government should be responsible. Captain Craigie's paper was exceedingly interesting as an analysis of our present system.

MILITARY SERVICE.

Is it desirable that the System of short term' Military Service should be superseded or supplemented by Compulsory Military Service? By JOHN HOLMS, M.P.

IT

is a wholesome sign of the times that this Association should consider the question of our Military Service. That the subject is closely bound up with the well-being of the nation, and intimately connected both with our national industry and expenditure, is beyond doubt. The Association, therefore, judging wisely, has placed the discussion of the subject under the economy and trade department.

For some years I have taken the deepest interest in the

subject, and devoted my mind to its consideration, and I own that I am perfectly lost in astonishment when I see that such an extravagant, inefficient, immoral system, entailing too, such a wanton waste of human life, has been permitted to exist so long amongst us in this country.

The plain truth is that the community at large know next to nothing, and think less, of how our army is got together, or of how it is maintained.

The result is that, constituencies taking little or no interest in the question, Members of Parliament and statesmen generally fold their hands and shut their eyes, and leave the War Office to go on pretty much as it likes. A French writer has very truly said that a nation cannot easily be led beyond what it knows or thinks.'

If England only knew the utter unsoundness of her present military system, with all its attendant immorality, waste of human life, inefficiency, and extravagance, and only knew how easily it could be replaced by a wholesome and sound system, and with a saving of many millions a year, the whole nation would with one loud voice, running from one end of the kingdom to the other, protest, and never cease protesting, until our present system was purified and changed.

That such a change can be brought about without either great difficulty or delay, I have asserted for years, and now without hesitation I repeat the assertion. But we must be prepared to give up an antiquated system mainly resting upon exploded and erroneous ideas-ideas which might befit the seventeenth or eighteenth centuries, but which are entirely out of harmony with our own; and we must not let the question be entangled with class interests or political results, or used as a shuttlecock between parties in the state, who, chiefly considering what interests they may conciliate, too often adopt mere makeshift expedients to satisfy political exigencies, and do not, on the contrary, grapple boldly with the evil. It is that spirit that has produced the utter failure and costliness of past schemes.

The great results obtained by continental nations at a comparatively small cost in money or withdrawal of their sons from home life, and the trifling results obtained by us at an enormous cost of money and waste of the time of our people, is, in spite of the dust which has been thrown in their eyes, beginning to cause people to see that such results are not due to conscription, but are mainly due to sound administration and good organisation.

I wish it clearly to be understood that I am not one of

those who would seek to emulate continental nations in having a vast military force. I cannot but regard the murderous conflicts which we have lately seen on the plains of Europe, and which unhappily there are indications that we may see repeated at no very distant day upon an enormous scale, as a disgrace to the so-called civilisation of our day and to this the nineteenth century of our Christian era.

ness.

But, on the other hand, the armed condition of Europe bids us to be quite prepared to defend ourselves, not with crowds of raw, untrained lads or men demoralised by long barrack life, but with a force of able-bodied men, who morally, physically, and as regards age, discipline and organisation, are at least equal to any army of any European power which might attempt these shores. With the European wars of 1866 and 1870 fresh before us, to have less would be the height of madSuch a force and organisation must be prepared in time of peace the days of hurrying up raw recruits to be drilled while the war raged are gone by. Wars now are hardly declared till they are over, and demand not only that men must be ready at once to take the field, but that their organisation must be the most decentralised and simple possible; yet, although twenty years have passed away since the Crimean War exhibited to us the abject helplessness of our War department, lost in the maze of its own centralisation-confusion everywhere, responsibility nowhere; and although nine years have elapsed since what I may call the revolution in European warfare was. inaugurated on the plains of Sadowa in 1866, and confirmed at Sedan in 1870, and we as a nation have been in profound peace, beyond organising vice for our celibate army, and spending some millions of money, our defences are not one halfpenny worth better than they were. We could not to-day, from all the crowds of men that we have, muster in these islands 50,000 men who could be regarded, either as to age or training, as equal to the soldiers of Prussia.

As yet we have no such force as can be regarded as satisfactory, nor is even the first stone of a sound scheme laid. Centralisation, in place of being diminished, is now even greater than in the days of the Crimean War, and our military system can best be described as 'a mighty maze without a plan.'

Whilst Prussia has reduced her system to a science with clear principles to guide her, we, apparently out of sheer wantonness, waste all the appliances which we have at our hands, and, amidst the finest materials and great expenditure, possess. only a chaos.

The question before us is this: Is it desirable that the

system of short term military service should be superseded or supplemented by compulsory military service?'

Now I take it that this question, as here put, means—

Are we to give up the so-called short service system without a pension, and almost no pay in the reserve, and return to long service with a pension?

Or are we to adopt really short service, combined with a compulsory system of obtaining our recruits?

My answer is that really short service has never been tried, and that voluntary enlistment properly gone about would give us more men than we require, and of a better sort than we now or ever have obtained under that system.

But we must be prepared to abandon our antiquated ideas, particularly that antiquated idea which stands directly in the way of a sound military system, namely—that we should recruit for and maintain two perfectly distinct military forces, for two perfectly distinct purposes. The one force for offensive purposes, and called our Regular Army-the other for defensive purposes, and called our Militia.

It is not to be supposed that these two armies, paid for by the same tax-payers, work into each other's hands, and cooperate in harmony, for the defence of the nation; far otherwise; for, on the contrary, each of those two armies recruit with as much vigour against each other as if they were enlisting for different nations.

And this ruinous competition is encouraged by the War Office, and paid for by the taxpayers of the nation.

The recruits obtained for the offensive army are kept in barracks, and drilled, and drilled, and drilled, until they are utterly sick of their duties, of their quarters, of their officers, and of the very name of soldier.

Whilst the recruits for the other army-the defensive army —receive only just about as much drill and training each year as they can forget by the time they are called out for training the following year, and their instruction is given by mere amateurs, three-fourths of whom never were in the army.

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The one army-the offensive army-the authorities, with the greatest coolness possible, inform the unwitting public would be none the worse of even a little more drill! Whilst in the very same breath they, without a blush, speak of that valuable old constitutional force, the Militia,' as being quite reliable as a defensive force-that is, to be perfectly trusted to drive from our shores any of the carefully and continuously trained European forces which might venture to invade us.

The plain truth is we play at soldiers in this country, and a