282 Field-Marshal Earl Roberts [March 23, 



sion for the emergencies of war may be secured in this country, 

 without resorting to any methods which can justly be compared to 

 the Continental system of universal and prolonged barrack-training. 

 That is a question to which I hope to address myself upon an early 

 occasion. The first duty of Army reformers, as we have already seen, 

 is to clear the ground of the confusion which has been hitherto the 

 greatest obstacle to progress. What you will permit me perhaps to 

 show, upon the present occasion, is that denunciation of our military 

 inefficiency and unreadiness during the last few years has been, to a 

 very large extent, upon the wrong tack. We have busied ourselves 

 with the problem of the Army when we ought rather to have devoted 

 a special and adequate share of our attention to the problem of the 

 Reserve which I have ventured to describe as fonning, for this 

 country, a separate but supremely important part — in some respects 

 the most important part — of our double military question. No 

 country expects to engage successfully in a serious struggle without 

 using its reserves, and we are the only nation which possesses nothing 

 in the shape of an efficient and sufficient Reserve, notwithstanding 

 our many Imperial responsibilities, our distant and extensive frontiers 

 to be defended, and our vital political and commercial interests in 

 every quarter of the world. 



If we are ever to have the power of expansion in emergency, upon 

 which the war readiness of every other nation depends, we must set 

 up some entirely different!] system from what any other nation 

 possesses, apart from our Regular Professional Army. 



I am now brought to the further and main point of my argument 

 to-night —that criticism of the Regular Forces and their management 

 has been in the past very largely misdirected. It has been excessive 

 and undeserved. Criticism upon the score of efficiency has been too 

 generally separated from the question of sufficiency. The best tailor 

 must cut his coat according to his cloth. No one would expect a 

 Fleet to be successful if the number of battleships it contained were 

 admittedly too few to enable it to grapple adequately with its task. 

 A small Army, in the same way, no matter how highly trained, no 

 matter how well equipped according to its scale, cannot do the work 

 of a large Army. Our position is that our Regular Forces must 

 always remain, in tlie nature of things,! too limited in numbers to be 

 capable of bringing any serious struggle on land to a successful con- 

 clusion by their own unaided resources. When the problems of pay, 

 recruiting, training, and organisation have been dealt with as satisfac- 

 torily^as the most exacting critic can conceive, the problem of numbers 

 will remain. 



What I desire to insist upon, therefore, is that the most perfect 

 Regular Army conceivable will not place this country in a state of 

 preparedness for war, or remove the danger of dislocation, expense, 

 and reverses recurring in some future crisis, under conditions, perhaps 

 as unexpected as were the conditions of six years ago in South Africa. 



