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[JNASKED ADVICE. 



learned their drills should be ignorant of field movements 

 (for after all this is in a few words the sum and substance 

 of the text on which so much has lately been said and 

 written), nor is army reserve a subject for my pen, but as 

 it is surely allowable for a sportsman to look at the 

 mounted arm of the service with a sportsman^s eye, and 

 from a sporting point of view, I propose so to do, and to 

 consider, now that cavalry is proved to be not useless^ 

 how it can be made most useful. In time of peace, and 

 in these civilised times, horses are animals of very 

 secondary importance to the world at large. A man may 

 go from Edinburgh to London without troubling any 

 such animal, and, arrived in town, may travel all over it 

 in underground railways. If he wants to send a message, 

 there is the post, which conveys his letter by steam ; if 

 time presses, is there not the telegraph, which, worked by 

 an economical Government, carries a message correctly, 

 at least once out of fifty times ; and so on. But civilisa- 

 tion, from the very completeness of its machinery, can be 

 easily upset. The more completely comfortable a neigh- 

 bourhood is in peaceful times, when all goes well, the 

 more any irregularity is felt. A watch is ruined by a fall 

 which would not be noticed by a walking stick, so an 

 invading force in the backwoods of America would do no 

 very lasting damage when their stay was at an end ; but 

 look at the effect of the same thing on France. There is 

 only one thing easier than to tear up the rails of a rail- 

 road, and that is to cut telegraph wires ; and then what 

 becomes of art and civilisation ? Then, a man who 

 wishes to travel fast must have a horse, and the power of 

 riding him — an accomplishment not possessed by every- 

 one; then, mounted messengers are required, and then 

 people are likely to discover the "deterioration of their 



