RECRUITING. 
81 
both battalions of a regiment has thus been established to such an 
extent that to break it up again would be a revolution, which would 
now entail great injury and great hardships. A battalion is certainly 
for men, after they have passed out of the stage of recruits, a better 
training school than any depot which you can form. I am sure that 
any battery officer here would say that his own battery was a better 
training school than a depot after men had once passed out of the 
recruit stage. Again, any system by which you form depots for India, 
and have men on short service at home means, whatever gain you get 
by it, a complete separation between the Indian and the English Army, 
which, again and again, in every commission that has ever sat upon it 
has uniformly been condemned quite as much by the evidence of 
regimental officers as of anyone else. The whole weight of the evidence 
that went before the Wantage commission, taken from all branches of 
the army, was dead against it. Mr. Arnold-Forster theoretically 
agrees with the principle that this separation should not take place. 
His proposals seem to me inevitably to expect it. 
Then, again, when Mr. Arnold-Forster talks about the proposed further 
breaking up of the regimental system by the formation of four battalion 
regiments, I think he misunderstands what the process in contemplation is. 
What the Secretary of State for War suggested the other day was, that two 
extra battalions should be raised, to be added to each of two regiments 
which had already two battalions. That does not mean a crush up of 
existing battalions. It has nothing to do with it. What actually is the 
case now, is that there are many regiments which are able to enlist 
within their own proper recruiting district very many more men than 
are necessary for the two battalion system. Those men, at present, are 
sent off to other battalions which have nothing to do with the regiment, 
and nothing to do with the locality. It surely will be a much more 
perfect carrying out of the territorial system, to have all the men who 
are coming from a district put into one regiment with four battalions, 
and to enlarge the work thrown on a particular county in accordance 
with what it is actually yielding in recruits. The complaint as to the 
territorial system, is that it has not been consistently carried out. I can 
testify, and anybody who knows any of the counties that have territor¬ 
ial regiments, can testify that the feeling arising locally between 
counties and regiments is very close indeed. I happened to be at 
Newbury when the Berkshire regiment was coming in, and the 
enthusiasm of the people because it was their own county regiment 
that was to pass through, could not have been exceeded. When a 
battalion has had sufficiently close connection with the county for 
county people to realise it, there is a local enthusiasm entirely due to 
our old historical county feeling. That seems to me, at all events, to be 
one of the very greatest value. I think that is an aspect of the question 
which does not forcibly come before an audience such as composes the 
majority of those here, because the Artillery has no connection at all 
with particular localities. 
When Mr. Arnold-Forster speaks of the long service in the Navy 
and Marines, the whole conditions are so completely different that 
it is hardly possible to take an analogy from it. In the first place 
fhe Marines are able to accumulate money much better than our 
