60 
EECEUITINGr. 
consider the individual quality of the man ; we ought to regard the 
ambitions and desires of the soldier. We do not do that. I was 
speaking just now, we ought to give a man a career or an introduction 
to a career. Perhaps it is known to some of you here, that I have 
advocated, following the lead of many persons much more qualified than 
myself, a change in the conditions of our service, greater elasticity in 
the conditions of service, a long service, a short service, according 
to the conditions of the place in which a man serves. 
The Teems of Seevice. 
I notice it has been said that long service is a thing of 
the past. There again we are in the presence of one of those 
“ incompatibilities ” which my reason cannot get round at all. I do 
not know what it means when I am told that long service is dead, I do 
not understand it because I look round and I find that the whole of 
the navy, the whole of the marines (hear, hear) and the whole of the 
Household Cavalry and a large number of other men serving in the army, 
are all enlisted for long service ; and I have never yet heard that those 
branches of our offensive and defensive forces are so conspicuously 
inferior to those who are enlisted on a short service term, or that 
they are not worthy to be counted amongst our effectives (hear, hear, 
and applause). 
Depots and the Seceetaey of State foe Wae. 
I have been told that there is something essential in the idea of 
sending men about from one battalion to another, and that there is 
something so valuable about this linked-battalion system, that it is 
quite impossible that it should be changed. I believe the linked- 
battalion system is exceedingly bad for the recruit and, what I desire 
is that the whole system of training recruits should be altered. The 
Secretary of State for War has said a very remarkable thing with 
regard to this question of the training of the recruit. He has said 
that the depot system, which to my mind is the ideal system of trainiug 
the recruit, is wrong and produces bad results. He says “ A. depot, 
large enough to support several battalions abroad, means in the first 
place an uprooting of the territorial principle, and secondly entails a 
concourse of young, untrained and indifferently disciplined soldiers, 
with a staff of heterogeneous officers proportionately smaller than the 
staff of a properly organised battalion. I am assured, he says, on the 
highest military authority, that service in such depots is demoralising 
both to officers and men, and that the recruits trained in them com¬ 
pare unfavourably with battalion trained recruits.” Well now, to one 
who holds, as I do, that depot training properly conducted is incom¬ 
parably the best way of training men, that statement came as a surprise, 
and it came as a greater surprise because I knew that by far the best 
drilled infantry—I say it in the presence of any infantry officer we have 
here—the Royal Marines, are all drilled in a depot. I know that depot 
well, and I have seen the men turned out from it. I know that all the 
