THE ROYAL ARTILLERY INSTITUTION. 
Ill 
offensive or defensive war, it must be protected by such fortifications 
as shall ensure its defence by a small force against superior numbers, 
and oblige the latter to undertake its siege or investment with every 
probability of final failure. 
Provided these conditions are fulfilled, at or near the centre of a 
manufacturing population would be found the most suitable position 
for the establishment of an arsenal; for in a position of this kind we 
might expect to find men, machinery, and materiel, which could, in a 
great emergency, be diverted from their ordinary business and applied 
to the production of warlike stores, supplementing and expanding the 
smaller organisation of peace time. 
In foreign states we look for large arsenals at the great pivots and 
bases of offensive and defensive operations, guarded by fortresses* 
which have grown up with the necessity for the supply and renewment 
of manoeuvring armies. 
In our insular position, however, the necessities of our navy, the 
defence of our harbours and dockyards, have naturally obtained the 
first rank in importance, while our arsenal and factories have grown 
into great establishments under the combined action of the require¬ 
ments of the navy, of our possessions abroad, and the convenience of 
water transport. 
But this convenience is coupled with danger. The concentration 
of the whole of our constructive establishments upon our outer line of 
defence is a great evil, and the causes of which we may look for, beyond 
those I have mentioned before, in the necessity for economy as well 
as in a disbelief of the possibility of invasion. 
In the admirable plan of organisation lately presented to the country 
—perhaps the greatest step towards the insurance of our independence 
which has ever been made—we have advanced a considerable way, by 
the policy of decentralisation of stores. 
It is perhaps too much to expect that, following close upon the 
costly measure of reform about to be commenced, we should suddenly 
begin to establish one or more arsenals in the central part of the 
kingdom. It will, however, ultimately be necessary, and let us hope at 
no very distant period, to complete the comprehensive scheme brought 
in by the present War Minister, by the establishment of one or more 
arsenals for the manufacture of the simpler kinds of ammunition, &c., 
and for the storage of other munitions of war, which shall secure our 
defensive army the proper supply of these under all circumstances of 
difficulty. 
I am unwilling to leave this important part of the subject without 
quoting the words of Sidney Herbert, who, in a letter to Major-General 
* “ But these should be something more than fortresses—they should contain sufficient material 
for a great army in artillery, firearms, provisions of all kinds, workshops, arsenals, hospitals; in 
fact, collecting all the raw material which naturally flows from the surrounding district into a 
great city, they should be capable of converting it, by means of a large population of artisans and 
of extensive manufactories, into the material of war—of turning brass into cannon, iron into pro* 
jectiles and rifles, wood into trains of wagons, wheat into biscuit, canvas into tents, &c.”—Hamley’s 
Operations of War, 2nd Ed. p» 307. 
