AND WAR SALARIES. 175 



naval men in the Ordnance Select Committee is justifiable and 

 intelligible ; if otherwise, that preponderance is an absurdity, 

 and something worse. No apportionment of constituents, how- 

 ever, as between the naval, the military, and the civilian ranks, 

 could make the Ordnance Select Committee efficient, until the 

 power should have been conferred upon it of making its deli- 

 berate and recorded judgments respected. The principle of 

 paying members of the Select Committee at all, seems objec- 

 tionable, as tending to make the Ordnance Select Committee 

 mere tools in the hands of the war-minister ; but, paid or un- 

 paid, the Ordnance Select Committee should have been no 

 sham. It should have been respectable, respected, and effi- 

 cient. It was neither the one nor the other. It could not 

 be, so long as its matured decrees were subject to be contra- 

 vened by the dictum of a secret committee. 



On a certain occasion attention was called to the remark- 

 able statement made by Lord Hartington, that the War-office 

 did not consider itself bound to adopt the recommendation of 

 their own committee that is to say, the Ordnance Select 

 Committee. A very strange statement, this, to come from a 

 British war-minister, and to be addressed to a British House 

 of Commons. Writing on this matter, somebody propounded 

 the question : If the War-office do not feel itself bound to adopt 

 the recommendations of the Ordnance Select Committee rela- 

 tive to propositions submitted to the investigation of the same, 

 and by the same adjudicated upon, then upon whose recom- 

 mendation did and does the War-office consider itself bound 

 to act? 



In course of time the answer came. The War-office re- 

 cognised a secret committee; professed to act upon the re- 

 commendation of a secret committee. Wherefore it stood 

 demonstrated, that the Ordnance Select Committee was a 

 mere noxious plaything ; a mere device for amusing the pub- 

 lic, tormenting inventors, and awarding to certain favoured 

 gentlemen of the service a no contemptible douceur in addition 



