82 
RECRUITING-. 
men are; so that practically they are in receipt of better wages. 
They have more money to spend. They are exposed to none of the 
conditions of constant interchange between home and abroad, that our 
battalions are exposed to. Their depot is not one of the same kind that 
he wishes to form for Indian relief. It is a large brigade head-quarters 
in which the recruits are lost among the trained men. 
We have the most complicated conditions to deal with. A huge propor¬ 
tion of our Army is abroad, such as no other nation has. We are more 
frequently engaged in War than any other nation. Yet we alone are obliged 
to face these difficulties without any power of drawing from the country 
such men as the state requires, by compulsory enlistment. Surely these 
are difficulties which must of themselves entail very careful handling. 
If any particular system is made responsible for what the very conditions 
of the problem involve, the only result must be that we enter into a 
series of disastrous experiments with perpetual change than which 
nothing can be worse for an army. 
At the present moment what regimental officers all feel is that 
they have a condition of both batteries and battalions, which is 
most unsatisfactory. That is to say, that an over-strain has been 
put upon our present system. Instead of their being able to send 
abroad trained men. and to retain a sufficient number of trained 
men in their batteries and battalions, the men they have to send 
break up their organisation at home, and are not what they ought to be 
to be sent abroad, but that is not because the short service system has 
broken down, but because the system, as originally devised, has never 
been carried out. 
It seems to me the confusion lies just here—that you attribute 
to the system what is entirely due to the conditions which, although 
provided for in the original scheme, have never been carried out. 
That is to say the scheme, as originally arranged, was not merely 
that there should be a battalion at home for each battalion abroad, but 
that the cadre of the battalion at home should be so strong that what 
was necessary to be sent out each year, should always be in excess of 
the cadre. If you had that so that your cadre at home was untouched 
and its efficiency unaffected, I do not think that the cry that has been 
raised for the doing away with the short service system would ever 
have been raised at all. It seems to me just as reasonable to throw the 
blame on the system as it would be to say that if an architect arranges 
for an arch to support the entry to a barrack square, and in the place of 
the arch you put in a rotten beam, and the super structure breaks down, 
that there the original architect’s scheme was faulty. The two things 
have no relation to one another. What has been done is that whereas 
it was arranged that there should be one battalion at home, supporting 
another battalion abroad each political necessity for the increase of the 
army abroad, has been met by no such increase of the battalions at 
home as was arranged for in the original scheme (applause). 
It seems to me that we are crying for the moon when we are asking for 
anything like doing away with such training of recruits as is being doneby 
every Continental army. It simply means—for anything like the army 
we can get under our present system—such an enormous increase of 
expense, that there is not the smallest chance of any government taking 
