292 
MINUTES OE PROCEEDINGS OF 
security of unarmed virtue; and, rapt iu admiration, mankind would enthu¬ 
siastically exclaim— 
“ Her armour is her honest faith, 
And simple truth her shield.” 1 2 
It had been said—and said, too, by her greatest political economist—that 
certain dangers necessarily accompany the production and accumulation of 
wealth. “The shepherd/* he explained, “has a great deal of leisure; a 
husbandman, in the rude state of husbandry, has some; an artificer or manu¬ 
facturer has none at all. The first may, without any loss, employ a great 
deal of his time in martial exercises; the second may employ some part of it; 
but the last cannot employ a single hour in them without some loss, and his 
attention to his own interest naturally leads him to neglect them altogether. 
These improvements in husbandry, too, which the progress of arts and 
manufactures necessarily introduces, leave the husbandman as little leisure as 
the artificer. Military exercises come to be as much neglected by the 
inhabitants of the country as by those of the town, and the great body of the 
people becomes altogether unwarlike. That wealth, at the same time, which 
always follows the improvements of agriculture and manufactures, and which 
in reality is no more than the accumulated produce of those improvements, 
provokes the invasion of all their neighbours. An industrious, and upon 
that account a wealthy nation, is of all nations the most likely to be attacked; 
and unless the state takes some new measures for the public defence,, the 
natural habits of the people render them altogether incapable of defending 
themselves/* 3 So wrote Adam Smith. But who was Adam Smith? A 
thinker who lived in an age of war, revolution, and scepticism! War, 
revolution, and scepticism were things of the past; peace, plenty, and 
prosperity were things of the present. The army must be reduced. The 
army was reduced. 
In vain the military authorities protested—the country was deaf as the 
deaf adder; and reduction followed reduction, although “upon every occasion 
on which an attempt was made.to reduce the force, a 
necessity was found to exist immediately for augmenting it again at a large 
expense, following a large expense incurred in the reduction/* 3 This system 
of alternate reduction and augmentation, aggravated by the influence of the 
navy, which now set in with fourfold violence, necessarily acted with ruinous 
effect on the field artillery, and its fall was as rapid as its rise. 
The symptoms of decay became first unmistakeably evident in the 
expedition to Portugal, only 11 years after Waterloo. The 4-gun batteries 
which accompanied the expedition were ludicrously under-horsed, and 
Col. Webber Smith, who commanded the artillery^, was recalled because he 
took the spare ammunition horses to increase the gun teams from 4 to 6 horses. 
His successor, Sir John May, arrived in Portugal with 50 additional drivers— 4 
1 Quoted from Sir Wilfred Lawson’s speech on the Army Estimates in the House of Commons, 
28th Feb. 1873. 
2 Adam Smith’s “ Wealth of Nations,” Yol. II. p. 280. Rogers’ Ed. 
3 The Duke of Wellington to Lord Gooderich; Supplementary Dispatches of the Duke of 
Wellington, Yol. IV. 
4 Sir John was shipwrecked, and had in person to march the drivers from the point of the coast 
on which they had been cast to the head-quarters of the artillery—120 miles. 
