was all the time basing its action not upon the facts but upon speculations as to what might come out of future ballot-boxes?  They were attending to their own mission, that of keeping in office, but neglecting the Nation’s necessary business, that of dealing promptly with the Boer assault upon British supremacy in South Africa.  The explanation is simple.  Every man in the Cabinet has devoted his life since he has been grown up to the art of getting votes for his party, either at the polls or in Parliament.  Not one of them has given his twenty years to studying the art of managing a war.

But a war cannot possibly be well managed by anyone who is not a master of the art.  Now and then there has been success by an amateur—­a person who, without being a soldier by profession, has made himself one; such a person, for example, as Cromwell.  Apart from rare instances of that sort, the only plan for a Government which does not include among its members a soldier, professional or amateur, is to choose a soldier of one class or the other and to delegate authority to him.  But this plan does not always succeed, because sometimes a Government composed of men who know nothing of war postpones calling in the competent man until too late.  There have been in our time two instances of this plan, one successful and the other a failure.  In 1882 Mr. Gladstone’s Cabinet drifted against its will and to its painful surprise into the Egyptian war.  The Cabinet when it saw that war had come gave Lord Wolseley a free hand and he was able to save them by the victory of Tel-el-Kebir.  A year or two later, being anxious to avoid a Soudan war, they drifted slowly into it; but this time they were too late in giving Lord Wolseley full powers, and he was unable to save Gordon and Khartoum solely because he had not been called upon in time.  The best analogy to the course then pursued is that of a sick person whose friends attempt to prescribe for him themselves until the disease takes a palpably virulent form, when they send for a doctor just in time to learn that the patient’s life could have been saved by proper treatment a week earlier, but that now there is no hope.  For war requires competent management in advance.  There are many things which must be done, if they are to be done in time, before the beginning of hostilities, and the more distant the theatre of war the more necessary it may be to take measures beforehand.

The management of a war can never be taken out of the hands of the Government, because the body which decides when to make preparations is, by the fact that it has the power of making that decision, the supreme authority.  If, therefore, a Nation wishes to have reasonable assurance against defeat it must take means to provide the supreme authority with a military judgment.  The British system for a, long time professed to do this by giving the Secretary of State for War a military adviser who was Commander-in-Chief.  Such a plan might have worked on condition that the